Chapter Text
George sat silently on the beach. He was alone, chewing slowly on a portion of soggy fish and chips.
It was how he liked it, actually.
The waves kept him company, rolling slowly and endlessly over the sand in front of him, shimmering under the cool April dusk. A fresh wind brushed across his face like a dance, sometimes quick and lively and sometimes so delicately that not a single hair was stirred from his fringe.
It was a Friday night, and though the beach was cold, dark, quiet – practically deserted – the city rumbled on behind him. To his left, the bright lights of the Brighton pier funfair were glowing all colours of the rainbow: the faint sound of laughter and pop music echoing across the almost-empty beach.
George liked to observe.
Now his uni days were over, and with it the tightly-wound knot of peer pressure, he felt he could finally be true to himself- to admit that that parties and the like did nothing but exhaust him.
Everything that happened on a Friday night never quite felt real.
Always dreamlike, he supposed, in how it never transpired to anything the next day. The only relics of the night being the woozy taint of a hangover and the colourful splotches on his arms, from god knows where, as is the existence of an inebriated person.
Sitting on the sand was quite frankly a world away from ‘the scene’- like meditation really. George could sit there for hours in the late evening. It made him feel simultaneously like he was the only person in the world, and the only one who didn’t exist.
Just watching, observing, feeling.
Feeling. Feeling the weight of the world as the waves rolled endlessly over sand.
And staring. Staring out to sea.
Au large.
It was about 10:30pm that his eyes flickered down at the phone lying next to him on the sand. It had been lighting up periodically the whole evening – of course it had.
It was a Friday night.
Notifications and distractions were unavoidable as everyone celebrated the end of another week of graft. But at 10:30 the notifications just kept on coming, like a flood.
Gently lifting his phone from the sand, and swiping up, George peered down at the offending messages. Oh, the MCC groupchat. It made sense, of course. April the 29th – the day before MCC.
He glanced around him, fruitlessly albeit, with not a single person in a 100m radius. He figured that the sea could spare him for a while.
A smile danced across his features for the first time that evening as he tapped out a response.
When George woke up the next morning it was almost midday.
The sun never reached his bed that late in the morning. Instead, the midday rays would choose to stay stubbornly outside the window, glaring down onto the street below.
He sat up slowly, with a familiar bitter and faintly blood-tasting sensation swirling around his mouth. But George didn’t take any heed. He was used to it.
The faint feeling that life was not quite how it should be.
Besides, last night was nice.
They had fun on the groupchat, even if George was still ignoring every other message that he received the night before. Sometimes he couldn’t even open messages, nevermind think to reply.
It was a nice group, the MCC team, he supposed. Ranboo and Sneeg weren’t people that he often interacted with – had ever really interacted with in fact– but it was nice to be with other people for a change, even for an introvert like himself.
Sometimes it can be hard to spend every day talking to nobody but people who think they can see right through you, even if they’re across an ocean.
And, of course, there was Wilbur too.
Wilbur Soot. Odd Wilbur. Good old Wilbur.
Wilbur who always managed to get under George’s skin like nobody else. In all the ways that are good and bad.
It would be a good MCC, he decided. A nice change.
The day moved on swiftly, normally.
George ate breakfast (lunch?), he drank a coffee, he went to the local corner shop for a new pint of milk. He took his washing to the dry cleaners and brought it back and folded it and put it into his drawers. He opened his PC and fiddled around before reluctantly replying to discord messages from Quackity and Sapnap and Dream.
But above all he spent an inordinate amount of time staring at his white, white walls. It was something he had been doing a lot recently.
George started his stream right on time, and finished it right on time too.
The team didn’t win MCC, of course. They were a pretty hopeless group – especially Wilbur, full of arrogance without evidence. But it didn’t really matter, George supposed as he leant back into his chair.
It was fun, and even after ending stream he could feel that he still had whispers of a smile etched onto his features. He hadn’t really smiled much recently. He hadn’t frowned either. He was mostly just in between. A perpetual shade of grey perhaps.
But he couldn’t lie, it was still rather a confusing experience.
Mainly due to Wilbur’s constant, earnest suggestions (stupid suggestions) that gave him excuses to meet up with George. To do drugs or to film a music video, it didn’t seem to matter.
To do drugs or to film a music video!
Something was up with Wilbur that day. Not even he would suggest things as ludicrous as that normally, or at the very least not on stream.
George had no idea why he was so invested in seeing him, he was just George. Boring George, if he was to describe himself. What could he bring Wilbur of all people?
Regardless, George had managed to stumble out a bullshit excuse as to why he couldn’t see Wilbur- he wanted a lazy Sunday! Or something like that. It wasn’t particularly important, the principle of the matter was that George didn’t want to see Wilbur in person, at least not any time soon.
Why would he? He would have to suffer being out in public and he’d most likely have take a train to Brighton as well, because God forbid Wilbur Soot found himself in the smoky city.
There was only one thing that could make George venture that far away at the moment. The call of the sea.
L’appel de la mer.
A buzzing from George’s PC pulled him from of his thoughts. It was Dream calling.
George would like to say he felt something about it, but he didn’t really, he just picked up the call like usual.
For a brief second, he wondered if he should bother. He didn’t particularly fancy sitting with a bunch of people jumping in and out of the call proclaiming ‘well-done’ with varied levels of fakeness. But he then he remembered that it was Sapnap who had won (again), so he figured there was no reason to decline.
“George!” Dream’s voice was high and squeaky, and not for the first time George thought about asking why he bothered. But he didn’t, it didn’t mean anything.
Cela ne veut rien dire.
At least it gave him warning that Dream was still live as opposed to them being in a private vc, he supposed.
“How are you? Have fun getting crushed by us?” Dream continued, his tone bright and joyful.
George didn’t feel like that at all. Certainly, the smile from the hour previous had gone by now. He laughed briskly in response, the kind of laugh that comes from your head rather than your stomach.
“Dream, you didn’t even win! You guys came, what 3rd? 4th? Besides, didn’t Wilbur kill you in sky battle at one point? It’s Wilbur!”
“…We came 4th George.” Dream relented, “At least it’s better than 6th! Or the curse of 3rd!”
George forced another laugh to fall from his lips.
For a moment, 30 seconds or so, they both just sat there not saying a thing. Until luckily Dream saved it, starting to interact with chat.
George relaxed, he could probably just follow Dream now until he got bored and fell asleep. It saved having to try and think of his own conversation because George couldn’t think of a single thing to say. But not just to Dream, to everyone really.
It was Sunday when George woke up, obviously.
George didn’t like Sundays.
They just had a certain vibe to them, but it was a vibe that George never quite seemed to be a part of.
Maybe it was a vibe that you were supposed to share with family? It was true that George only tended to go home every couple of months, but that wasn’t exactly atypical of someone in their mid-twenties and everyone else seemed to like Sundays just fine.
George tried to recall how last night had ended, but frankly he couldn’t. It all seemed to be a bit of a muddle. He didn’t remember ever hanging up on Dream, but his PC was shut off and he managed to sleep in his own bed, so he figured it couldn’t have been all that bad.
Dream probably told him to go to sleep just past midnight for his time, asking if he was okay because he seemed quiet. George would have complied, and brushed him off.
It confused him really, George was fine. Couldn’t Dream see that? He seemed to be asking silly questions like that more and more recently.
George had no idea why.
A few minutes passed, as George listened to the slow sound of lazy Sunday traffic outside his bedroom, before he pried himself out of bed, and walked over to the window.
George might hate Sundays, but the quiet that descended on the roads wasn’t too bad, and if you listened hard enough you could hear the sparsely placed trees rustle in the light city wind.
In a quiet moment, he thought back to Friday night and Brighton beach.
He wasn’t sure why though. It was midday – a cool, cloudy midday nonetheless – but George hadn’t been to the beach earlier than 5pm since the time that he went with Wilbur. A day that was almost a year ago now.
It was quite a nice day in retrospect, he thought. Still, there was no reason for him to travel down to Brighton alone for the 2nd time in 3 days – on a Sunday above all.
For a very brief and fleeting moment, George wished that he had taken Wilbur up on one of those offers, if only to waste his day side by side with another on Brighton beach rather than at home.
But it was just a moment.
A brief and fleeting moment, before George got up and moved on to make the most of the self-proclaimed lazy Sunday.
It would make sense to want to be somewhere else, he supposed, as he had spent a lot of time inside recently. Plus, he was supposed to be going to Florida soon, right?
He shelved the thoughts to the back of his mind, and moved on with his day. It is what it is.
C’est la vie.