Archive of Our Own

George’s room is bare when he awakens. It looks the same as when he fell asleep; boxes and bags tossed on the carpet and some memorabilia scattered about that he took from his old place that he simply couldn’t get rid of. It looks the same as when he fell asleep, but it still takes some blinking for him to remember that he’s halfway across the world in his best friends’ apartment. It’s strange and foreign and tastes like memories that he hasn’t made yet. Something’s burning in his gut.

Something about it tastes different. The air is different, and his feet feel heavy when he swings himself around and touches down on the carpet with socked feet. The air is crisp in that Floridian-air-conditioning way that he feels he will grow to love. The water tastes different too. Worse , but the pros outweigh the cons. George can deal with shitty water if it means he gets to spend every day with- 

Oh. Him. It only takes a second and it all comes rushing back. He can still feel Dream’s skin against his own as they hugged on the driveway. The lingering sensation burns against his arm, his shoulders. He thought about it while he was drifting away to sleep last night, but he wasn’t sure what it meant. He just knew that he was content in the knowledge that Sapnap and Dream were both probably asleep in their bedrooms and everything was safe and good and calm. The world felt quiet, even though George only existed in one tiny part of it right now. 

He is in the kitchen when George finally shuffles in, the coolness of the tiled floor unfamiliar under his socked feet. He is looking at his phone, or something , and his head is down, light brown curls falling into his eyes.

“Hi,” George says, suddenly overcome with nerves after sleeping a full twelve hours. He doesn’t know why he’s so nervous. He’s known him since they were teens but connecting Dream’s face to his voice is still disconcerting. He’s here and he’s real but George feels somehow meek.

He looks up from his phone, immediately beaming. He still has a pretty smile. One of those ones that make you smile, and then everyone is smiling. He has straight teeth too. It’s a bonus, George thinks. “Hi.” He’s awkward too, but it’s endearing. Neither of them know how to approach this new situation. It’s tentative. “How’d you sleep?”

His voice is still slightly alarming, because for years he’s only heard it over call, and phone calls are never clear enough. But Dream’s voice is clear and rich and he’s in the kitchen while George is in the kitchen. “Good,” he mumbles out, perching on a stool against the countertop. Metal burns something ice-cold into his thigh. “Bed’s comfy.”

He’s smiling again, puts his phone onto the worktop and it feels like he’s admiring him. George burns under his crystalline gaze. He’s on fire, but hopes it never gets put out.   “Good. I forked out for a nice mattress for you.” 

George is smiling, something about the way that Dream is here and he’s on the other side of the room instead of the other side of the world, and his voice is clear and real and George has missed him so much.

Suddenly, with a haste he’s never felt before, he’s moving across the kitchen and they’re hugging, George’s ear pressed tight against Dream’s heartbeat and oh, he’s real, he’s real, he’s real. His mouth shapes words that only he knows the meaning of but he doesn’t say them. He doesn’t know why. There are a lot of things he doesn’t know.

“I’m glad you’re here,” Dream says, and his voice vibrates through his chest. The domesticity of the moment nearly makes him cry. He’s been searching for whatever the feeling of ultimate fulfilment feels like, and he thinks he might be nearly there. Nearly there.

They break away. “How’s the shoulder?” George nods vaguely in Dream’s direction. 

“It’s… better,” the other says, moving his arm and shoulder to demonstrate. He looks down at George. He sort of loves the way Dream makes him feel observed and exposed, like he’s akin to a painting in an exhibit with the curtain and the barrier to dissuade prying eyes and wandering hands. Dream’s eyes burn flames into his skin, but he’s somehow cold. “How’s the mosquito bite?”

George had almost forgotten that he was bitten by a mosquito last night when they were tipsy around the campfire in Dream and Sapnap’s garden. He’d been watching Dream and Sapnap argue over who had built the fire correctly, and then there was a sharp sting on his thigh that had diverted his attention. The sharpness of the bite drew water to his eyes. He’d blinked it away. It was just a mosquito bite after all. There was nothing more to it, and something inherently infuriating about Florida.

“S’not as bad as last night,” he shrugs, pulling the bottom of his shorts up to expose the small red mark on his leg. He meets Dream’s gaze with a simmering stare he didn’t know he had inside him. “I’m gonna have to get used to this.”

Dream swallows. He has a weird expression on his face that George can’t decipher. George nearly doesn’t catch it, but he knows Dream too well. He knows the cadence, the sound of his voice when he’s angry, stressed, anxious. Somehow it translates to the look in his eyes, and George is surprised that it’s something he’s noticed. He’s always been uncomfortably observant, though. “Yeah.” His eyes dart around a bit, unsure. “You want breakfast or something?”

*

They get drunk again that night. Sapnap buys a metric ton, or near enough, of beer from the liquor store down the road. They light the bonfire again, collect timber and logs for the pile and light it with some matches Sapnap found in his room. George laughs as Sapnap and Dream argue over who’s building the bonfire correctly again. George loves how amateur everything feels. It feels like they’re just starting out, everything so warm, tentative like scattered touches over cold skin, but so perfect. And his face feels warm, like someone’s pressing gloved hands to his cheeks after a snow day. It checks out.

They locate these dusty old camping chairs in the garage. Sapnap says they were from the old owners, but they use them anyway, after blowing the dust off first. They all sit in a little circle, the fire tingeing their legs with gold and orange and amber and pink. It tinges on everyone’s faces too, and George can’t stop looking at Dream. He doesn’t know why. Sapnap’s telling some stupid story about when he first moved in, his mouth moving quickly as he speaks but George can’t hear him. Dream’s smiling, watching Sapnap speak, eyes crinkling and glowing from the light of the campfire. His cheek is alight with fire, golden sparks jumping over the shadows on his face and George thinks it’s almost too perfect to be true, but-

“...George?” 

Sapnap’s speaking to him. 

“Hm?” 

They both laugh. “Those shoes I bought the other month. You sent me about twenty messages asking me to get a refund after you saw me wearing them,” Sapnap says.

“Oh yeah,” George says with haste, as if the words on his tongue are escaping his mouth and he must catch up with them. “Hideous shoes. It changed how I viewed you, Sapnap. I’ll never forgive you.”

Dream laughs at him, and it makes his cheeks warm again, like he’s finally fulfilled something. He feels like his chest should be sagging in relief. He’s always thrived off validation. “You’ve always been mean, George.” He’s joking. Dream’s eyes twinkle with something he’s never seen in an iris before, and it feels like their own secret code. It feels like they’re infinite.

*

“Are you still awake?” Dream’s voice is tinny through his headphones. It’s 6 am in the UK, and George should probably be asleep by now as he’s got to be up early tomorrow to start editing. But something is calming about laying in bed with Dream’s voice in his ears. 

“Yeah,” George says softly. “Tired though.”

Dream laughs, the fond one that makes the hair on George’s arms stand on end. “Go to sleep, idiot.” 

George wants to. He really does. “I like talking to you.”

“I like talking to you too. I think…” He can hear him sigh into the mic. He imagines what Dream looks like right now. He wonders if he’s lounging in his chair, or if he’s sitting upright. He wonders what Dream looks like when he smiles. “I think when you’re here with me in Florida, I’ll end up standing in your room all the time, incredulous that you actually exist.”

George knows he’s going red, but Dream can’t see because they’re on call. He’s almost relieved because he knows he would get teased within an inch of his puny little life. “Really?” He questions with an exhale that takes everything out of him; his heart, his soul, and everything in between.

* 

It’s 4 am and George is still awake. His room is starting to take shape now. He’s unpacked most of his belongings except for a few things that he has no idea about the potential location of. He’s at his computer, editing a video that is expected to go up in a few days, but at the rate of his editing so far, it’s looking unlikely. The brightness of the screen feels like it might burn a hole into his brain and the room is too dark. George is starting to feel like he should maybe just go to sleep. God, there’s nothing in his life that he detests more than editing. Or maybe he’s exaggerating. He does hate editing, though. 

There’s a soft knock at his door before George can think any more about finishing the video. A knock that doesn’t ask too much of him, doesn’t request his presence. Just simply asks of his existence.

He turns in his chair, and slides his headphones away from his head until they fall to his neck, cold against hot skin. “Yeah?” 

When the door opens, Dream is standing at the entrance of his room, ringed fingers bracing the frame. He’s so big, in his room like this. Not just with his build and his stature and the broadness of his shoulders. But the way he fills any space with something more than words and meanings. It almost makes George feel dizzy.

“I knew you’d be awake,” he says. He absently raps against the frame with a ringed finger. It makes a metallic sound against the wall, hollow. “Idiot,” he adds with a smile chasing his lips. It looks good on him. 

George fights his cheeks from reddening. He feels like that’s all he does lately. “I’m editing. You should be proud.”

Dream’s eyebrows raise in surprise. It’s almost a bit humiliating, that the simple act of George editing his own YouTube videos elicits such a reaction from the latter. “Wow. Should we throw you a party?” Sarcasm drips from every word, but George knows he’s messing around. 

He’s wearing a nice jumper, actually. Pine green, and crocheted. His hair’s messy too, all light brown curls that spring across his forehead. Sleep pulls at his eyes. George wonders how long he’s been awake, or whether he’s pulling an all-nighter. 

“Cunt,” George says.

“How far through the video are you?” Dream asks, ignoring George’s flowery language. He should be used to it by now, anyway. They’ve been friends for seven years. He comes into the room and leans over George’s desk to stare at his computer screen. His aftershave wafts over them both in ripples of vanilla, sandalwood, pine. George feels jittery.

“I’m nearly done,” George defends. Looks up at him through dark eyelashes as Dream stands back upright. “You can stop judging me now, yeah?”

Eyebrows furrowed together, Dream feigns shock. “I would never.” 

George hums, and spins around a bit in his office chair. Dream had really forked out for him. The room reeks of expensive technology, and even the office chair he sits in feels expensive and plush to the touch. He hasn’t had a bad back since he got here, and back home this was a regular occurrence. Something strange flutters inside his veins when he thinks about Dream sitting in front of his computer, ordering all this fancy technology for George, splashing the heaps of money he has on someone he’d never even met in person before.

“Where’s Patches?” He asks, a childish intonation to his voice. He’s always loved cats.

“Probably asleep in my room,” Dream muses. George loves the way Dream looks when he talks about Patches. He’s always had a way of speaking whenever she’s around. “She does love me best, even though Sapnap claims it’s him.”

George shrugs, a facade of disinterest playing on his features. “ I’ll be her favourite soon.” 

Dream laughs down at him. “We’ll see.” The jittering doesn’t stop. George’s brain feels alive and beats like a heart with something more than happiness, contentment, equanimity. “You wanna come find her?” He asks, his voice soft and gentle, dripping in manuka honey and promises he’d never break.

George’s heart thuds in his chest. He nods, stands up fully from his desk chair so he’s at eye level with Dream’s chest. Jitters again, floods his mind with a thick, rich static. He can’t explain it.

Dream’s room is cold. The window is open, and Patches sleeps on the bed, curled up like one of those little pastries in a bakery shop window. She’s solitary. “There she is,” Dream says from the doorway, gesturing vaguely at her. “Told you she likes me best.” He grins as he says this, leans against his door frame as George tentatively steps into the room to greet her.

He sits on the edge of the bed gingerly, and reaches a hand out to pet her. She makes a small noise of interest as George begins to stroke her, his hand gentle on her brown and auburn fur. There’s something intrinsically domestic about this, and George almost feels lightheaded as Dream watches them interact from the doorway. He doesn’t look up to see his expression, but he knows he’s watching with some kind of expression that George wouldn’t be able to dissect even if he tried.

“Can I hold her?” George asks.

There’s a beat. “Yeah,” the latter breathes. 

She meows in mild indignation as George picks her up, but she begins purring as soon as she’s on his lap. It’s not even that it’s Patches, but it’s Dream. Hell, it’s Clay. She’s his whole world and she smells like his aftershave and his essence and his laundry detergent and his shampoo all mixed into one. He leans his face down, kisses the top of her head between her ears. It’s her, and it’s him, it’s him, it’s him.

He looks up at Dream. He’s staring with something urgent waiting in his eyes, the tiniest quirk of the corner of his mouth evident from where George is sitting. 

“What?” George asks in barely a whisper. He’s being observed again, and he feels so tiny within the depth of Dream’s view. 

“Just…you and her.” He swallows, with the intent of saying something more, but doesn’t. You and her. George tastes the words on his tongue, wishes he could repeat them but doesn’t. He doesn't know what he’s scared of.

“What about us?”

Shrugs. “I don’t know,” he whispers. “I can’t explain it.”

Dream’s room is cold but the air is suddenly thick, dark treacle, like there’s a heat haze in this very room. The hairs on his arms stand on end, and he doesn’t know whether it’s because Patches’ fur keeps tickling against his skin, or whether it’s because– 

“I’m happy, Dream,” he says absently, scratching her head again. “I’m happy being here.” With you, he imagines himself saying. He wishes he could say something like that. He meets Dream’s eyes with something that feels like finality, something that feels like an unspoken confession. 

From the doorway, he smiles. There’s something in his eyes, something poignant and hopeful that George wants to stare at and stare at and stare at. Dream looks like he wants to say something, like the words are seconds from spilling out of his mouth. 

But, instead: “Y’know, I can finish editing your video for you.” He pushes himself upright from where he was previously leaning up against the doorframe. “You look tired.” He walks into the room, towards the bed. Sits down on the edge of it, right next to George, right next to Patches. Their knees are mere feet from knocking into each other.

George’s heart aches with adoration. He feels like if he were a cartoon, he’d have big heart-shaped eyes and a wobbly mouth. He realises. God, Dream is his absolute favourite person in the entire world. “It’s okay,” he hums. “Jetlag is kicking my arse. I should probably stay awake until I’m all caught up with Florida time –”

“Go to sleep,” Dream says without hesitation. “I’ll do it for you.”

“But…” he tries. “You need to sleep too.”

In a second that stretches out almost to eternity, Dream reaches out a hand towards George’s lap where Patches has begun to slip into sleep, her purring being the predominant sound in the room. Dream then strokes her head absently, and George freezes like he’s been shot. They don’t talk for a few moments. George watches Dream’s hand like it’s a metronome, or the hand on a grandfather clock, while his own hand hangs limply against Patches’ fur. 

Dream doesn’t say anything for a while, just pets her, the fabric of his hoodie occasionally brushing against George’s thigh. It sends a pathetic shiver through his spine every time it happens. He wishes he had the guts to say something to him, let the treacle spill from his mouth, instead of just watching Dream’s furrowed brows, and his dark lashes. They’re long and pretty , a distinct contrast to his tall, broad build. 

“Please sleep, George,” he breathes. George looks down, and tears his eyes away from freckled features. Dream’s hand lingers on the gap between Patches’ fur and George’s leg. His thumb and first finger ghost against George’s leg like he wants to remember how it feels. How being close to George feels, after years of not even knowing. 

George wonders if Dream had ever thought about it. He can’t bring himself to think about what it means. George vibrates inside, and he doesn’t know why. 

The question bubbles into his throat and seeps into his mouth, thick behind his teeth. It’s the treacle again . “Can I sleep here?” He asks with a tentativeness he didn’t know he possessed in his brain, squiggly with thoughts and emotions he shouldn’t be having. Like TV static. 

Dream looks right at him. “In my room?”

George feels like an idiot for asking. He imagines Dream laughing at him, saying no, you idiot. But Dream would never say that. “Yeah,” he croaks. And then, trying to justify himself: “Just don’t want to wake her up.” He nods his head down to Patches, who is so deeply asleep that he’s mildly concerned she might be dead.

“Of course, you can,” he says in a soft, gentle voice - the voice he’s always used for Patches when she does something cute. George’s heart does somersaults underneath his sweater. He plays out a conversation in his head and pretends that there’s an eternity where his questions get answered, where he doesn’t have to plague himself with the possibility that he might be–

Have you ever thought about it?

About what?

You know what, Dream.

He falls asleep on his side on Dream’s bed, curled up, legs bent. Patches is in the crook of his arm. He watches Dream leave the room to get George’s hard drive, watches him sit down and patiently edit George’s video, watches the back of his head, looks at the tufts of light brown hair that fall out of his beanie. He just watches, slow blinks , completely and utterly in awe that Dream is real, and here, right now . He’s not in his ear, a muffled voice at the end of a phone call. It’s almost pathetic. And then, as if hypnotised, he falls asleep.

*

“He’s alive,” Sapnap announces the second George steps into the kitchen, hair mussed and sleepy-eyed. He stands at the kitchen worktop, stirring something in a frying pan. He’s got a weird look in his eye, George notices. He looks somewhat curious, like there’s a question on his tongue that will probably go unanswered for now. Maybe it’s too soon. 

“Mhm,” George mumbles. He’s got a severe case of cotton mouth. “What are you making?” He peers over Sapnap’s shoulder. He’s not too sure what’s in the pan, but Sapnap has always been worryingly bad at cooking. 

“It’s an omelette, you fucking idiot,” Sapnap says, rolling his eyes. “I’m trying something new and I’d appreciate no judgement at all.”

George raises his hands in defence, and shrugs. “Doesn’t look like a fucking omelette.”

“That’s what I said.” Dream ambles into the kitchen from the living room like some stupid big, broad-shouldered git. He’s armed with a blanket, a cushion and a grey hoodie. God, there are so many things George could say about how Dream looks and sounds when he’s just woken up. He feels like he should say them, so they exist in some time and space. But he’s not an idiot. So he doesn’t.

Did he…?

Sapnap gives him another curious look.

“Did you sleep on the sofa?” George asks tentatively. Like if he says it too quickly or loudly then Dream’s face will screw up with anger and laugh in his face for even daring to suggest something like that. 

Dream pauses, and looks at them both as if they’re conspiring against him. “Yeah, you were tired. Like, knocked out,” he says, throwing his blanket, cushion and hoodie onto the worktop. “Wasn’t gonna disturb you and Patches.” And oh God, he means everything in the entire world to George.

“You could’ve just–”

Dream waves a hand in the air, smiles tightly at him. “It’s fine, George. The sofa is comfortable, anyway.” He brushes past them both, the smell of the laundry detergent on his clothes catching under George’s nose. His breath nearly hitches in his throat like a virus. “Anyway, I’m gonna go take a shower.” 

He strolls off towards the bathroom. 

Sapnap frowns at him immediately as soon as Dream is out of earshot. “You slept in his bed?” 

George goes red. “Listen–”

“George.” Sapnap’s voice is tinted with some sort of concern, and George immediately panics. 

“He edited my video for me because I’m jetlagged, so I just, like, watched him work,” George explains. “And then I fell asleep.” He shrugs like it’s nothing, as if his heart doesn’t start beating ten times faster in his chest whenever Dream is around, or whenever the smallest molecule of his being touches George’s skin. 

“You two are on some weird shit,” Sapnap says, now seemingly less concerned and more mildly irritated. “Anyways, you want this omelette?”

George takes one glance at the finished ‘omelette’ and makes a face. “No, thanks.” Sapnap’s never going to be a chef. 

*

The hard drive is on the desk in his bedroom when he enters. There’s a little post-it note on it, too.

“You’re welcome, Georgie :)” it says.

And George knows that there is no way in hell that the post-it note is ever going to leave this room. He brushes a finger over the handwriting, feels the debossed indent where Dream was inevitably pressing too hard with the pen. Like he always does. He sticks the post-it note to his monitor, and probably stares at it for too long before he finally decides to actually move. 

George can hear that the shower in Dream’s room has just been turned off moments before he knocks on the door. Good timing, George thinks. Because the last thing he would want to see is his damp, disgruntled, half-shampooed best friend, right?

He knocks on the door. He wonders why his heart is pounding so much when he’s only going to thank Dream for editing the video, but after the looks Sapnap gave them and the brief but needed pep-talk, he feels like there’s something…different. Maybe he’s wrong, but there’s just something in the air. 

“Two secs,” Dream calls from inside his room, but when he finally opens the door after minutes of George standing around, he’s wearing only a towel, and his hair is wet. Water drips into his eyes. God. 

“What’s up?” 

“Just wanted to thank you for editing my video,” George smiles up at him. “Meant a lot to me.”

Dream beams at him, and he’s the epitome of sunshine. His entire essence is just the sun, sky, endless horizons, and the feeling of ultimate fulfilment. “Anytime.”

“You’ll never guess what Sapnap just said to me.”

Dream laughs, rolls his eyes. He leans against the door and shakes his hair to dry it a little bit. A few drops land on George’s skin. It almost burns. “I’m a stupid idiot who can’t make an omelette?”

“He said, and I quote: ‘you two are on some weird shit.’’

George swears he catches Dream freeze a little bit, catches his smile drop, for a millisecond - like he’s been caught in the act. But maybe George is just seeing what he wants to see. “Well,” Dream says. He stutters. “He’s not wrong.” He meets George’s gaze with something that tastes like the spaces in between unspoken words. And George wants to clarify, wants to say something else. He wants to ask him. He really does. 

Have you ever thought about it, Dream? Y’know, with all the jokes and stuff. I always thought they were just jokes, Dream. 

But the moment passes as soon as it starts, and Dream is already talking about something else. “I was thinking we could go for a drive.” 

George hums. “When? Now?”

“Tonight,” he replies, and then he disappears into his bathroom for a few seconds to, presumably, put on some clothes instead of standing in front of George half-naked. He emerges wearing a dark jumper and light-blue jeans. “Might be therapeutic. I dunno.”

George swallows a lump in his throat. “Yeah.” He doesn’t know what to do with his hands when Dream looks at him. “Cool. I’ll go tell Sapnap.” He turns to leave.

Dream pauses in the doorway. “Uh.” He holds out a hand, somewhat desperately. “Don’t tell him.”

“No?”

“I thought it could be something we do…just us.”

George thinks his face might be as red as a tomato by now. “Okay,” he says shyly, hoping that Dream can’t see how pink he is. He’s embarrassed. 

Have you ever thought about it?

What do you mean?

When they ask….when we’re live and they ask. And we brush it off because it’s funny, right? And we play it up for the camera so much that I start to believe in it myself. I’m worried it might become nothing and I don’t want us to become obsolete, Dream–

Oh. 

Oh. 

It’s not him. It’s his brain that does the math, and his heart comes to the realisation of what’s been plaguing him.

“I’m sure Sapnap will busy himself with something. Like ringing Karl.”

He probably should have laughed, but George doesn’t say anything, just smiles while trembling under the weight of his heart. It’s too big for him to carry on his own, and he thinks it might be getting heavier.

*

Dream texts him at eleven that night, while he’s deciding on an outfit. 

u ready to go? :)

nearly bb, he replies. deciding on outfit

Dream texts back almost instantaneously . make sure u wear smth pretty 

His face burns with something he hasn’t ever felt before. The urge to speak and word vomit and overdo it until everyone is sick of him. The urge to say that he’s starting to believe it himself. The fact that he’s always had this feeling in his head that something was off when they joked around while live. The idea that this could be his life now. An existence of waiting around for something to happen, shared looks and touches only ever just ghosting across the skin. Never getting close enough, never closing the gap. Never unblurring the line, forever living in the TV static. No black and white, no facts. Always having treacle clawing at the back of his throat. He doesn’t think he can bear it.

Have you ever thought about it, Dream?

George wishes the words he wants to say would stop playing in his head like a stuck record. Maybe it’s his guilty conscience talking, like the asshole that it is. 

He puts on his nicest pair of shorts because it’s goddamn Florida, and a white shirt which is slightly too oversized for his frame. It dwarfs him, but most of his clothes do.  

“You took forever,” Dream says, leaning up against the back of Sapnap’s car. He’s now wearing a sports team top over the top of a grey hoodie. “You look good though. Makes up for it.” He looks him up and down. George is convinced he is going to go insane. 

“Shut up.” He gets into the car before Dream can even think about commenting on how pink his cheeks are. He doesn’t want to think, doesn’t want to know. 

They drive for a little while in comfortable silence. George sits with his legs bent, pressed up against his chest. He leans his head against the window, watches Dream drive as if he’s never seen anybody drive a car before. He looks at his hands, looks at his ringed fingers. Dream has nice hands, long, with a few prominent veins. 

“This car is quiet,” George muses. He notices he keeps looking at Dream as if to gauge his reaction to every little thing he says. He doesn’t know why he does it. No, he does . He’s known Dream for seven years - seven years of just his voice in his ear, a floating voice with no body to connect it with. He can’t help but stare, as if Dream will be taken away from him and he’ll have to memorise every little detail of him. As if this won’t last. The guilt claws up in his throat again, a virus he can never truly cure. 

“It’s electric, George,” Dream says softly, his voice all soft and warm again. George wants to live there forever. In the safety of Dream’s voice when he speaks to him. 

“Mhm,” George says. “Do you drive Sapnap’s car a lot?”

“Oh yeah.” Dream looks at him for a second before focusing back on the road. The streetlights on the side of the road blur together like fairy lights, how fireworks look with your eyes unfocused. “It goes really fast.” Something dangerous glints in his eyes. 

“How fast?”

“Nought to sixty in…like, 3.7 seconds I think–” 

George’s mouth drops. “Dream, we can’t–

“Should I do it?” He laughs, the laugh George knows like the back of his hand. The laugh Dream always did before he’d send him some stupid meme to make him laugh when he’d be streaming. The laugh he’d do before he’d intentionally kill George in a video game just to piss him off, wind him up. “Should I floor the gas?”

“No!” George argues. “There’s, like, a forty-mile limit here.” 

Dream laughs again. “You’re such an idiot.” And he probably shouldn't be thinking of this right now, but God, he’s missed him saying that. 

And before George can defend himself or convince Dream that it’s a bad idea, he slams his foot into the gas. 

The car shoots off before George can even catch his breath, and George feels himself being catapulted backwards into his own seat, all the organs in his body lurching at the same time. Instinctively, he grips the handle at the top of the car, heart rate rising exponentially. “Dream, what the fuck?” The car gets faster, the latter’s eyes calmly focused on the road. If he wasn’t so worried for his life, he’d probably find it attractive. Maybe .

Dream laughs again when he looks over at him, something twinkling in his eyes. “You’re acting like my mom when I drive her around.”

“You floor the accelerator with your mum in the car?” He’s almost horrified. No wonder his mother is always so concerned about him. 

Dream won’t stop laughing at him now. He almost sounds insane. “You’re so British, George. I can’t bear it,” he’s saying.

“Can you slow down?” George looks behind him, half expecting to see blue lights in the back window. He wouldn’t be surprised if there were.

With an eye-roll and a shrug, Dream releases his foot from the gas. “Boring,” he says, but looks over at George momentarily with a grin. Maybe George likes the reassurance. 

“Where are we even going?”

Dream shrugs his shoulders. “I just like driving around. Do you?” And then he reaches over and pokes one of George’s bare knees with his free hand. He must know what he’s doing. 

“I like driving around, yeah,” George replies. With you, he thinks and pretends he’s said it. Pretends that Dream smiles at him and validates what he’s been feeling for the past few weeks. Pretends Dream is the one who brings it up, instead of just looking pained whenever someone hints at its existence. 

They sit in silence for a while, until George almost jumps out of his seat, pressing a finger against the window. “Pull over.”

“What?”

“Pull over!” He says excitedly.

With a frown adorning his features, Dream pulls over to the side of the road and stops the car with a huff. “You’re so stupid. What are you talking about?” 

“I want to take a picture of the moon,” George says defiantly, and promptly gets out of the car. 

The moon casts a glow on him as he stands on the side of the road. It feels somehow poignant, but he’s not sure how. It stares down at him, pale and safe and enveloped in gold and orange. It’s two hundred and forty thousand miles away, but he’s never felt as close to it as he does now. He finds his phone in his pocket and takes a few photos. The cars passing hum around him. White noise .

The moon is alone too. Suspended in time and space, hundreds of thousands of miles away from any company. He wonders what it’s like to be that perpetually lonely, aching for some kind of explanation. He thinks she looks pretty tonight. He hopes she likes the pictures. 

He hears Dream get out of the car behind him, shutting the door with a resounding thud. His shoes crunch against the mixture of asphalt and dirt. 

“What are you doing?” Dream comes up behind him, and his hand ghosts against George’s hip as he moves to stand next to him. It’s his greeting . His brain short-circuits. For God’s sake. “Staring at the moon like a psychopath?”

“I’m…” George starts, and falters. Okay, maybe his brain has actually broken. “I literally just told you I was taking a picture of the moon.”

“Looks like you’re horny for the moon.”

“I hate you.” He smiles up at him. He’s shrouded in light and shadow, his eyes reflecting the glow from the moon. He looks handsome, and George swallows a sudden apparent lump in his throat. 

“No, you don’t.” Dream looks at him, observes him. He does it a lot. Watches George, as if he has to memorise every intricacy of his being. As if George will suddenly not be there anymore and all he’ll have left is a memory.

“No, I don’t.”

Dream smiles. He’s got George wrapped around his pinkie finger and he knows it. “Knew it.” He ruffles George’s dark hair with a stupid grin on his face. And George finally gets it. It suddenly slots into his brain like the puzzle piece he’s been missing for days. 

Retrospectively, it all makes sense. Dream doesn’t talk about things to him because his love language is touch. He doesn’t need to use words because touch is his utmost importance. Whereas George thrives from words, explanations, feelings, and confessions of love and guilt. They’re the opposite of each other. While Dream is the sun, shrouded in gold and light, George is the moon, an orb of existentialism and blue-tinted luminosity. 

“Dream?”

“Mhm?”

George scuffs his feet against the ground. Thinks of the words. “You know you can talk to me right? About anything.” 

In confusion, Dream looks at him, blue and silver radiance spilling over his features. The moon is their catalyst tonight. “What do you mean?”

“I just wanted you to know that you can.”

Dream looks almost a bit pained, eyebrows furrowed and the side of his mouth quirked down. George somewhat regrets saying it, knowing that he’s thrown himself into the deep end of the pool now. He can’t go back, because Dream must know what he means. A blanket of darkness wraps itself around George. A stormy sea of thoughts and emotions and guilt and the inability to talk. 

“Thank you, George.” He says it like he’s grateful, but his eyes stop twinkling under the moonlight. George wills his knees to buckle, for thorns to adorn the soles of his feet so he has a reason to fall to the ground. 

“Sorry,” George says hastily, noticing Dream’s obvious discomfort. “I just always wonder what’s going on in your head.”

With a glimmer of doubt clouding his features, Dream looks at him with a strange expression. It’s hard to read Dream, George has noticed. He often covers himself up, all stoic and perfect and aloof, which makes it hard to get in. To wriggle into the cracks of everything that makes up Dream. That makes up Clay. “No, you’re…” He starts, and falters. “It’s okay.”

Painfully, George looks down at his feet. The dust from the roadside has marked up his shoes. He should probably have found a metaphor there, but his mind rings blank. He’s in the TV static again, his boundless void of nothingness that detains his thoughts. He says nothing.

“There’s just a lot of things,” Dream continues. He doesn’t look at him when he says this, just watches the moon. Eyes flickering in recognition. “Things I can’t say.”

“Why?” he asks with empty curiosity. He feels like his soul has been choked up and spat all over the side of the road. Ribbons of blue and coral and ochre.

“Because I’m all kinds of fucked up.”

With an exhale, George’s lip trembles. “You’re really not.”

“I am,” Dream says, adam’s apple bobbing in his jugular as he cranes his head to look for the stars, hidden behind a cacophony of clouds. “You would hate me.”

George blows out an incredulous laugh, because honestly, it’s funny. There’s nothing Dream could do that would ever induce feelings of hatred. He’s the goddamn sun after all. “I could never hate you,” he says with a sincerity that almost makes his throat close up. Guilt flings herself repeatedly against the growing virus that’s his heart. 

“Belief is a strange thing, don’t you think?”

“How?” George unfolds his arms, and looks up at his best friend with something that he wishes he could explain.

“Y’know, when it suddenly all feels real.”

The wind brushes past them, a greeting and a farewell before she’s running her hands through their hair and whistling in their ears. “I know what you mean.”

“Really?”

“Yeah,” he says with a breathlessness that almost sucks his entire being out of him. “For ages, I thought I was missing something. Not seeing something. But now I see it.`` 

“You see it?” Dream asks.

“Yeah,” and when George says it he meets Dream’s gaze with some sort of finality, the concertmaster’s violin solo. The final movement at the end of the symphony. “I see it now.”

Have you ever thought about it, Dream?

The Dream inside his brain answers back this time.

Sometimes.

*

When they get back home, Sapnap is none the wiser. They could’ve taken his ninety-thousand-dollar Tesla to be crushed in a junkyard and he would still be out cold in his bedroom by the time they got back. It’s endearing, really.

They both hover in the kitchen, on opposite sides of the too-large granite kitchen island that Dream and Sapnap must have really forked out for. It’s a nice kitchen, don’t get him wrong, but George can’t help but wonder why it’s so big when only three of them live there. 

“It’s so late,” George says into the silence, into the echo that wraps itself around him like a blanket of cold. “I think I’m going to go to sleep.”

Dream looks mildly alarmed when George says this, straightening up from where he was leaning against the worktop, phone loosening in his grip. “Oh. I thought… maybe we could sit out in the yard for a bit.”

“The yard? It’s like two in the morning,” George says, staring out of the window towards the darkness of the Florida nights. He can’t see anything. Just the reflection of the kitchen and then nothing for miles and miles.

“So?” Dream shrugs his shoulders. “Time is but a construct.” But Dream has this impossible ability to turn anything in his favour with a glimmer in his eyes and the quirk of his mouth. He’s impossible to deny, and George thinks that even if Dream had come up with the idea of going on a killing spree, he’d definitely be up for it. Well, that might be a bit far, but the sentiment still stands.

So: “Fine.”

They sit out on the grass, limbs bare as the wind gushes past them. It’s dark, but George can see the outline of Dream’s face, the part of his beanie where his hair springs out from underneath. The shadow below his eyes and the gleam within his iris. 

“The moon is gone,” George says absently to nobody in particular, craning his neck up to search for it. “It looked really pretty tonight.”

“Mhm,” Dream says, leaning back on his hands, legs stretched out on the grass. Cranes his head back, neckline strong and masculine. “Don’t you find it funny that we see the same sky now?”

George looks down at him. They’re opposite each other, and their shoes are nearly touching. He fixates on it for a few seconds. “We’ve always seen the same sky,” he laughs.

“Yeah, but now we’re seeing it in the same place in space and time.”

George thinks about when Dream used to call him at four in the morning. “Look at the moon, George,” he’d say, voice soft and enveloped in honey. They’d stare at the same moon in the sky for minutes on end, pretending that they were sitting underneath it. They’d just exist on the phone together, on the same plane of earth, under the same sky. But hundreds of miles apart.

“I’m happy.” George shifts, and lies down on the grass. It’s cold against his neck and arms and legs, tickling his skin. But not in a way that bothers him. He exhales, the one-thousand thoughts spinning around in his head finally dispersing. His eyes flutter shut.

“I’m glad,” Dream says simply, a smile in his voice that has George fighting the urge to crack an eye open. 

“What you said earlier…” George adds tentatively. “About belief. It resonated with me.” He opens his eyes, finally. 

“How come?”

“I don’t know, I just…” He sighs, looks at the stars. Imagines them as one entity, imagines them as millions of entities. “Everything hasn’t felt real lately. Like I’m in a dream or something.”

Dream shuffles around from where he was sitting opposite George. In a single movement, he lays down beside him, and George freezes a little inside. 

“...But everything feels so real now. I feel like I believe it myself.”

Dream doesn’t say anything, and George feels like he can hear his brain whirring, the cogs turning. Slowly, but surely. George turns his head to look at him. Looks at the slope of his nose, his neck, his jaw. The curls escaping from his beanie. 

And George thinks he’s had feelings for him for years, before they even knew they were best friends. The early morning phone calls where they’d both be so horribly sleep-deprived that they didn’t make any sense. He knew then, but his brain wouldn’t let him in on it. 

He knew he had feelings for him when he’d talk to him in the same voice he’d use to talk to Patches. The soft voice, like syrup and honey and cinnamon and cherry lip gloss. He knew then, but he didn’t want to know. Didn’t want to let himself believe that he was becoming enamoured by a friend. By his best friend. 

He looks down at their hands. Dream’s looks painfully empty, beside him on the grass. They look like they should fit together, like a jigsaw puzzle that’s been unfinished for too long on top of the dining room table. 

There’s no TV static when George’s pinkie finger ghosts against Dream’s. His mind is completely clear, sings rich and clear like birdsong, like the dawn chorus. It’s never felt this clear in his entire existence.

Real real real real real.

Dream hooks their pinkie fingers together in a single movement. His chest rises and falls like he had to think about it, like he had to exert himself to do it. 

They don’t talk about it, and George is somewhat glad. It feels nice, relieving, for him to not have to think up an explanation as to why he’s lying in the grass with his pinkie finger locked around his best friend’s.

“The, uh…the jokes everyone made about us…” Dream breathes, focus fixed on the sky. “We never talked about it.”

George exhales. “I know.” His brain feels broken, like there’s nothing more to expel in his lifetime. He’s given all that he can give.

“I just wanted you to know that it never felt like a joke to me, George.”

His heart catches in his throat, the last of a plaintive birdsong leaping from his chest as if it’s been trapped in there for years, stuck on a broken record. “What?”

“It was always real to me.” And then Dream’s sitting up, beanie askew in his curls. He looks down at him with an expression that George finally knows the meaning of. An expression he could write songs, poems, essays about. 

Air courses like wildfire from his lungs when he says it back. “It was always real to me too.” 

And then Dream leans down into his space, into his bubble. His hands press into the grass on either side of George. Until they’re dangerously close. Until George’s brain completely shuts down. There’s a beat of time where George realises multiple things. But before he can dwell on them and their meanings, Dream leans further into his space, a warm hand sliding up to his jaw, behind his ear. Their lips could almost ghost together if George moved a millimetre.

“I didn’t know how to tell you,” Dream says, and then he kisses him. Hand threaded between dark locks, Dream presses their lips together with the fervent and desperation of the world’s possible end. 

It’s seven years of longing when George kisses back. Seven years of thinking but not really knowing, days of realisation. And when Dream’s other hand slides to his neck, the last remaining pixels of the TV static disperse from his brain, making their long journey back to the London sky, where it all started. 

And his brain doesn’t even have to ask the question that it’s been asking for days, because the Dream in his brain that never used to answer him is standing right in front of him, saying: 

All the goddamn time, George.