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“Ten!” they all say in unison, the countdown beginning. There’s something magical in the way everyone ushers out the old year and brings in the new—the same element he was missing so terribly last year. They’re all here, now. Everyone important to him in his new life—Sapnap, Karl, Quackity, Tina, Punz, Hannah, Sylvee, and most importantly, Dream.
“Nine!” The living room is popping, the ball drop playing soundlessly on the television while Quackity pours champagne into their glasses, spilling liquid everywhere. He’s so dumb. George’s hand is sticky from the excess drops. He doesn’t even like champagne. He meets Dream’s eyes across the room of bodies and he looks away quickly.
“Eight!” Quackity tips the bottle all the way up as he pours the dregs into the last flute. George didn’t even know they owned champagne glasses here. There are still plenty of mysteries left to be solved. Like, is Dream as tired of this game as George is?
“Seven!” His friends scramble around him, inexpertly balancing their champagne with trying to writhe around like an adult version of musical chairs. Sylvee and Hannah end up pushing into him, causing George to shift to his left. One step closer to Dream, who’s already making his way towards George. He can’t breathe.
“Six!” George’s eyes watch Dream move, the way his shoulders brush past their friends, the way he lays a hand carefully against Tina’s back as he passes her to show he’s there. The physicality of Dream never ceases to astound George. For so many years of just his voice and his personality, every tick of movement from his best friend excites him. He wonders when that will stop. If it ever will.
“Five!” Dream ducks to avoid a shoe flying through the air. George can’t tell who threw it, eyes stuck on Dream’s form, but he suspects Sapnap from the way he’s laughing uproariously. Dream’s mouth quirks a half smile and cuts around a reprimand.
“Four!” George doesn’t know what to do with his hands—his flute is half-full and the bubbles rise quickly to the top of the glass because his hands can’t keep still. Dream’s getting closer and George can’t breathe. He hasn’t taken a breath in an eternity.
“Three!” He’s never been in this situation before. He doesn’t know how to—does he want…? Dream’s eyes find his and George feels trapped. He can’t control the expression he’s making; his heart pounds in his ears, louder than the chanting of his friends.
“Two!” Dream’s a step away, eyes still locked and the room could explode and George wouldn’t notice. His stomach comes alive with butterflies battling nerves.
“One! Happy New Year!” This is it. This is the moment. Dream’s standing right in front of him, eyes huge and full of a million different emotions George can’t name. George swallows back the knot of feelings caught in his throat. This moment feels inevitable, it feels infinite, it feels—
Dream pulls him into a hug, careful of the glass in his hand, and whispers into George’s ear, “Happy New Year, George. I’m so glad you’re here.” He leans back enough to stare down at George, like he’s trying to read him and George lets the confusion and disappointment fill him up. How dare he not—Why wouldn’t he—?
Tersely, George throws back his flute of champagne, letting the bubbles burn his throat instead of his despondency. He nods to Dream, returns the sentiment, and then watches as Dream drifts away to offer the same words to the others.
Sapnap shakes his shoulders, yelling something in his ears and George, for once, can’t reciprocate. He lets the champagne run to his head and downs Karl’s when he sets his glass down.
Here’s to 2023.
The next few days are the same on the outside. They eat meals together, they hang out on the couch with Patches, they hit each other with nerf guns, but George can’t stop thinking.
What happened? What went wrong? He thought they were getting somewhere between the lingering touches and the late night talks on Dream’s bed. He thought they were just waiting for the moment.
What moment could have been more right than that?
George keeps a loop going in his head of everything that could have gone wrong—maybe his breath smelled bad, maybe Dream didn’t want to taste the alcohol from earlier on his tongue, maybe his lips were too chapped, maybe he forgot to put on deodorant, maybe Dream hates him.
Maybe Dream considered starting something with George, who reshuffled his entire life to come live with Dream, and decided actually he doesn’t want him.
They’re watching television on the sofa on January 4th in the living room when Dream nudges his thigh with his toes. Normally, George would be lying on the other end of the couch, battling under the shared blanket for prime foot real estate. Today, he gave in without a fight. He doesn’t want to accidentally touch Dream, doesn’t want to chance scraping their skin together and have those delicious shivers erupt all over his body. He holds himself back from Dream as a punishment.
It’s a punishment for both of them.
Dream nudges him again and George sighs heavily.
“What’s wrong with you?” Dream asks, his eyes still on the screen. It’s a tactical move. He knows George does better without eyes staring at him. He hates and loves being so known.
“Nothing’s wrong with me,” George says. “Except maybe how bad you smell.”
“I don’t smell,” Dream says, softly and with the air of someone jumping through the hoop because he knows he can’t get around the red tape without it. George almost hates him in that moment.
“You do, though,” George says.
“Well, everyone smells when you think about it,” Dream says and George congratulates himself on successfully derailing the conversation. Dream will want to argue about this for the next hour.
He argues for fun, keeping up just enough of a rebuttal to hold Dream’s interest and then he retreats from the conversation and shuts himself in his room with Patches.
And maybe he watches two hours of TikToks alone in the dark in his room in order to not think about anything further. But that’s between himself and Patches.
She’s a terrific secret keeper.
The day after that George streams. He has no plans when he goes live, and he’s enjoying this new era of throwing himself out there and seeing what strikes his fancy. He indulges his audience and plays around on his hardcore world. He attempts to build a little house, running poll after poll for chat to help decide what it will look like.
They shouldn’t be any kind of designers, George decides, because the house comes out looking unsightly. But it’s their home, his and chat’s, and so he loves it for that.
“Why is it kind of good?” he asks chat, turning his head like a dog to take the whole thing in.
“Who lied to you and said this was good?” Dream’s voice speaks in his headphones and jump scares him. He didn’t notice him join the VC and now he’s mad about it.
He didn’t say Dream couldn’t join, there was no conversation saying he couldn’t. The general rules for the three of them are that unless specified, they’re always welcome on each other’s streams.
“It is good,” George says defensively. “You’re just jealous of my house.”
“Why would I be jealous?” Dream asks, a smirk in his voice that normally George would find insanely attractive, but now it’s just annoying him. “We have our real house together and the DNF gingerbread house, so…”
“We destroyed the DNF house,” George says and he’s a little happy that they did now, just so he can say that. At the time, he had to pretend he wasn’t upset. There’s nothing George loves more than objects that remind him of good times. He would have kept the DNF house in all its glory if it was up to him.
“We haven’t destroyed the one we’re sitting in yet,” Dream points out, all cock-sure. “So I think I’m still beating chat.”
“Whatever,” George says because letting Dream win a stupid argument on stream is less important than saying what he’s really thinking while live… he’d never recover. “Are you going to log in and help me or just sit there and be annoying?”
“I might just sit here and be annoying,” Dream says and George rolls his eyes. He does join though, and while George is still irritated with him, still feeling the sting of rejection, this is his best friend in the entire world.
With Dream’s help, they make another house and they’re careful to make it three times as big as chat’s house. It takes hours to complete. And, yes, it’s in green and blue colors that they took shamelessly from creative mode.
George isn’t worried about the integrity of the hard core world anyway.
Later that night when they log off, Dream comes to his office.
He knocks tentatively after he opens the door, the complete opposite of the convention. George makes himself not care. He can bring that up another time.
“Hey.” Dream hasn’t been in George’s office much. Other than his first stream after the allergic reaction, he hasn’t been back. He respects George’s space while encouraging everyone to come to his own office whenever they want.
“Hi,” George says back. He picks up his butterfly knife and spins it. He doesn’t mean it as a threat, but, well, maybe he does.
“Are you mad at me?” If he were a dog, his tail would be between his legs. It’s sad, watching him like this. George takes a deep breath and forces a smile across his face.
“Why would I be mad at you?”
Dream snorts. “If I knew that I wouldn’t be asking if you were mad at me, I’d be apologizing so that you wouldn’t be mad anymore.”
George can’t help the laugh that escapes him. “I’m not mad.”
“You are, though.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Dream,” George says, the irritation slipping out against his will.
“George,” Dream says, raising his eyebrows in challenge.
The thing about George is, he can’t resist a challenge. Not from Dream. Never from Dream. He rises to them, exceeds them, makes them his little bitch. Give him his crown. GG.
“Okay,” he says, spinning his chair to face his PC again. It’s very satisfying putting his back to Dream. “I’m mad at you. But it’s a dumb reason. So let me just get over it.”
“No way.” Dream grabs the chair and spins him back around to look at him. This has the effect of forcing George to be crotch level with him. When he looks up, it’s miles and miles between them. “Tell me what’s wrong, doesn’t matter how dumb it is. I want to fix it.”
“You can’t fix it,” George says because how can someone fix their feelings? They can’t. That’s what’s dumb here.
“Well, I certainly can’t fix it if you won’t tell me, you idiot.”
And here’s the thing about Dream: in conversations like this, he is always 100% earnest. It makes it really hard to maintain being mad at him when he wants to make it right so badly. This is truly the only time George has felt like he doesn’t want to tell him, if only because he’ll have to rehash the rejection.
“George, come on, “ Dream says, voice honeyed. He reaches out to grab George’s arm and touches down until he reaches his hand, which he then uses to drag George to stand. “Tell me what I did wrong.”
“You didn’t—” George says before he can stop himself. It’s a weird compulsion. Something about Dream attracts honesty in George, who would rather keep his secrets than share anything real.
“I didn’t what?” Dream asks, his green eyes are watery and in this light George can see every one of his eyelashes. The cat beanie is in place on his head, curls poking out the bottom, and George feels a wave of fondness take him over. This is the guy he’s worried about rejecting him? The cat beanie guy?
“At New Year’s,” George says, pushing down on that lump again. He should really get that checked out by a doctor. Now that he knows his own health insurance information, he could do it. He could go back to that Urgent Care and—the same Urgent Care where the doctor thought Dream was his boyfriend. Maybe not. Maybe a different one. Sapnap can drive.
“It’s been that long?” Dream asks. “Really? What didn’t I do on New Year’s?”
“You didn’t kiss me,” George says and then yanks his arm out of Dream’s grip. He can’t be here any longer. He makes for the door, eager to get out, escape, leave this situation entirely, and—
Dream catches him around the waist.
“George,” he says, a plea in his voice mixed with something else. “George, I didn’t—”
“It’s fine,” George grits out, trying to wiggle out of Dream’s strong arms. But it’s hard to do that when being in Dream’s arms is all he’s ever really wanted. “You don’t have to—”
“Can I do it now?” Dream asks, pulling a startled George back into his chest.
“Can you—what?”
Dream’s embrace is warm, warmer than this room can handle. He hasn’t set up his fan yet, and now George is starting to sweat between the heat and Dream’s warmth, and the anxiety wracking his body.
“Can I kiss you now?” he asks into George’s ear. He’s tentative, like he’s dealing with Patches after coming back from the vet.
“Do you want to?” George asks.
“Oh, George, I’ve always wanted to, what the fuck?” Dream says and George has his entire life flipped upside for the second time in under four months.
With Dream’s help, he turns in his arms and now he’s looking up and Dream’s looking down and—they’re nose to nose. “You did? You do?”
“Yeah, idiot.” Dream bumps George’s nose with his own, and it’s so cute George wants to keel over. “I’m like incredibly into you. Did you not pick up on that?”
“You are?”
“George!” Dream asks, mirth dancing in his eyes. He laughs lightly, but it doesn’t feel pointed; it feels like relief. “Say something else or I’m going to assume you don’t want me to—”
“Kiss me,” George demands, seriously. He uses his best tone, the one that has a 75% return rate for getting him what he wants from Dream. “Kiss me right now.”
“Okay, fine, I’ll kiss you,” Dream says around a laugh and then—
His lips are soft. They barely graze George’s like he’s scared that he’s going to drive George away, like any kind of pressure will wake him up and he’ll run off. To be fair, George can see why he’d think that. If he didn’t pick up from New Year’s he wanted Dream to kiss him, he probably has no idea that it’s more than that, that George has actual feelings for him.
It’s George that breaks away. “I’m into you, too, I guess.”
Dream laughs again, he can’t stop. George likes the sound, always has, he likes being the cause of it. He doesn’t mind. “Oh, you’re into me? Is that why you wanted me to kiss you on New Year’s and got mad when I didn’t?”
Oh, so he’s still an asshole. George punches Dream’s shoulder in retaliation and tries to squirm out of his hold, not hard enough to succeed, but enough to make his point. “Shut up.”
“No, no, George, I didn’t mean it.” Dream reaches down and kisses George again, stronger this time, like George’s words give him the courage to push for more. Dream’s tongue licks at his bottom lip, and George opens up. Heart pounding and blood pumping around harshly in his ears, George starts to feel lightheaded. Kissing Dream isn’t like anyone else he’s ever kissed.
Those other kisses were little league and this is the Super Bowl.
“Why didn’t you, though?” George asks when they come up for air. His chest rises and falls in time with Dream’s, both moving quicker than normal.
“Why didn’t I kiss you for the first time in front of all our friends at a cliched time when other people kiss, and it doesn’t always have meaning?” Dream asks and okay George hates when he has points, especially when he has points that supersede George’s points. “Because.”
“You’re sappy,” George says because he can fill out the rest. Dream wanted them to have their own moment, a private moment. They hadn’t talked about this, he couldn’t have known that his kiss would be reciprocated, and in front of their friends—that kind of rejection would be social suicide in front of the likes of Karl and Sapnap.
“Trust me when I say I always want to kiss you, and that was no exception.”
He proves it by reaching down to slot their mouths together again. George doesn’t think he’ll ever get over the rush, the way they fit together so naturally, the insane reaction his heart has to Dream’s touch. He hopes he never gets used to it.
“You’re my boyfriend now,” George tells him. Dream’s eyes widen in delight. He’s pleased. George pushes his luck. “And my boyfriend has to edit my videos. Those are the rules, sorry.”
“Are those my official titles now?” Dream says, joy living in the wrinkles around his eyes. “Boyfriend. Editor. Chef.”
“You forgot Bitch,” George says lovingly and with a kiss to punctuate the sentence.
“Shut up, George.”
He then proceeds to shut George up.