Chapter Text
George wakes up.
In the cool shade of the spruce trees, the warm memory of a pleasant dream lingers at the edges of his consciousness. George, unwilling to let it go, reaches blindly for it—tries to cup the light and hold it, but it slips easily through his hands, water pouring through the cracks between his fingers.
When he opens his eyes, Dream is hovering above him, eyes wide and bright.
“Come on, George,” he laughs and reaches out a hand, tugging him impatiently upwards. “You’ve been sleeping forever. Look, I got a few more diamonds—four, enough to make you boots—and I think we have enough iron now to make an anvil…”
The corner of George’s mouth curls involuntarily into a smile. He follows Dream out of spawn, listening to him ramble on about the changes in the world as George slept—a pretty bird he had seen, the fence he had built to house a pen of cows, his trip into the caves that snake far below the surface.
It feels like coming home. The memory of a memory of his dream floats above him, unreachable, but he brushes it off—lets it dissolve into the warm daylight. What dream could be better than this, anyway?
He cannot hear it, but the wind brushes a warning through his hair, pressing it cold and certain to his skin like a brand. He doesn’t know it yet, but the end has already begun.
—
Dream builds their house with patience and with humor, layer by layer, brick by brick. His fair hair shines golden in the sun, spun from skeins of light and sky. George digs his hands into the soft, turned soil, scattering wheat seeds in neat, engineered rows.
There is a peace to it. Dream looks up from his work to flash George an endeared smile, wiping sweat off his freckled face with the back of his hand, and then go back to stacking his bricks with a renewed energy to his pace. Like George’s presence alone lets him breathe.
George ducks his head to hide the pleased grin that has begun to spread across his face. His fingers squelch around dirt. He feels giddy, drunk with a kind of all-encompassing love that sweeps him clean off his feet. The strength of the emotion is unfamiliar but so is everything. They’re building a new life, after all—something far away from blood and hurt and the hunt.
When lunchtime comes, so does Sapnap, bearing fish enough for all of them. His rod swings, unused, at his side as he clomps proudly over to the two of them, dripping a rivers worth of water.
“Did you catch these with your bare hands, ” Dream laughs. He pokes gingerly at one of the salmon in Sapnap’s bucket with the stick of his pickaxe, which flops miserably.
“I got bored waiting for them to bite,” Sapnap says, flashing his usual grin. “It’s easier this way.”
“Sure,” Dream agrees. “I suppose you came up with names for your new pets too while you were playing watersports with them.”
“Of course,” Sapnap says indulgently. “This one’s named Mars. This one’s Beckerson. This one’s Dream Is A Raging Asshole. Don’t they look delicious?”
George frowns at it, rising from his place at the garden to make his way to where the two of them are gathered. Something—a memory, or maybe some unknown intuition—ticks at the back of his mind, wriggling uncertain and wrongfooted. He tries to grasp it. It slips out of his hands.
“You are such a dick,” Dream is saying. He punctuates it with a roll of his eyes. “George, tell him he sucks.”
“You suck,” George says automatically. Something must be odd about his tone because Dream turns, a concerned crease forming at his brow.
“Dude,” he says, “are you okay? You look a little—” he flaps his hands a while, searching for the word, “—nauseous. Do you need to lie down for a bit?”
“I’m fine,” George says, though he feels vaguely like a memory has come apart from his conscious in chunks, tearing soft and easy like soggy bread. It’s a stupid thing—to try and remember something that he can no longer access, or perhaps maybe never existed in the first place—but he finds himself fixated on it. Chasing it, though he know it is impossibly out of his reach.
“Right,” Dream says like he doesn’t quite believe him. “Right, well, why don’t you go take a nap or something—you’ve been in the sun all day, maybe you’re just a little overheated—and Sapnap can cook Mars and Beckerson and the other one and when you wake up you can eat.”
George’s uneasy feeling rises even as Sapnap says, “Say the name of the other one, Dream, I dare you. Do it.”
Dream sighs. “Go cook Mars and Beckerson and Dream Is A Raging Asshole, dickhead.”
Sapnap’s smile is smug and hard-won. “You can eat Dream Is A Raging Asshole. If you’re nice to me, I won’t even char him too much.”
“And which one will you eat,” Dream says, exasperated. “Mars or Beckerson?”
“Obviously Beckerson,” Sapnap says. “Mars is for George’s delicate palette. Right Georgie?”
George opens his mouth to respond. What comes out instead is: “This isn’t how it goes.”
Dream turns. “What? Are you sure you’re okay?”
“I’m fine,” George says, again. He puts a hand to his lips. The words left a stiff, clunky shape in his mouth. The more he thinks about it, the less they make sense: this isn’t how it goes. How should he know? Why would he know? And then he thinks about it more and the sounds blur together indiscriminately, thisisnthowitgoesthisisnthowitgoesthisisnthowitgoes, until all meaning is lost.
The breeze thickens, sweeping grass under its chilly step. Dream turns.
“Of course this is how it goes,” he says, and oddly enough the words fall apart as they reach George’s ears, dissolving into a mess of sounds, soft round edges and sharp corners that fall flatly onto the wood below their feet. His easy smile has distorted into something thin and strained.
The world sharpens in focus, just a little more. Enough that George becomes acutely aware of it: reality, pressing its piercing talons into his shoulders, perched heavy and unforgiving, bending and warping around his breaths.
“Of course,” he manages, beyond the crush of the world around his lungs—and then the whole thing softens. Like an exhale. Like blowing a stray bit of hair out of your vision. The whole place deflates and Dream’s smile is radiant and natural again.
“As I was saying,” Sapnap says impatiently, as if he has been speaking this whole time, to no audience, “I think fish soup might be fun to try. It was always barbeque or grilled while we were—you know.”
“Tell us the truth,” Dream teases. “It’s because you haven’t figure out how to burn water yet, isn’t it?”
“Ha ha,” Sapnap says sarcastically. “What do you think, George?”
“Um,” George says. His mouth feels chalky and dry. He pushes past it. “I think Mars and Beckerson and Dream Is A Raging Asshole would enjoy their hot tub.”
Sapnap’s eyebrows furrow. Slowly: “Mars and Beckerson? Did you just name the fish we’re about to eat?”
“You named them,” George says, with a creeping horror. “You just said—we were eating Mars and Beckerson.” But that’s not quite right either, is it? Something is still wrong.
“George,” Dream says. There’s none of his usual teasing in it. It sounds like a warning. His shoulders are stiff and alien in their shape and slope. Nothing like the real Dream at all.
“Right,” George murmurs. Right. Play along. And he watches Sapnap’s face smooth from concerned confusion back to jovial delight, peering at his bucket.
George says, “I’d love to eat fish soup, Sapnap.” And the afternoon continues on smoothly into evening into night. No one tries to ask George if he’s okay again, and George doesn’t offer the information up. Still, Dream’s flinty eyes follow him where he goes, mouth pressed into a thin, unforgiving line.
—
He stews in the feeling for a few days. George slips into the role with the ease of a practiced actor reciting his parts. It becomes all the easier when all mistakes are largely ignored and sped past. Dream laughs and relaxes loose and happy but he still watches George out of the corner of his eyes. As if he is only waiting for him to speak the truth that has taken root in his throat.
George keeps his head down and his words silent. He has always been impulsive but something metallic curdles at the edges of his stomach when he thinks of confronting that Dream who is not quite Dream. Something like fear.
It feels wholeheartedly wrong, to be afraid of Dream. Dream, who looked at him like he hung the stars in the sky every night. Dream, who took his hand shyly in the morning and boldly at dusk to trace his heartlines with thick, calloused fingers. Dream, who gave them eternity, who sealed godhood behind a vow on George’s own beating heart.
It’s not Dream. It’s not Dream. It’s not. It can’t be.
Still, something about everything is wrong. The fish tastes like chicken; the chicken tastes like mutton and has the texture of overcooked steak. George cannot begin to explain it because so much as anyone else knows, this is how it has always tasted. Because as far as he knows, this is always how it has tasted too. And the spruce forest at spawn turns to jungle to savannah and then a desert until he is sitting on the top of the snowy mountain where he has, as far as he is aware, had always spawned, looking out into open ocean.
George thinks he can taste sea salt on his lips. There is snow over his boots, turned brown from mud and dust.
“There you are,” Sapnap says from behind. He settles on the crag by George and sighs, breath white and crystalline in the cold. “It’s so pretty up here, isn’t it?”
George doesn’t bother to answer. He leans forward, pressing his elbows into his thighs, his face into his palms.
“I want to speak with Dream,” he says, after a good, long time.
“Wow,” Sapnap says, mock-outraged. “The first thing you say to me—”
“It’s not funny,” George says flatly. “And you don’t have to pretend. I want to speak to Dream.”
Sapnap’s face wrinkles in obvious confusion. The pit of George’s stomach drops for a terrifying second—had he guessed wrong?—before he notices that the snow has stopped. Not fallen; it’s just stopped where it is, frozen in mid-air. Sapnap, too, has fallen still and quiet. George reaches tentatively out to place a hand on his sleeve when—
“You requested me,” Dream says. Had he always been there? He looks made out of ice, here—inhumanely still, piercing cold green eyes fixed on George’s.
“Yes,” George clips. “I imagine you know why.”
“You think something is wrong,” Dream says. His words roll of his tongue in a smooth, practiced motion. “You think there is some place else you are meant to be. Someone else’s George. I am telling you there is not. I am telling you this is where you belong.”
“Bullshit,” George says. “We both know this is—what, an echo of something in my past? And not even a good one. You’ve been getting details wrong left and right.”
“This is where you belong,” Dream repeats, with a tinge of anger and impatience. “Here. With us. With me.”
“You’re not even a good copy of Dream,” George says, rising to his feet, distaste souring his tone. “I don’t belong with anyone who has been so unkind to me.”
“I haven’t been unkind —”
“You strongarmed me into a lie.” George strides forward in two steps and yanks Dream’s mask off with a quick, furious motion. He’s not sure why he does it. A visceral need to see him, maybe, to catalogue all his differences and add them up into a separate being. Someone who is definitively, conclusively, not Dream. Who could never be Dream.
The strings snap easily. Not-Dream’s eyes go wide.
They’re blue. His eyes are blue. They had been green before—George remembers their icy green just seconds prior—but now they’re blue as frost and sky, surprise thinly veiled with a frustrated anger.
George throws the ceramic mask to his feet. It shatters on the rocky mountainside, shards spinning out and tumbling off the edge and down and down and down and down.
“I want to speak to Dream,” he says, icily. “The real Dream.”
Not-Dream puts a trembling finger to his cheek, where the string had recoiled and drawn a string of blood. The red smears at the touch, colored bright and vivid against his pale skin.
“George,” he says, sounding for all the world like he is lost, adrift at sea, and then the world is splintering, tearing itself in paper-thin strips that dissolve in a golden, familiar light.
→ → →
There’s a faint buzzing at the back of his head. George tries to shake it off—it’s the lack of sleep, he thinks. It must be. They had tracked Dream through the cover of night, well into early morning, and Dream had run and run and run, eyes and blade flashing with a maniacal glee, bright as the sun.
“George?” Sapnap touches his shoulder, worry etched into the lines of his face. “Did you hear what I said?”
“Hm? Oh,” George says, brushing the concern off like dust, and goes back to sharpening his iron sword on the whetstone. “Yeah. You were saying about—” he pauses to feel the shape of his thoughts, slotting a faint memory together like a puzzle piece, “—the compass.”
Sapnap doesn’t look convinced but he lets it go in favor of their more urgent mission. “Right. It hasn’t moved in a while, which could mean that either Dream has stopped moving or he’s been travelling in a straight line. I think probably the latter because he’s smart and needs all the ground he can get, but he’s also probably exhausted. We should decide if we want to give chase.”
George glances to Bad, who’s tucked into his bedroll across the camp, trying desperately to catch a few minutes of sleep before they’re hitting the road again. He shifts, still restless from the hunt, and settles back down.
There’s something in his chest that aches in the direction of the unmoving needle. George yearns to follow Dream, to catch him by his wrist and hold and hold and hold until the earth has collapsed from age and wear under their feet, burying them together, still entwined, so that whoever comes afterwards may think of them as one being.
Gods above, he thinks, startled by the thought. Where had that come from?
He credits it to exhaustion. Dream is his bounty and nothing more. Fuck, he hardly knows the man—hardly knows anything about him other than the price on his head and the feeling of his flashing steel sinking into George’s flesh.
It does nothing to dissuade the want. So he rises despite his aching, heavy bones and tired eyes, and nudges Bad awake with the toe of his boot.
“Let’s go,” he says. His smile is weary at the edges. “We have a green bastard to catch.”
—
They don’t catch him. Dream subverts them through the winding twists of a mineshaft and then they are stuck there, miles below the surface, surrounded on every side by monsters that creep ever forward. George can taste metallic frustration like blood in his mouth, tempered by the ash of sleeplessness and exhaust.
Bad swings his sword. A skeletons skull drops to the floor and the bone shatters on stone. The needle of George’s compass swings.
He barely has enough time to comprehend what it means. The hairs on his neck stand up and he ducks, just barely avoiding the shining steel of Dream’s own axe. He parries the next blow, blocks the next with his shield, and then disengages to turn tail and run.
Dream’s smile is vicious and bloodthirsty. “George,” he sings, the pounding of his feet marking the rhythm of George’s frantic heartbeats.
“SAPNAP,” he shouts, but it’s too late and too far—they’ve split into another branch of the cave, winding and twisting up and down and every which way. George pivots, fires a bolt from his crossbow. It whistles past Dream’s ears. George keeps running.
He stumbles down a steep slope, miraculously skirting a lake of lava, flying over another to land on obsidian, following a stream of water down into another cave branch. Dream’s pace quickens behind him. It becomes quickly apparent why.
George has hit a dead end.
“Dream,” he gasps through a choke, as if trying to reason—it’s no use, of course it isn’t, and he manages to lift his shield just in time for Dream’s axe to split cleanly through it, splintering wood in every direction. George scrambles to the side, missing another swing of Dream’s blade, but Dream kicks him hard in the stomach with the tip of his own boot, temporarily knocking the breath out of him.
He’s perilously close to the lava now, just a few inches from rolling in, and he can feel the heat rising to meet him. Sweat trickles across his forehead. Dream’s mask has a smudge of dirt across it from the chase. He looms down, as if contemplating it—whether he should roll George into the lava or split his chest clean open, burying his axe in bone and muscle.
George’s mouth goes dry from heat. He is so tired but the space between them is so small now. He raises a shaking arm—Dream flinches back on reflex, twisting deftly out of George’s grasp.
“Dream,” George says, heart pounding against his breastbone, so loud he can hear its roar in his ears. “Dream. It’s me.”
Dream hefts his axe. It’s impossible to tell what he’s thinking behind the mask but George thinks, wild and half out of his mind with fear and exhaustion, that he knows the meaning behind every shift of his muscles. The dutiful flex of his fingers around his axe. His flighty stance, as if he has already begun to plan his escape.
George knows what’s going to happen before he even sees it. Dream draws his axe back, biceps straining, and swings down with enough strength and speed to tear him clean open. To leave no room for hesitation. To cleave George’s poor, aching heart free, at last.
George closes his eyes and steadies himself for the finishing blow.
It never comes. Instead, someone’s fingers curl around his wrist, tugging him up. For a heart-splitting moment, George thinks—hopes, desperately—it might be Dream, come to his senses, but when he opens his eyes it’s Sapnap, impatient and practically vibrating from excitement.
“Dude,” he says, “you sleep too much. Dream is getting away.”
“Dream was….” George takes his surroundings in. The blue rolling sky above him, the plains dotted with brush and low-hanging trees. He finds a bedroll under him, blanket tossed haphazardly over his legs.
But that can’t be right, can it? George can still feel the heat of the lava reflected across one side of his face. Sweat still sticks to the back of his neck. His eyes are still adjusting to the brightness.
He was in that cave. He remembers it. Dream looming over him, the fear stark and sharp as day. It had been real. It must have been real.
“...just here,” he finishes, quiet and uncertain. Sapnap snorts.
“I wish,” he says, stretching his arms up. His mouth splits into a bone cracking yawn, but he shakes it off and tromps over to the fire, dousing it with a bucket. “I could have—” he mimes strangling Dream, “—as soon as he showed his stupid mask around here.”
It’s then that George notices. There are only two bedrolls around the fire—his, and Sapnap’s, the latter of which is rolled neatly and ready to travel.
Uneasily: “Where’s Bad?”
“At home,” Sapnap says. “Why?” His tone says, you should know this.
George is starting to think he doesn’t know anything he’s supposed to. Like the tingling feeling that rests just above his heart. Maybe Dream has cursed him with a heart condition and he will drop dead in minutes.
He doesn’t. So he rolls his bedroll up and follows Sapnap, fleet-footed and sure, in the direction of the swinging needle.
George manages to pry a few answers out of Sapnap as they run through a series of clever prompts—carefully, The trick he pulled in the Nether was so stupid and Sapnap grumbling back, Yeah, I hate that bastard. My right arm still hurts even after I respawned, that fucking asshole—and then his iron pickaxe is prying the last stone from the ceiling of the stronghold and they’re falling, hitting the ground running.
It’s not long before he catches a glimpse of green and bone-white mask, disappearing behind a corner, and he’s following before he knows it, giving chase before Dream can take it back. Sapnap’s close, very nearly stepping on his heels as they pursue him through the damp, narrow corridors of the stronghold.
George’s fingers flex around the hilt of his sword. He thinks he can taste blood already. Soon, soon, something in him sings but he can’t quite hear the next part, can’t quite feel what is coming, until they skid into the portal room and Dream has thrown TNT haphazardly in their path.
He strikes steel against flint once. It’s enough to spark the fuse.
They’re too close, George thinks, cold with fear. Too close to avoid the blast, too far to follow Dream into the star-speckled portal, into the End, before the blast catches them. It’s an amateur mistake.
“Get down,” he shouts at Sapnap, skidding to an abrupt stop, throwing his arms out to steady himself on the stronghold’s walls. Sapnap falls into his back with a muffled grunt of surprise and George uses the motion to twist, knocking them both to the ground.
The blast rips him out of his body and it feels like he is falling, down and down and down, for so long he has almost given up hope of ever respawning when—
—a hand reaches out and snags his wrist. The force of it nearly rips his bone from its socket.
George opens his eyes. He’s dangling above the cold, harsh void, just off the edge of the End Island. He cranes his neck up and nearly loses his breath.
It’s Dream. His mask is nowhere to be seen. It’s just him. George knows it in his bones.
“Dream,” George says, breathless.
The fog of the End blurs Dream’s expression, makes it unreadable, but his voice is low and true. “George.”
“I was starting to think you wouldn’t come,” George says. He’s aware he’s begun to babble but there’s a weight sloughing off his shoulders now, relieved by the single point of touch connecting them—an anchor, a lighthouse, drawing him back to shore. “God, Dream, I missed you. There was a—someone pretending to be you, and then I was here and I just kept thinking, this isn’t real, it can’t be real, you know? Because it’s not….”
Dream’s grip on his wrist tightens, wordless.
“...it wasn’t you,” George finishes, meekly. All of a sudden he’s aware of how fragile the moment feels—like it could shatter with a single breath.
Quieter: “Dream? Could you help me up?”
It’s a long minute before Dream speaks. His fingers have gone white and George’s wrist numb.
“I….” he says finally, sounding oddly distant, sounding oddly hurt. He takes a shaky breath. It travels in a shiver down George’s spine. “....I’m not supposed to be here.”
“Well if you weren’t I think I’d be dead,” George says, trying desperately to smooth out the unrecognizable panic that has begun to creep in on Dream’s unflappable tone. “Dream. Can you pull me up?”
“I’m trying to keep you safe,” Dream murmurs, almost unhearable despite the thick silence that envelops them. “This was supposed to— how? How did you bring me here, George?”
George swallows. “I didn’t do anything,” he says. “Dream, seriously, let me up. This isn’t funny. If you want to keep me safe, I think—” a half-hysterical laugh bubbles in his throat, “—I think not falling into the void would be very epic, actually.”
“I can’t,” Dream says thickly. “I can’t.”
“Yes you can,” George starts to say, but Dream says, “It’s to keep you safe, George, it’s all to keep you safe—you don’t understand. You can’t understand.”
He takes a shuddering breath. It travels in shivers down George’s spine.
“Whatever you did,” Dream says, “don’t do it again. Don’t bring me here again.” He exhales and his tone turns softer, more pained: “But remember I love you. Always. Okay? No matter what. That’s what it’s all for.”
“Dream,” George says, helplessly, because he doesn’t know what else to say. Because his best friend in every universe is unravelling, clinging to him just as much as George is, and his stomach has dropped to his feet because he thinks he knows where this is going. Because Dream is putting on his noble, hero voice, and preparing to make a sacrifice.
“I love you,” Dream repeats hollowly, and then he is letting go, fingers pulling free of his vice grip on George’s wrist, leaving it raw and cold and empty and vulnerable and George is falling and falling and falling and falling and this time, no one catches him.
→ → →
He lands so hard the breath knocks out of him. In the distance, he can hear shouting and scrabbling—Dream and Sapnap, his empty chest tells him with a pang.
George shuts his eyes again and drapes an arm over his eyes. Let them leave him, this time around. Let them leave him alone. Just once. Just this once, so he can breathe in the emptiness and know that the thing that aches and burns inside of him is the same that aches and burns on the outside, too.