Chapter Text
George had never been a brave person.
When he was little, he would cry at the sound of fireworks or broken glasses. He hated ball games, concerts, anything loud. It got to the point where he no longer wanted to go to school and would cry every morning before going.
People were hard, and loud, and computers and coding and video games were neither of those things. They weren’t hard, or they were, but not in the same sense that people were. Coding was hard, but in the end there was a satisfying 'no errors detected' message, and the code worked; the computer worked. Computers weren’t hard, because there was an answer for the things they did that weren’t right. You could fix computers, you could fix code, you could fix buggy games. You couldn’t fix people.
George was living proof of that.
His mother was always at a loss with what to do with him when he was a teenager. He spent all his time in his coding teacher’s classroom, spending hours working on code unbothered. Other teachers would come looking for him, sometimes even administrators, but his coding teacher never let them past the door. (He was always thankful for that teacher, who seemed to just understand that he needed space and time and a place to just be and that anyone else would hurt more than help, no matter their intentions.)
He failed almost every class he took besides coding that year, but made it up online in the summer. He did that for the rest of his schooling, and passed with flying colors when he learned online. For his last year, he was completely remote, and he passed with flying colors then too.
For a while, George never said anything at all to his mother, really. Or anyone. But he loved them, and they knew it, and he knew it, and it was enough. He was too afraid to open his mouth and speak, to make noise, to be loud and demanding and take up space, but that was okay, for a while.
So no, by all accounts, George was not brave. And he hated loudness, and people.
But one day when he was 19, he was coding in his room and his mother came in and sat on his bed. This wasn’t abnormal, per se, as she did that sometimes just to be in his presence. But she seemed troubled, the thick emotions rolling off of her in waves pungent and distracting.
The code did not run, but he saved and closed the program anyway and faced her, lying on his bed and staring at his off-white ceiling with a blank expression. The chair creaked as he shifted, and they sat in silence for a while before his mother spoke quietly. She always spoke quietly when he was around, laughed quietly when he was around. But sometimes he’d hear her boisterous, raucous, happy laugh or her loud shouts of pure joy from downstairs just faintly and smile, because she deserved to laugh like that. Even if she couldn’t do it around him.
“George?” She said softly, and he nodded and made a soft noise so she knew he was listening. “George, I used to be afraid of the dark.”
His mother didn’t often talk about herself, especially not about what she was afraid of, worried she’d give him the same fear.
“I used to be so afraid of the dark I would go to bed before the sun went down and I trained myself to sleep until after the sun was up. I would miss school events, dinners, nights out, family nights, all of it, to sleep and escape the dark. I slept with the lights on, and if anyone turned them off, I’d have a meltdown. Cry and scream and make then promise not to do it again.”
George didn’t like hearing this; he shifted and closed up inside of himself, drew up the drawbridge that had connected him to the rest of the world. He still listened, but it was vacant, and she knew it.
“I was so afraid that my father caught me on the way to go to bed one day and said, ‘Come here.’ So I did, and he locked me in the closet with no lights or anything and left. And I cried and screamed and begged, but he was gone. And eventually, the tears stopped, and I wasn’t upset anymore.”
There was a long pause, after that. So long he thought his mother may have fallen asleep, but her eyes were open. So he waited.
Eventually she continued, “when he came back in the morning, I wasn’t afraid of the dark anymore. After that, I’d stay up into the late hours of the night, keep my overhead light turned off, only have a candle going for some light.” George didn’t like where this was going. He drew his knees up and wrapped his arms around them, allowing his nose to rest between his knees so only his eyes remained visible; putting a barrier between them just in case she was going to lock him in a room with a crying baby for a day or something. Just in case.
“I’m not gonna do that to you, George. I would never do that to you. But I want you to know how I got over my fear. It wasn’t the dark that I was afraid of, it was what could be hiding in it. So I became scarier than anything hiding in the dark, and I was never afraid of the dark again.”
George didn’t know how that translated over to his fear of people and noise, but he listened anyway.
“And I didn’t learn martial arts while I was in that closet or anything. I am not stronger than things that might hide in the dark, but I am scarier. In my head, I’m scarier.”
He still didn’t see the connection, so opted to stay silent. She closed her eyes, looking more tired than he’d ever seen her, and he almost said something, almost got off the chair and hugged her. But she spoke once more before he could.
“I know that you can’t be scarier than noise, or people, or anything else you’re afraid of. But the lesson still stands. You have to become bigger than the fear. You have to be louder than the noise that scares you, you have to be confident that you can be friends with people. It’s not easy, and I’m not suggesting it is. But you’re allowed to be loud, George. You’re allowed to be different than you are. It’s fine if you’re not, but you’re allowed to be.”
She left, then, and George sat there dumbly for a second, processing, then clambered off his chair and raced into the hall and almost slipped on the wood floors because of his speed and socked feet, but he hugged his mother tightly, and it was worth it. He hugged her and poured all of his love into it, every single good particle of his being. He hoped she understood, that he appreciated her so much, and loved her more than anything.
George was still afraid, after that, still a coward, still not brave. But he was waiting for the day that he locked himself in a room with a crying baby, metaphorically, and it wasn’t the time yet.
And George had been expecting it to hurt, to be hard, to be confusing and terrifying and terrible, and he thought he’d want to give up. But when the day came, it wasn’t hard, it didn’t hurt.
Dream wasn’t hard like other people were. He didn’t hurt.
Dream didn’t actually know that George used to be afraid of noise and people. He had no idea, because Dream was just effortlessly wonderful and he seemed to like George for some inexplicable reason, and so he just carried George along. He was the closet and the dark, the locked room and crying baby in his case actually, but it wasn’t so terrible, he found. Not when it was Dream.
With Dream, he would scream and laugh and be louder than he’d ever thought possible, honestly, and it was just effortless.
The first time he’d screamed, out of pure frustration while they were playing Minecraft and he’d been killed four times in a row because of several inconveniently placed creepers, his mother had run up the stairs and assumed he’d hurt himself, thought she needed to call for an ambulance. He’d muted his mic and shook his head softly, apologizing for worrying her and saying that he’d just gotten too worked up about a game and that it wouldn’t happen again.
It happened many more times, his loud shrieks and barks of laughter and his mother sometimes stood outside his door and cried, because even when he was yelling out of frustration and anger, he was yelling.
And it was at real people who loved him and made him feel safe. It didn’t hurt her that he couldn’t be that way around her, because she just wanted him to feel safe and if it wasn’t with her, it wasn’t with her. George loved her dearly, and she knew it, so it didn’t bother her.
And after a while, it began to seep into his real life. He’d shout at his siblings when they knocked into him instead of recoiling and hiding. He’d laugh when his mother tripped over the cat instead of staring with vacant eyes while everyone else poked fun at her. There was life in him where there hadn’t been before, a joy and a spark where there had been dying embers before.
There was love in the places where fear used to reside, and she would forever thank his friends for that. Forever thank Dream for that.
She watched the flowers grow from the dead earth that once was George, and revelled in the sweet scent of it that permeated her house. Even if it was loud and crazy and he never left or spent time with them.
He was made of flowers, and she could bear the rest of it because he was made of flowers, and that’s all she’d ever wanted.
And it wasn’t exactly that Dream had planted them, because he hadn’t. He’d helped heal the dirt, helped find the seeds, helped keep the blossoms watered, but George had done all the work. And she was so proud of her son for that.
So when the discussions of Dream turned from rambles about his block-clutches and amazing pvp skills to how smart and funny and amazing he was and this story he’d told and 'what does that even mean? He said it so weirdly, too', she wasn’t surprised, nor disappointed. She indulged both sides of it, and loved both versions of her conversations with her son.
“George, George, let me meet your mom!” She heard through the speakers of her son’s phone one day and grinned.
“Hello, Dream,” she said from the dishwasher, quickly pulling open the racks to put her bowl in.
“Hey George’s Mom! Nice to meet you!” It was a black screen, mostly, but she saw herself in the little corner of the screen as the phone was thrust at her and smiled at it anyway.
“Nice to meet you too, Dream! I’ve heard quite a lot about you, I think he’s told the story about you peeing the bed so many times I could recite it in my sleep,” she grinned, not being able to resist the opportunity to embarrass the both of them, and suddenly the phone was being wrenched away from her by her blushing son. She slid the racks back into the dishwasher and shut the door, the remnants of a smile lingering on her face.
“Okay, that’s enough of my mum, never mind.” George said hurriedly, and noises of protest crackled from the speaker.
“Oh come on now Gogy, I like your mother. She’s brave, like you.” Dream had no idea that George had never in his life believed he was brave, the thought had never even crossed his mind. But George’s blinding smile didn’t care that he didn’t realize the weight of his words, the rush of utter delight through his veins didn’t care, the laugh bubbling up from his gut didn’t care. It only knew that Dream was proud of him. It only knew that Dream thought he was brave.
“Shut up, Clay. I have to go anyway, I am in desperate need of some new t-shirts.” George held up his mask as if to show proof, and Dream sighed.
George’s mother had long left the kitchen, but their conversation carried through the halls. She didn’t pay much attention to the words, only to the smile in his voice as he spoke them. She shut the door to her room with a soft smile.
“Can’t you just order them online?” Dream groaned, seemingly pouting. George laughed quickly.
“It’s like four t-shirts, it’ll take me like ten minutes total. I don’t feel like paying for shipping when there’s a store five seconds down the street.” George explained, and Dream continued to whine for a bit before they hung up, miffed that they couldn’t play Minecraft together for a whole hour while he went out.
George usually got blue shirts, because he couldn’t tell apart the other colors well enough to know which ones he was getting, and occasionally he got white shirts as well because they were a staple, but as he entered the store, he caught sight of a rack of clothes that made him stop. They all looked yellow, to him, but for some reason, he saw them and just had to know if they were yellow or green.
He asked an attendant, who looked slightly confused but answered with ‘green’, and he grabbed a couple in his size before continuing on to grab two new blue t-shirts and a white one.
He thought he could draw a little smiley face on one of the green ones and surprise Dream, since George’s merch hadn’t made it to his country yet. He grinned just thinking about the way Dream would laugh, shocked, before commenting slyly that green looked good on George. He would dare George to wear it on stream, and George would accept and then lose the subsequent game of Minecraft tag and be forced to actually do it. Sapnap would make fun of him relentlessly, and Dream wouldn’t stop making comments about how green was his color and he should wear green more often, and it would be perfect. And it was.
There were some things that just didn’t need to be said, and the way George felt about Clay was one of those things. Sapnap and Badboyhalo and even Tommy saw it, but it didn’t need to be talked about. It could just hang in the balance, in the ocean between George and the person who helped him become made of flowers.
Until it couldn’t.