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There are only a few lucky enough to be born with the world. It happens like this: a boy’s lungs heave the same moment fire first sparks to life. A boy is thrown to the ground, cut from the first endless night sky.
A boy opens his eyes to a new world, dirt under his feet and life in his hands.
They are so full of life—they discover, they create, they build, they grow. They learn to speak a common tongue and give themselves names. Their eyes are bright enough to be stars, glinting as they learn to shape their world. Craft a boat, and the ocean is yours. Kill a cow, and you have meat to eat. Kill a skeleton, you live another day. Kill each other and—
Nothing happens. The boy shudders back to life, back on the dirt floor, eyes wide and disbelieving. “What was that? I think you—I think you killed me!”
“Yeah, because you were being annoying.”
The boy splutters. “What was I—I didn’t do sh—”
The most solemn of the three rolls his eyes. “It doesn’t matter, does it? George is back, it’s not like he died for good.”
“Yeah, okay Dream, it’s not like you’re the one who died—give me my stuff back, Sapnap!”
The firecracker of a boy cackles, running off with the meager supplies (bread, a sword, a pickaxe, a bucket of water). But the boy brushes dirt from his palms and knees, and after a brief glance at the other, they chase him anyways. They run as a pack, marking the world as theirs.
They are so full of life they do not bother to contemplate anything else.
Death comes for everything, and with it, her steady companion, decay.
The world expands. More people, more life. The three travel to places they’d never conceived of, crossing oceans, stepping into the Nether—“But never the End,” Dream says. “Not there.”
“What’s that?” George asks.
Dream shrugs. “It doesn’t matter. There’s nothing for us there—not like up here, right, George?”
Unconvinced, he kicks at the ground. “I mean, if you say so.”
Dream beams, and George seems to forget he even asked.
But see: he’s bored. There are more people, more buildings, even wars to be fought, but he’s bored. He dies a thousand times and he’s upset and then he’s not and it means nothing. Sapnap disagrees, defending his possessions with unmatched ferocity. Dream disagrees, although for different reasons.
The truth is, George is just careless. Death is temporary, a speck in the grand scheme of the world’s lifetime. They don’t all see it that way, though.
“It’s tyranny, Dream.” Wilbur wasn’t born with this world. He was born the way sand and gunpowder and flint are sparked into explosion, born from the too-human process of work and words. “You take away our rights to live as we wish and then threaten death when we disagree. I’m sure you can see where you’re wrong.”
“This is my world,” Dream says, like he fundamentally doesn’t understand why there’s a fuss to begin with. He’s probably frowning, although it’s hard to tell with the mask he’s been wearing lately.
“I’d rather if you didn’t kill me—us—over it,” Wilbur says flatly. He gathers his little posse and spins on his heel, exiting. He lives life like the world’s never seen before. He lives like it carries meaning and weight, like death carries meaning and weight.
When the petty arguments finally explode into war, George lets the arrow fly easily. He doesn’t hesitate.
In the end, it’s not his arrow, but Dream’s, that makes the difference. Tommy falls and by the time he hits water it’s too late. It’s only a few minutes, but Tommy comes back with scars that aren’t physical, and everyone takes notice.
In particular: Dream takes notice, eyes narrowing imperceptibly if George wasn’t watching, but the bodies stack up anyways. Swords, axes, shields. They are building things not for life but for death. George doesn’t care, but Sapnap and Dream do. It’s the first invisible crack, Sapnap’s thirst for life, Dream’s fear of death, George’s complete disregard of either.
When he stumbles upon a ring of mushrooms, he kneels down to examine more closely. He’s used to huge mushroom forests, something he first saw when they weren’t quite reckless and youthful but still had something worth exploring. It’s not the first time he’s seen smaller mushrooms—they’re not even that remarkable, compared to those of the Nether—but it’s the first time he notices the mound of dirt they circle. A few brushes of his hands reveals the remains of a hare, practically half-dirt by this point.
He’d pocketed a few, intending to let them grow around the community center, but now he questions if there’s something to it, if he has to trade one form of life for this one to flourish.
Dream promises George the world. He calls it their kingdom, puts it into words that feel too big and too small all at once. He promises a sunrise where the world will belong to a boy born from the earth, and he doesn’t say it but he’s all but begging him to stay and wait for that moment.
The boy thinks of that when he respawns, hyperaware of the soft earth that touches his bare arms and feet, lying on the ground. He wonders about the day he’ll stop being the boy tied to dirt and wood shavings and become a king among humans.
George thinks he’s grown bored of human things. He—Dream, really—has suspected that they’re not quite as mortal as the others, something between the way time bends around them, slowing their aging. Dream reckons that space bends around them too: “We’re stronger, don’t you think? Haven’t you noticed that we don’t die as easily?”
Privately, George thinks that’s down to their netherite armor more than anything else. Without armor, George dies just as easily as the rest of them do. But it doesn’t mark him the way it does others, so he keeps his mouth shut.
“I don’t know about that,” Sapnap says.
George ends up signing onto a presidential cabinet, bored out of his mind when Quackity comes up to him and asks, Do you want to run with me? They don’t really know each other, but Quackity is brimming with life and it’s shaping up to be more than simple drab politics, so he’s willing to play along.
He ends up sleeping a lot. He’s not tired, there’s just nothing much for him to do. He sleeps through the election by accident, which is the most exciting thing that’s happened because of him in ages. But the administration starts setting down rules and Wilbur and Tommy make a big fuss about being exiled and George doesn’t want to bother with that. He’s technically part of the cabinet, but it doesn’t really matter under Schlatt’s authoritarian rule.
Aren’t you going to say something? George thinks when he’s out boating with Dream and Sapnap. L’Manburg—Manburg, whatever—aren’t exactly on good terms with the rest of the world. There’s no conflicting obligations yet, not that George is doing much of anything, but still.
Sapnap brings it up first. “Since when were you into politics, George?”
“I’m not—I’m not, it just sounded fun, I don’t know,” he says absentmindedly. He fixes his gaze straight ahead—they’re heading to the giant mushroom biome, Dream wanted to brew potions and there’s still some sort of monopoly going on back in the main regions—and pointedly avoids Dream’s eyes.
“Well,” Dream says. “It’s not like it matters that much, right? They’ll die eventually.”
And George can’t find himself to be interested in it anymore. Dream tramples through the mushroom forest, axe confidently slashing through any mobs in sight, and George watches as mushrooms grow before his eyes, covering the remains of zombies. It feels comfortable out here, rooted to the dirt, in a way that city walls and cobblestone buildings never have. It feels like home.
He's never had to build a house before. The whole world is his home. His kingdom, he’d been promised so long ago. Yet here he is, tediously arranging the door to his liking. The boy takes the mushrooms out of his pocket and places them in the dirt.
Far away, an explosion brings a nation down to nothing.
It starts when Schlatt and Wilbur die and don’t come back.
Dream gives George his kingdom—a fool’s crown, a ruler in nothing but name. Stay in the castle, stay safe, he says, but the boy’s apathy only grows.
“What are you worried about?” George asks. He feels a little stupid, sitting pretty in the empty throne room with the golden crown on his head and thick cape around his back.
“I’m worried you might die,” Dream says, like it’s obvious. “You—I want you to be protected, okay?”
George hums. “And you’ll be there to protect me?”
“Yes,” Dream replies automatically.
What Dream doesn’t seem to get is that it doesn’t matter if he dies or not. George will wake up to dirt under his back and he will move on. There’s nothing else to it.
Being ruler means little to George. Everyone knows where the real power lies, and it’s not with the king born from dirt and soft soil. There’s little to do, in stark contrast to the quiet rebuilding of L’Manburg, Tubbo’s devotion to returning the nation to a place where people can live. It feels so terribly mortal, to spend a lifetime placing new bricks where the old was blasted to bits.
George grows comfortable in his position, Dream always two steps ahead and determined to destroy every threat. He leaves a trail of mob bodies, and when George follows him he finds that there’s mushrooms sprouting under his footsteps. If Dream cares, he doesn’t say anything. But there’s a little bit of George tied to every spore he leaves behind, tying him to the soft soil he was born to.
After his house is griefed, Dream decides that Tommy is one of those threats. George has never seen Dream so invested in a human's life, and he's gone for longer and longer periods of time only to come back too serious and cold and bloodied to mess around with George and Sapnap.
"I exiled him—or, I made Tubbo exile him," Dream says, proud, and George is starting to think it has less to do with protecting him than it did tearing a fracture in Tommy.
"Do you think I should visit him? I don't know, induct him away from L'Manburg?" George says absently. He doesn't understand why Dream would go to such lengths to fuck with Tommy, who's annoying, sure, but also just a boy.
Dream shakes his head, picking up his mask. So he’s leaving, already. “No, don’t go near him. I don’t want your hands touching this.”
George tries to tell himself it’s for his protection, but doesn’t really believe it. He returns to his empty castle, a king without a kingdom. Sometimes it feels like he’s the one on guard, defending a land with no life left in it. The mushrooms bloom.
The boy has grown defensive. Another boy, cut from the cloth of the night sky, plays divine ruler and takes away his crown only to find that he’s grown thorny in his absence.
“I’m doing this for your protection,” Dream tries, but it falls flat.
“Just say you hate me,” the boy says, anger and betrayal tinged with wonder. How did it come to this?
It’s rare that he feels this deeply about anything anymore, even more surprising that it’s from handing over a meaningless crown. It feels like a death.
Dream’s getting more and more scarce. Sapnap, too, but he’s been wary of Dream ever since the dethronement, and George is inclined to agree. He checks the community house (blown up) and the spawn point (littered with mushrooms), and half the other spots they’d start exploring from. Nothing. George leaves mushrooms popping up in his wake and heads to L’Manburg.
George finds Dream hunched over a blue sheep. When he reaches out, Dream surprises him with firm fingers around his wrist. "No."
"What?"
"I don’t—I don't want you touching this." And there it is again. When George flinches, he adds, "Just watch."
Dream takes a deep inhale, and George watches him breathe life back into the sheep. "What the hell.”
"it's incredible, isn't it?" Dream asks, and all at once George understands why Dream had never fallen to the same boredom he had. The look in his eyes is terrifying and unfamiliar, otherworldly and inhuman.
"It's... something," he manages. The sheep baas as if in agreement, already returning to its life.
Dream watches it with a sick fascination, looking for any indication of a once-dead animal. George stands, shell-shocked, unable to speak.
When Dream finally turns his attention to George, his face is so closed off he might as well be wearing the mask. "Anyways, what was it you wanted to say?"
"It's nothing," George frowns. "just that Sapnap won't be standing with you when the time comes."
Dream looks away, but George catches a glimpse of his face. There’s none of the grief or anger he expected, just acceptance.
“Well? Aren’t you going to say anything?” George thinks about how Sapnap insisted, He doesn’t care about us—look at him, we’re just pawns in his fucking game. That’s not Dream—he’s not our friend anymore.
“Sleep in tomorrow,” is all Dream says.
Dying is different for everyone. It carries more weight for some, counting them on their fingers. They’re careful with life, insistent on evading death at all costs. A boy born from fire makes his life count, even if it leaves shadows in his eyes. A meteor of a boy climbs his way back into stars, sitting atop the highest mountain and yelling, I am a god, I am a god.
The boy dies and comes to in the dirt. He takes the first inhale and tilts his head to the left. There’s mushrooms in a half-circle around his arm.
George isn't there when Dream is imprisoned.
He'd thought of it as one of those horribly human things, Sapnap's desire to live lives worthy of their deaths clashing with Dream's continued climb towards godliness.
But Dream's gone now, and the world feels a little quieter for it. He wonders if this was the sunrise Dream promised him all those years ago, or if somewhere along the line that promise also fell victim to the cracks in their friendship. Maybe Dream had always planned to give him a hollow crown, and that pathetic dethronement had been it.
He'd never been king, not really. He'd failed at the first step of caring, unable to truly understand the human desires that pushed them into conflict.
He doesn't have much anymore, just some seeds lining his pocket, and it's truly pitiful when he dies and didn't even feel any loss. It's a strange life for a former king.
“They killed him, did you know that?” Sapnap says, idly running his hands through the grass. George keeps his hands to himself, all too aware of the decay that comes with him. “Twice, actually. I think they think he’ll be gone for good if he dies again.”
“Do you think so?” Death still means so little to him. He respawned with a mushroom nestled in his hair and waved it off.
“I don’t know.” Sapnap still burns, a constant anger thrumming right under his skin. George wonders if the quiet I hope so he hears is unspoken or imagined. They’ve all changed so much. It’s hard to reconcile the Dream and Sapnap from when the world was young to today. “You should visit him, though.”
Prison. What a mundane and human thing, jailing a near-god. The trail of destruction Dream left behind had been undeniable, now confined within obsidian. It’s not really a question of if Dream will find his way out but rather when, which George thinks others have failed to consider. Maybe even Dream’s forgotten, so tied up in the dramatics of humans that he’s closer to being mortal than not. If so, George hadn’t been there to see it. His absence is a chasm that can’t be crossed.
George thinks about the world as his kingdom, covered with death and put-out fires, slowly decomposing under George’s touch. The world is his kingdom, tied together by families of mycelium.
One day, the world will be yours, Dream had said. Dream, playing with divinity from the start. With death comes decay, and Dream has been trying so fucking hard to keep George’s hands away from death, for his protection or maybe for Dream’s own fear of attachment and consequence.
“Visiting. Right. I’ll think about it.”