Chapter Text
It had been the hottest day that Dream had ever experienced when he met the mushroom boy.
When the sun reached its peak at midday, Dream felt like he was being tortured. The sun was ruthless, casting rays of fire onto Dream. He was almost convinced that he was melting, sweat dripped from his brow in fat drops and his clothes felt sticky, uncomfortable and tight. He was used to warm weather, as much as he preferred the cold, but by midday Dream couldn’t handle travelling in such weather anymore and sought the shelter of the forest he could make out at the top of the small hill he was walking up.
The broad branches shielded him from the sun a little, providing temporary relief, but there was only so much shelter that leaves could provide. The sun was still shining through the leaves and creating ripples of light across the lush green grass. If it were any other day, Dream would’ve thought the sight was beautiful. It was the kind of scenery idealised by artists. But in that moment, Dream was more concerned with escaping his own stench and stopping his body from melting into a puddle of sweat in the middle of the wilderness.
To Dream’s relief however, the sound of a creek somewhere nearby promised a chance to hydrate and cool down.
Dream followed the sweet sound until the ground dipped before him to reveal where the body of water had carved a trail over many years. He grinned and immediately freed his feet from his boots, wrinkling his nose at the foul smell that escaped them. He lifted his travel bag off his shoulder and removed his shirt. A cool breeze that managed to navigate its way to him through the trees kissed his moist skin, the contrast in the temperature of his body and the wind felt heavenly.
Dream bent down to cup his hands and raise some of the creak water to his mouth. No liquid had ever tasted so good, it was fresh and clean and cold. It washed down all the saliva that had built up in his mouth and threatened to choke him. After drinking, Dream lowered his body into the creek, not caring about his pants getting wet. There was no one watching to call him crazy, he was free at act as odd as he wanted.
Or so Dream thought.
The steady flow of the creek massaged his scalp and shoulders as the water ran over his body. Dream sighed blissfully and shut his eyes to further relax. He finally took in the serenity of his surroundings, the breeze in the treetops, the soft occasional bird song and the bubbling of the water he lay in. All the sounds came together to form a pleasant duet. This place was perfect, the most perfect place he’d ever seen. This was a moment he never wanted to end. Being a traveller could be so nagging, the journeys always insisting that he pick up his bags and carry onto the next town, never staying in one place long enough to get attached. Lying in the creek, for the first time in months Dream felt like he could finally take a few minutes, even hours to just exist.
Only when Dream thought he heard footsteps and breathing did he open his eyes again.
It was quite surprising for him to realise he was in fact not alone. When he opened his eyes, he was met with the curious brown gaze of a boy. Upon realising that he had been seen, the boy gasped and ducked out of Dream’s sight.
Dream sat up in the middle of creek and looked over the curve of the bank to see a large mushroom sitting next to him that he definitely would’ve remembered seeing before. Tentatively, he reached out to tilt the edge of the mushroom up. Underneath lay a nest of fluffy dark brown hair. The boy twisted his head to look at Dream with deep brown eyes from underneath the mushroom that he was apparently using as a hat.
“Hey there.” Dream greeted with a smile and an eyebrow raised in curiosity. “What are you doing here?”
The boy frowned as if he had been asked a rather unusual question. He answered shyly. “I live here?”
“Really?” Dream looked around for any sign of a house he may’ve missed earlier. “…Do you have a house?”
“Yes…” George replied.
Dream looked back at the boy, maybe he was more unusual than Dream originally thought. “What’s your name?” He asked the boy.
“George.” The boy answered.
For such an unusual person, he had a pretty common name.
“I’m Dream.” Dream introduced himself and held out his hand for George to shake. The boy sat up from where he had tried to hide amongst the grass and Dream was finally able to get a good look at him.
He had very pale skin despite apparently living outside. His cheeks had a few faint freckles that were masked by the pink flush of his cheeks. Whether it was from the heat or Dream was yet to be determined. He wore a light blue shirt that seemed just a little bit too small for him and had a few holes and tears in it. His pants had befallen a similar fate. The cloak he had draped over his shoulders seemed to be made of moss with additional leaves clinging to it here and there. Dream guessed that was how he managed to camouflage so well. From this angle, George looked fairly small. There wouldn’t be much to have to hide under the cloak. Overall, George looked… pretty, in Dream’s opinion.
“Why are you sitting in a creek?” George asked.
Dream gestured above their heads to the sun. “It’s so hot!” he whined.
George giggled. “Where did you even come from? I haven’t seen a human in months... Maybe years.”
Dream pointed in the direction he came from. “I’m a traveller from the West. Where are you from?”
George narrowed his brow in thought for a minute before shrugging. “I’ve been here for as long as I can remember. My parents left me here one day and I never saw them again.”
“That’s horrible!” Dream gasped.
George shrugged again. “I don’t mind it, She looked after me pretty well anyway.”
“She?” Dream frowned.
“Mother Nature.” George said. “She’s the one who kept me alive all these years.”
When it came to magic and the supernatural, Dream liked the idea of such things, but he wasn’t quite sure if he believed in them just yet. ‘Mother Nature?”
“Yeah!” George nodded. “She feeds me, clothes me, shelters me. She taught me some of her magic too! Watch this…”
Dream pushed his thoughts about debating whether Mother nature was actually doing a good job of keeping George well clothed aside. Choosing instead to watch as George eagerly pressed his delicate fingertips into the damp soil of the riverbank. Dream’s eyes widened in shock as tiny red mushrooms began to grow from the dirt.
“H-how are you doing that?” Dream gasped.
“Mother Nature taught me.” George said proudly. “She helped me to build my house! Do you wanna see it?”
“S-sure.” Dream was still taken aback by the fact that his new acquaintance had the ability to grow mushrooms at his will. George grinned and stood up, offering Dream his hand to help him rise from the creek.
Now that they were standing, Dream noticed another detail about George. He wasn’t just slightly smaller. Dream was probably a whole head taller than him, meaning that George was pretty much at eye-level with his bare chest. Suddenly Dream was very embarrassed about the fact that he was shirtless and asked for a moment to put his shirt back on. George giggled and said that was fine.
After putting on his shirt, he realised his travel bag was nowhere in sight.
“George, have you seen my travel bag by any chance?”
At this George dipped his head to avid Dream’s gaze and hesitantly held out his travel bag from behind his back. “Y-yeah… I didn’t think you were going to wake up so soon so… I thought I’d be able to grab it and…”
“You were planning to steal it from me?” Dream asked.
“Y-yeah…” George’s face was completely hidden underneath his mushroom hat. But Dream could still see his body drooping in shame. “I know I shouldn’t have, it’s just I don’t see humans very often and you have such interesting, useful things that I can’t always make for myself.”
“Why don’t you go to one of the local towns and buy the things you need from a market?”
George’s head shot up. His eyes were wide with panic. “I haven’t left this forest in years! Not since I was six! I don’t remember how I got here or where the nearest town is. What if I couldn’t find my way back? I don’t know how to live with humans anymore. You’re the first one I’ve actually spoken to in years!” George wrapped his arms around himself. “Mother Nature has looked after me for as long as I can remember. I don’t know what I’d do without her, without this forest.”
Dream reached out a hand to rest it on George’s shoulder in an attempt to comfort him. George flinched initially, the feeling of another human’s touch being unfamiliar to him, before he relaxed into it. “Hey, I’m sorry if the idea stressed you out.” Dream apologised.
George sighed. “It’s okay, I probably overreacted a bit.”
“That’s fine, we all do sometimes.” Dream said as he stooped down to put on his boots again. Once they started walking deeper into the forest, he noticed that George wasn’t wearing any shoes himself.
“Do you have shoes?” Dream asked.
“I used to.” George replied. “But they got very worn and eventually I grew out of them. Mother Nature can find and bring me clothes, but shoes are a bit harder to carry on the wind. Besides, being bare foot doesn’t bother me anymore. I’ve gotten used to it. I like the feel of grass between my toes.”
Dream nodded in understanding. Now that they were deeper into the forest, the scenery changed. It was darker for one. The heat of the sun was still there, but it was much more bearable than before. George was leading him further upstream. The ground was becoming less grass and more tree root and leaf litter. Twigs were starting to snap beneath Dream’s boots.
This new setting was different, but Dream decided it wasn’t a bad different. This darker part of the forest had its charms too. The bird song for one was much louder and the taller trees had Dream’s mouth slowly parting in awe. His tree-climber’s eye naturally caught on the taller trees with low hanging branches. It was a challenge that he child in him was secretly crossing his fingers for time to accept.
Eventually the creek led them to a clearing. In the middle of clearing rested a house that was just as unusual as George.
It seemed to be nestled almost into the ground. If you were to look at the house from behind, you would be likely to mistake it for a mere hill of grass.
From the front Dream could see a round little front door with windows on either side. The windows weren’t made of glass as the resource was likely unavailable. Instead, George had made a cross of sticks to keep out the outside world. It seemed like there was a curtain of some kind of ivy or moss behind the windows. The windowsills were made by shelves of fungus and an arch of ivy grew around the round door frame.
Growing from the grassy roof was a crooked chimney that looked as though it were only being held together by the plants that had grown into the cracks.
Next to the house on the left-hand side, surrounded by a fence of sticks that also seemed ready to fall apart at any minute was a garden. There were no carrots or tomatoes or anything you’d expect to find in any normal person’s garden. George was using that space to grow lots of edible native plants.
“What do you think?” George asked.
“It’s… Definitely different to most of the houses I’ve seen.” Dream admitted.
“Do you like it?”
Dream studied George’s little mushroom house in the clearing, taking in every little detail. “Yeah.” He answered. “Yes, I do.”
George beamed. “Come and see inside!”
Dream smiled. George clearly did not have visitors very often. He was thrilled to be able to show another human being around, his obvious excitement was… Endearing.
Dream followed George into the house. The first thing he realised about it, was that it clearly wasn’t built for someone as tall as himself in mind. Where George only had to duck his head a little to slip through the round doorway, Dream was practically playing a game of limbo to enter George’s home. When he was inside and tried to straighten up again, He hit his head on the low ceiling.
“Oh my god! Are you alright?” George asked.
Dream tried to smile reassuringly as he rubbed his head. “I’m alright, just wasn’t expecting the ceiling to be that low.”
George chuckled. “It’s not that bad! You’re just much taller than me!”
George’s house had three rooms. In the entrance, which was a whole room of its own, Dream could see a coat hanger. The only thing that made the coat hanger unusual was that it was made from a branch growing through the wall. George took off his mushroom hat and moss cloak and hung them up on the branch. Without the accessories, George seemed even smaller. The hat no longer adding to his height and the lack of the clock showed of how slim George was.
“You’re more than welcome to hang your travel bag up there too.” George offered. “Don’t worry, I promise I won’t try to steal it.” He added humorously.
Dream laughed and decided to take George up on his offer and hang his bag up.
“Also,” George began as he wiped his feet on a door mat. Dream was stunned at how much George could make with the natural resources of the forest. “I might be living in the middle of the forest, but I do try to keep this place a little clean. Would you mind taking your boots off?”
Dream nodded and removed his feet once again from his boots and set them down underneath the coat hanger. After doing so, he followed George’s example and wiped his own feet. He had spent a good fifteen minutes just lying in a creek not that long ago.
Also in the room was a rug of moss, a fireplace and a small pile of bags and boxes.
George gestured to the bags and boxes. “Mother Nature finds things for me. Normally when travellers like yourself pass by they stop to shelter in the trees, much like yourself, to eat and drink by the creek. She’ll hide things from them and either tell animals to bring them to me or guide me to where she’s hidden them herself.” George smiled as he looked back at Dream. “That was why I found you. Mother Nature thought you were asleep too and thought I’d be able to get away with pinching your bag… I’m still very sorry about that by the way. I just really like them, they’re so useful.”
“It’s fine, I can understand why you’d want them.” Dream said. He just didn’t have it in his heart to be mad at George about something he was so genuinely sorry about. “…Actually, would you like to see some of the things in my bag?”
George’s eyes widened with interest. “You serious?”
Dream nodded.
George considered it. “…After I finish showing you around?”
Dream laughed. “Of course.”
The tiny little kitchen that George had managed to scrape together was clearly the brunette’s pride and joy. He had dragged a log into the room and shaped it with an axe he’d made so the top of the log was smooth. Providing him with a flat workspace. A different approach to the tables Dream had grown used seeing, but he figured as long as it served its purpose and George liked it, it was cool.
George had managed to make some wonky plates and bowls from the clay Mother nature had apparently led him to. A few naturally growing herbs were hanging here and there. And he had hidden a few seeds on smaller shelves of fungi than what made up his windowsills. Despite the lack of a few things that one would expect to see in a kitchen, George had still managed to fill his kitchen with enough to make the room feel charmingly crowded.
Everything about George’s wonky little house had a certain charm that Dream was quickly growing fond of. It was so wonderfully unique. Even though the ceiling was a bit too low, there were literal plants growing in the house and there were no chairs or lots of other things. It was undeniably cosy. Especially once George lit the fire after showing Dream the bedroom that made up the last room of his house.
By the time they had finished their tour and Dream had started showing George the things he was carrying with him in his travel bag. Night was already upon them and George had to drag himself away from marvelling at Dream’s compass to set himself to work in the kitchen to make dinner.
“You may as well stay here for the night.” George said as he started making a mushroom stew. “You need to eat and sleep before you continue on your way.”
He has a point. Dream thought. “Are you sure it’s okay if I stay the night?”
“Of course it is!” George reassured. “I haven’t had anyone other than Mother Nature and the animals to talk to in ages.”
“Wait, wait, wait.” Dream chuckled. “You can talk to animals?”
“Mother Nature taught me when I was seven.” George confirmed with a proud smile.
“H-how do- how does that even work?” Dream asked.
“Once you can hear Mother Nature, you can learn almost any plant or animal’s language with practice.”
“You talk to plants too?!”
George burst out laughing. “It’s harder for sure, especially since you can read an animal’s body language if you get stuck. I’ve pretty much given up on talking to seedlings. They speak mostly gibberish because they haven’t learnt to talk yet and they’re more often than not muffled by the soil.”
“What’s your favourite thing to talk to?”
“Besides Mother Nature? Hmm… they’re all fun for different reasons. Squirrels are very energetic and entertaining, deer can be nice if you’re just looking for a chat. The Old Oak is good if you’re looking for advice. I’ve met a raccoon or two, they can be kinda rude sometimes but otherwise they’re cool… I think I talk to the birds the most. They just have a lot of good stories. Did you know they pass down their stories from generation to generation? They call those Nest Tales.”
“Like nursery tales?” Dream guessed.
George shrugged. “I wouldn’t know. Everything I know, I was taught by Mother Nature, animals and plants.”
“Oh… Well nursery tales for most humans are stories that have been passed down from generation to generation we write them in books now.” Dream explained.
“Books… books… books…” George tested the word on his tongue. “Oh! I think I’ve seen one of those before! Another traveller nearly left one here once!”
Dream ran their conversation back through his mind in their silence, his attention caught on one thing that George had said. “Everything I know, I was taught by Mother Nature, animals and plants.”
“George, if you’ve barely ever spoken to humans, how come you speak English so fluently?”
“Mother Nature doesn’t just dwell in this forest, it’s just where I hear her best.” George explained. “Her presence is woven across the entire world, she hears everything, helps anyone that will listen, speaks every language. She taught me English first before she taught me anything else. She speaks to me in English so I can practice. She just doesn’t understand everything humans do, that’s when she can’t teach me.”
They continued to talk non-stop for ages before George had finally finished the stew. “I’m sorry, there’s not much. I wasn’t prepared to cook for two people.”
“Don’t worry, I pack food for every meal when I’m travelling, and I was too hot to eat lunch today, so I’ll have extra. We can split our food between us.”
“Okay, that sounds good.”
George had whipped up a pretty decent stew considering he only used things that grew naturally in the forest. The loaf of bread and trail mix that Dream had packed only added to it. As Dream ate, he realised that George would have no idea about so many kinds of food that existed in the world.
“How often do you make this mushroom stew?” He asked for confirmation.
“Every second night if not every night.” George answered.
“Do you ever get sick of it?”
“No.” George’s reply was simple. “I don’t know any different and I don’t really mind that. Besides, there’s a little variety with the changing seasons. Mushroom stew in Spring and Summer is definitely better than mushroom stew in Winter.”
“Oh my god it must be terrible out here in Winter, you don’t even have a good blanket! Or clothes!” Dream preferred the cold over the heat, but not enough to sleep practically outside when the snow starts to fall.
“It’s much rougher, yes. But Mother Nature helps. She weaves the branches tighter together at night to trap more of the heat in and guides me to good firewood. And for the blanket and clothes, sometimes I have to skin dead animals for their pelts in order to stay warm. I have a fairly good collection by now, which is nice because I don’t have to do that as much anymore.”
George looked over at Dream’s bowl to confirm it was empty, he then collected Dream’s bowl along with his own and stood up with them. “I leave the bowls in the clearing at night. It’s too dark to clean them, I’ll do that in the morning. The nocturnal animals can lick up any scraps they want tonight, Mother Nature will keep them out of the house.”
“Huh.” Dream nodded in acceptance. George was weird, no doubt about it. But he was nicer and more cheerful than some of the people from the towns Dream visited despite barely having human contact. Maybe that was the reason why he was so nice, he’d had no one to hurt him, he was free to blindly trust anyone. When George walked back through the door and smiled at him, Dream suddenly felt the need to protect him and his innocence.
“Where are you planning to go when you leave?” George asked.
“North-East probably. That’s where the next town is, and I’ll need to top up on some supplies.” Dream told him. In that moment, in the comfort of George’s little house, the idea of bustling streets seemed very unappealing.
“I’ve heard a few stories about that town from the birds they say they have seen worse towns, but I wouldn’t know anything about whether they’re right or not. That’s just what I’ve heard.”
“I’ve heard that it’s nothing special, but I don’t plan to stay there long anyway. I’m kinda just wandering around until I find a place that calls to me. A place I can call home, you know?”
“I think I do. You need to find your own territory.”
Dream laughed. It was very obvious from that statement that George really had only ever talked to animals. “Yes, pretty much.”
“Well, how about you keep looking for your territory after you get some sleep? You can have my bed for the night.”
“Where will you sleep?” Dream frowned.
“Mother Nature’s searching for a place for me right now, I asked for Her to look while I was in the clearing. She’ll make sure I’m comfortable, but I don’t think you’d be nearly as comfortable as I’d be sleeping in a tree.”
Dream laughed again. This time at the image in his mind of George lying on a tree branch, mushroom hat covering his face as one dirty bare foot dangles below him. “Probably not.”
George paused to stare out the window of his house before speaking again. “She’s found a place. I’ll ask her to wake me just before the morning bird song so I can be back in time to start making breakfast.”
“Okay…” Dream said, George seemed satisfied with that answer and turned to return to the forest outside. “Hey George?”
George stopped to look over his shoulder. “Yeah?’
“Thank you, you’ve been a very good host.”
George grinned. “Thank you, that means a lot. I don’t get the chance to see humans very often, so I’m glad I could make you feel comfortable.”
When the silence had stretched out for a little bit too long, neither able to break the strange eye contact they had made, Dream filled in the gap with; “Good night.”
“Good night Dream. Sleep well.”