Work Text:
Two and a half hours into an unrecorded Discord call, Dream felt the last shreds of his early-morning sanity slipping. What little he had begun with was already gone, worn down and used up with every wheeze that slipped past chapped lips and every smile that lit up green eyes. Even with cameras off, the atmosphere had finally dipped below sane levels, words loosed too easily in the slowly tapering call. The line usually drawn was being stomped on this morning, as it too often was, and Dream could feel his eyes burning with the strain of keeping them open and focused on a screen he had ingrained into memory.
“You know, you've been blowing up on Twitter lately,” George commented, and before he could even continue, Dream was chuckling. "Manatreed is almost up to three hundred thousand followers."
"They're crazy," Dream said, a shallow lick of fondness highlighting the words. "They'll do anything to figure out who it is."
George mimicked a ghost noise at the mysterious phrasing and Dream snorted with laughter, knowing all too well that if they hadn't been half asleep, George wouldn't have dared to make such a weird sound. It warmed his chest some, to know how relaxed and open George could be with him.
"Speaking of Twitter," George cut himself off with, "have you seen those tweets-" and already, the word 'yes' was building on Dream's tongue- "where they talk about feminine and masculine urges?"
"Yeah," Dream filled in, not expanding in the anticipation that George was going to finish his thought. Right on cue, he did, tone slipping over words with ignored exhaustion.
"They're so dumb," George burst, voice pitching around his accent on the word 'dumb.' "I've never felt a ‘masculine’ urge to do anything, and definitely not half of what they tweet about."
"Oh, come on," Dream teased, filter forgotten after too many minutes of hiding behind a screen. "You've never resisted the masculine urge to make out with your friends as a joke?"
It wasn't brought to life the way it had been in his head, although in retrospect, he didn't know where he had been going with the joke. However, for all intents and purposes, he didn't harbor truth in the flirty words, and he immediately chalked it down to his innate desire to get a reaction from George.
Which it did; an instant loud laugh choked its way out of George's throat, a trail of huffing syllables following as he struggled to process what exactly Dream had said. Dream dropped his head into his palms, elbows resting on the hard edge of his desk, eyes closed and humored regret ricocheting through him.
"Wh-what?" George sputtered after several seconds, slowly regaining his breath. Dream said nothing, so George prompted, "Dream?"
Seeing it was now too late to back away from his joke, Dream hesitantly repeated, "Resisting the masculine urge to make out with your friends as a joke."
"Oh my God," George laughed, "you're a menace."
"Shut up," Dream fired back, blood rushing to his face. "It was the first thing I thought of."
Nearly dying, the British man on the other side of the call couldn't breathe when he said, "Of course it was. Do you- do you resist that urge often, Dream?"
Flustered but unwilling to back down now, Dream dropped his tone and said, "All the time."
George coughed with how quickly his laugh died, and Dream felt some of his confidence returning in the seconds it took for his friend to pull himself back together.
Now seeing his full hand, Dream wasn't going to let up. "Do you want me to stop resisting, George?"
Silence. Dream thought he heard George inhale sharply, but wasn't sure, cursing the untrustworthy Discord mic.
"Speak up," Dream taunted, eyes bright with the knowledge he was back on top of his joke. "Do you want me to make out with you?"
"You're so dumb," George rushed, “I’m hanging up.”
Cracking immediately, Dream was quick to switch gears. “No, don’t do that.” With little resistance from his slow synapses, he habitually tacked on a coy, “You’ll never get a kiss if you leave me.”
“Goodbye,” George said with finality, though embarrassment rang through the line. Dream was late to react, and by the time he started thinking about any way to prevent the overdue ending to their call, Discord chimed to let him know George was already gone.
Dream typed a small “:(“ into their DMs, but the dot to George’s name was grey, and he knew it would have no effect. Reclining in his chair, Dream let out a breath of pent-up energy from his lungs. Their call had been one stupid conversation after another, but he regretted none of it. They often toyed with the line between friendship and beyond, even when fans weren’t around, and lately, Dream had been contemplating how far that line stretched. When, exactly, were they supposed to stop?
Lost in his thoughts, his fingers followed habit and clacked “twitter” into a freshly opened search engine. Words lingered in his head, and while his fingertips buzzed with memory, he slowly wrote a tweet he was sure George would see.
“resisting the masculine urge to make out with your homies but just as a joke”
A single click and it posted before he could think much about it. Closing the window, suddenly too impatient to wait for George to respond, he leaned over an old bottle of water for his phone and opened Snapchat before he could contemplate how desperate he must look.
Taking a blind picture of his glowing desk, he fumbled over keys as he tapped in “open twitter” and then a smaller “pretty please” below it.
He sent it and instantly jumped when he felt Patches nudge his ankle beneath his desk. Dream glanced toward the door to his room, seeing it was now several inches wider than it had been, and a brief smile curled his lips. He rolled back and scooped her up into his lap, unabashed contentment lacing his features when she nuzzled his cheek and began to purr. He spent several minutes running long fingers down her spine, uttering sweet words in brown ears that twitched with every breath.
By the time Patches decided she’d had enough attention, Dream’s phone screen had timed out and was black. He set her back on the ground, scratching briefly below her chin in a loving last gesture, and as she walked off, he slid his phone closer and reopened the device.
Sitting there was a snap from George, and his mind jolted with renewed anticipation. Tapping it, he almost missed the words on the screen, too focused was he on the middle finger glaring at him in front of a soft grey t-shirt.
“you’re obsessed with me,” a small message read, and instantly, Dream felt his face heat. Unafraid, he made half a heart with two fingers and attached a “;)” to go with it. Knowing he was at an advantage, and happy to have renewed contact with George, he sent it without bothering to notice how Patches was sitting on the floor in the background.
George’s response took less than two minutes. A picture of brightly lit counters met Dream, along with a caption of “patches is cute.”
“So are you,” Dream sent back, layered over an image of his keyboard.
George merely replied with a rolling eyes emoji in their DMs, and Dream took the liberty of pushing their joke further.
Aligning his camera carefully, he took a picture that contained a single frame of his face. The corner of his lips, a stretch of skin, a shadowed neck, snippets of cotton at the edges. Knowing full well how the image looked, he sent it off with a dangerously placed message at the very bottom.
“let me kiss you, George.”
George didn’t respond the entire time Dream waited, decided to get up and cook, and sat down to eat. A response finally came, nearly twenty-five minutes later, just as Dream had his teeth sunk into a warm egg sandwich. Huffing around the freshly cooked meal, he finished his bite with amusement before opening his phone.
Instantly, he choked. Despite the fact there was no food left in his mouth, Dream somehow found a way to get his throat stuck on absolutely nothing, and he spent the next thirty seconds pushing his way to the sink so he could fill a nearby glass and prevent himself from asphyxiating.
Already timed out, an image of George rested in their conversation. An image of George that would haunt Dream effectively for the rest of the day and long into the upcoming weeks.
Backdropped by wrinkled sheets, outlined with a soft glow from his phone screen, a swathe of skin Dream had never seen before stared back at him when he replayed the snap without thinking a minute later. A shirt hem bordered the edge of the photo. Pale freckles splashed across paler skin that shimmered under synthetic light. But what truly caused such a sudden reaction from the Floridan man was the hip bone that jutted past planes of abdomen and waist.
Just there. Just staring Dream down like George knew exactly how it was going to make the younger man feel.
An unconscious tug drove Dream’s fingers to his power and volume buttons, and in the tracks of the thoughtlessness George had prompted, he took a screenshot of the image seconds before it vanished once more. A blush rose high on Dream’s cheeks, but he did nothing to hide it, basking in the heady feeling the interaction gave him. Opening his gallery was perhaps the first in a line of many upcoming secret forbidden acts, but this knowledge didn’t haunt him as his fingers navigated to the new image.
And what stole his breath for the second time was the word he had missed at the very top of the photo.
“where”
Before he had time to recover from the new discovery he had made, he got a message from George, a text amidst their string of pictures. It read a teasing "I knew you'd screenshot that. freak."
Dream couldn't even offer up a smile at the message. He was still reeling from the snap.
Hesitantly, he turned off his phone. He picked up his sandwich. He took another bite.
If Dream could pretend like George was just another distraction on his phone, maybe he could get rid of the clawing desire inside of him that screamed he had gone beyond joking. The desire that wished more than anything that he had trampled that line. Because he thought, as he fed the last bite of his sandwich to Patches, that maybe he did want to kiss his best friend. And not as a joke.