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Dream got the call at 11:15pm, when in a surprising show of a decent sleep schedule, he and George were already in bed.
“Dr’m.” George, half asleep with his head tucked against Dream’s chest, reached up to bat lightly at his arm. “Make it stop.”
“Can’t reach.” Dream just managed to wiggle far enough without fully disturbing George to reach where his phone was plugged in sitting on the floor. He, probably, should have checked the caller ID at least for security purposes, if not just to see if it was worth a middle of the night phone call, but right then his number one priority was making the loud, unruly vibrating stop.
“Hello?” he said, voice blurry with sleep, and George groaned dramatically, presumably at the realization that he wasn’t going to be able to fall asleep right away.
“Clay.” His sister’s voice seemed out of place, through Dream’s oversized cell phone. It had been ages since he’d heard her voice at all, mostly communicating by text these days. He’d been so busy, lately. He couldn’t even think of the last time that he spoke to someone in his family other than his mom. “Is now an okay time?”
“Clay,” George repeated, sounding in half disparaging and in half amused, like it wasn’t Dream’s legal name that he had been called for a good chunk of his life. Dream just rested his hand on the back of his neck, thumb brushing ever so slightly across the small strip of bareskin above the neckline of his t-shirt and making George shudder ever so slightly before looking up to smile at him.
“I mean, I guess it is?” Dream looked around the room, taking in his own shirt thrown on the floor and George curled up next to him in his bed. “What’s up?” Normally, he would have been more anxious over a middle of the night call from his sister, but she sounded casual. A little annoyed, if anything.
“What are you doing tomorrow?”
He shrugged. “Like, editing. Why?”
A few seconds of silence. “Can you do that somewhere other than at home?”
He frowned slightly. George sighed, the unspoken question of why is this happening hovering on his breath. “Like, I guess?”
“Julia’s sister is getting married on Friday.” Dream briefly tried to remember who the fuck Julia was before the image of his sister’s fiance flashed onto the surface of his eyes. “We fly out tomorrow, and our nanny just canceled on us. Can you watch Charlie?”
Charlie, being his nephew. Like, a year and a half or so; a cute kid from the pictures his mother sent him sometimes. Dream had met him once, when he was still tiny and did nothing but sleep and cry. He probably, like, was a little wild now. Probably put things in his mouth. Dream thought, momentarily, of all of the tiny, swallowable objects littering their home.
“Like, here?” he said, probably sounding a bit too disturbed by the idea. But, like, he’d had to stop George from hitting his head on the ping pong table recently. He himself was always tripping over the random shit they left everywhere. Their house was so, so ill suited to house a child.
“No, not there.” Dream knew his sister well enough still to imagine the face she was making, the way she was imagining what a house owned by three men in their twenties looked like. “You can watch him here. He’ll be happier and that will make it easier for you. Bring George or whatever; I don’t care. I just do not want to have to try to book another flight at the last minute.”
Dream half wanted to say no. He’d had experience taking care of kids, obviously. Younger siblings, younger cousins. He knew that George was the baby of his family, but his boyfriend was a smart guy, and sweet and fun enough that surely any kid would love him. But still…it had been a while. What if he, like, dropped Charlie? He was clumsy; it could happen. And surely there were, like, things you had to know about year old babies that he simply did not.
But his sister sounded so stressed, and Dream had never been one to leave the people he cared about out to dry. Besides, people, like, left kids with teenage girls who spent the entire time doing their algebra homework and texting their friends. Surely he and George – two adults with careers and a cat and Sapnap that they were responsible for keeping alive – could manage.
“I’ll ask George,” he said, and George strained to look up at him, curiosity filling the dark vaults of his eyes. “But okay.”
-
Dream spent the hour-long drive to his sister’s house the next day listening to George read aloud from parenting blogs after they realized that neither of them had any idea what a year and a half old kid actually did. The first indication of such was that they kept saying kid, when apparently what Charlie really was was a toddler.
“It says that he should be able to say some words,” George read as Dream drove, the soft sound of Dream’s Spotify on shuffle making up the white noise filling the space under George’s voice. “Oh ew.”
Dream looked over, and George looked a little nauseous. “What?” he said, unable to keep the warm vanilla care from seeping into the word enough for it to be running over.
“Do you think your sister told him that your name is Dream or Clay?” As always, George said Dream’s real name like he was doing something horribly wrong.
“Probably Clay,” Dream said. “But I doubt he would even know my name. He can probably just say stuff like – I don’t know. Mom, dad, like, apple juice. Stuff like that.”
“Apple juice,” George repeated, looking pleased, before returning to his article. “He should also be able to play with toys and, like, climb.” He sounded particularly aghast at that one, which Dream understood. All he could imagine was that clip Sapnap had shown him a few weeks earlier of his kittens scaling the wall of his streaming room.
“At least we’ll be able to play with him,” he said. “I remember my sister saying that he likes stuffed animals.”
George nodded approvingly. “It also says scribbling; is that, like, drawing?”
Dream just shrugged, and he merged into another lane.
Eventually, they finally turned down the right street, a weaving road surrounded by the same sort of suburban houses filled with children and playful dogs that Dream remembered from his own childhood. Swing sets and basketball hoops and the occasional chalk drawings littering the sidewalks.
When Dream knocked on the door, his sister’s fiance opened, looking a little bit frazzled. “Clay, hi,” she said, stepping aside to let the two of them in. “Thanks for coming at the last minute; you’re, like, literally a life saver. I’m supposed to be at my sister’s rehearsal dinner in Dallas in, like, less than nine hours.”
“Yeah, of course,” Dream glanced at George, who was doing that thing he did where he held his own hands. He could tell that he was a bit nervous at meeting the only part of Dream’s immediate family that he hadn’t seen at Christmas two years earlier, but he didn’t need to be. Dream had only met Julia a few times, but she was friendly. And he knew that his sister thought George was good for him. Still, when George’s panicked eyes met his, he reached out with a lifeline, wrapping an easy arm around his waist.
“You’re George, right?” Julia asked, and the two of them quickly dissolved into easy smalltalk about London and his job. George was always borderline painfully polite to Dream’s family (excluding Drista, who was around more frequently), but luckily he relaxed pretty quickly.
Dream, meanwhile, took advantage of the lack of attention on him to look around. His sister’s home was nice, clean, but as his eyes adjusted and learned the new environment, he found the quirks of having a young kid easily. The baby gate at the bottom and top of the curved staircase. What was probably a diaper bag, hanging on a stray doorknob. A few feet away, there was a toy car tucked inevitably by tiny hands behind a picture frame showing Julia and his sister in front of some unidentified body of water.
When his sister came down with the baby, he immediately caught her eye, and it was like looking in a mirror. All of the Wastaken siblings had the same curly dark blonde hair, freckles, broad shoulders. He thought Drista was the only one of them not to have hit six feet tall yet, and that was probably just because she was still young. She had time, as their mother was always reminding them, to catch up. The first time Dream saw one of those Girl Dream edits, it was a bit of a jump scare because he was looking at a familiar face.
“Charlie’s down for a nap,” she said, straight to the point after introducing herself to George. “I have all of the information we had for the nanny printed out on the counter. Schedule, what he’s supposed to eat, bedtime routine, and all the emergency numbers. I’ll buy wifi on the plane, so you’ll be able to reach me whenever. And if all else fails, call mom. She’s busy with work, but she said to tell you that she’ll pick up anyway.”
It felt like way too soon before his sister and Julia were out the door and he and George were sitting alone on the couch in a much too quiet house.
The silly thing was, obviously his sister’s three bedroom house in the suburbs wasn’t as big as their house. But all Dream could think about was all the places they could lose a kid here.
As if summoned by that worry, soft staticky cries emerged from the baby monitor on the coffee table. He and George exchanged a look. They were officially on babysitting duty.
-
Charlie was a really cute kid. Moreso because he stopped crying as soon as Dream and George opened the door to the nursery, but he would have been regardless. Chubby cheeks, big brown eyes and light blond curls. He was wearing a cute elephant shirt, which Dream was pretty sure was at one point in time his brother’s.
“Hi,” he said, and even as he was doing it, Dream realized that he was using the same voice he used when he spoke to Patches. “I’m –” a glance at George “I’m your Uncle Dream. And this is George.”
“Hello,” George said, voice soft too. He waved, both hands, and Charlie giggled, pulling his fingers out of his mouth to mimic the motion. “Yeah?” A hint of laughter made its way into George’s voice, deepening it ever so slightly. “Do you like that?” He did it again and Charlie giggled again before rolling onto his stomach.
George looked up at Dream, beaming unabashedly. “He likes me!” he said, and Dream could hear the underlying worry that he wouldn’t. The same fear that had been eroding Dream’s lungs the entire ride over. Luckily, the first meeting seemed to be going well.
“Of course he does,” Dream said, and George’s beam shifted into something just as happy, but much more delicate. “We’re all going to be best friends, aren’t we, Charlie?”
Charlie babbled back at them. So far, this was easy. Dream’s mom had commented multiple times on what a happy baby Charlie was, and it was clear that she had been right.
“Do you think he has, like, any idea what we’re saying?” George asked as Dream beant down to pick Charlie up out of his crib to bring him back downstairs. “We could be saying, like, something crazy, and he’d still just be like waah I’m a baby.”
Dream scoffed. Charlie reached for a loose curl and he carefully redirected his hand before he could get a grip. “What, like a dog? I imagine he can understand some words. I bet he’s thinking wow, George, that sounds like some sort of British fuck.”
“Dream!” George sounded delighted. “Don’t swear in front of the baby. What if he learns? Your sister will kill us both, and then your mother might come, like, desecrate our graves or something if we babysit and he starts dropping – that word. He probably, like, doesn’t even know what my name is, anyway. He hasn’t said anything.”
Downstairs again, Dream sat down on the floor, letting Charlie wiggle around on the ground in front of him. That was one thing that his sister had put in the notes for the nanny – Charlie, apparently, had been obsessed with getting to play on the rug in the living room lately. And sure enough, he looked delighted.
“He’s like a worm,” George observed. Dream looked over at him. George looked fascinated, the same way that Charlie had looked at the two of them. A little intimidated, but his eyes were wide and curious and, when he glanced back to meet Dream’s own eyes, his mouth was open ever so slightly in wonder. Dream felt a rush of warmth in his heart, and if they weren’t preoccupied, he would have been kissing him right then.
It couldn’t have been more than a second, but their attention was pulled quickly away by Charlie babbling loudly.
And then…he pointed towards George, and loudly went “cat!”
Both of them immediately cracked up. “He’s a genius!” Dream said, in between laughter. “George, he knows! You’re a cat.”
“Wow.” Despite him dragging the word out, Dream could tell how pleased George was. “You’re on twitter, huh, Charlie?”
Charlie, having pushed himself up into a sitting position, obviously had no idea what he had done to warrant this reaction. But, based on the wide smile taking up most of his tiny face, it delighted him nonetheless.
-
The afternoon was playtime, and Dream pulled a bin of stuffed animals off of the bookshelf in the corner that resulted in an elaborate storyline involving princesses, Minecraft, and an evil dinosaur named Sapnap. Then, came dinner.
“It says he likes applesauce and these little, like, cracker things?” Dream read off of the notes his sister left. “I don’t know – she says they’re in the pantry. And there’s rice with shredded chicken that we can heat up for him too.”
“Applesauce?” George looked over to smile at Charlie where he was sitting safe and sound – thank fuck; he’d been wiggling incessantly the entire time Dream was trying to put him in it – in his highchair. “Yummy.”
“Yeah, yummy,” Dream agreed as Charlie kicked his feet happily in response. At least, Dream assumed it was happily. He was certainly smiling, anyway. Dream opened the fridge. “Okay, here’s the rice and chicken. I can heat that up; do you want to get his applesauce? And crackers?”
George nodded, and the two of them got to work. Dream heated up a few spoonfuls of rice in a ceramic bowl while George carefully poured the applesauce into a cute plastic plate with little compartments that had been left out on the counter for them to use. Dream grabbed the crackers as he waited for the microwave and passed them to George, and he did the same with them.
“Oh!” George said suddenly, and both Dream and Charlie quickly looked up. “Did it say what he drinks?” Charlie, apparently recognizing that he was asking a question, babbled something in response and George nodded very seriously like he had said something particularly insightful. It was sweet, and Dream felt his heart flutter faster as George turned back to him, smiling.
“Uh, it said water or apple juice is fine,” Dream said, once he remembered that George had actually asked him something and wasn’t just standing there idly to be cute and domestic clutching Charlie’s purple sippy cup.
“I’ll get water,” George decided. “Then you can have apple juice for lunch tomorrow, right, Charlie?”
Charlie nodded enthusiastically.
Dinner was pretty easy. Dream’s sister had said that they could eat whatever they wanted from the fridge, so they both joined Charlie at the table as well as he jabbed his spoon into the apple sauce and periodically got some into his mouth. He had better luck with the crackers – these little soft puffy things – although a few still rolled away from his grabby fingers.
“He’s so good at that,” George observed, as Charlie managed to get a spoon full of rice all the way up to chew on it, only dropping a few pieces onto his placemat. “Isn’t he, Dream?”
“Yeah, he’s basically a genius,” Dream agreed. “That’s how you can tell we’re related.” In response, Charlie dropped his spoon entirely, sending rice spilling all over the floor. George rushed to get him a fresh spoon – Dream had suggested he just rinse it off in the sink, but George was aghast at the idea of risking letting Charlie get floor germs in his mouth – while Dream went to find a broom.
After dinner, Dream’s sister had said that Charlie could have some TV time before bed, so Dream pulled up some cartoon show saved on the DVR that was, to his eyes, mostly completely incomprehensible.
“You’re just too old,” George said, leaning into Dream’s side as Dream put an arm around his shoulders. “You’re, like, out of touch with the youths now. Too bad he doesn’t want to watch Minecraft Manhunt. Does he even know what Minecraft is?”
“I don’t know,” Dream said thoughtfully. He watched Charlie, watched the way that he hugged his small stuffed line to his chest in delight every time something happened in his show. “I mean, he’s pretty young. He probably, like, can’t even use the computer.”
“Imagine,” George said, and both of them paused as Charlie wiggled himself into a new position on the couch. Once he was done, George leaned his head further against Dream’s shoulder. “I mean, he could still know about it. When’s his birthday? We should get him one of those stuffed Minecraft bees.”
Something about the we made Dream’s face automatically twist into something happy. It was always we, with him and George. We do this, we want this, we’re going wherever. Sometimes, in the back of his mind, he wondered if he would ever hit the extent of George’s we. If he’d ever hit the point that the stress and the bullshit were too much for George to handle, and he had to let go. Had to put some distance between what was his and what was Dream’s. Dream wouldn’t have blamed him if he did; sometimes, he wondered if it was selfish that he let George stay holding onto his hand through all of this, even though he knew it put George in the firing line too.
So it was good, knowing that this wasn’t the boundary. That, like everything else, George just took it in stride, accepted the unwavering fact that they would buy Dream’s nephew a birthday gift.
“That would be cute; we should definitely do that,” Dream said, and he smiled, small and sweet and with his eyes soft, at the way George’s cheeks flushed slightly at being included unquestioningly.
Just a little bit before it was time to take Charlie up to bed, Dream shifted a bit on the couch. “Dude, I have to piss,” he said, slipping his arm out from around George’s shoulder.
George laughed, quiet and breathy, more like an exhale with an extra layer of citrus. “Go piss, girl.”
Dream, obediently, went to go find the bathroom down the hallway. Took a piss, checked his phone – Sapnap was still valiantly on his daily streamer arch and was in the middle of playing something with Punz – and was washing his hands when he heard a thud followed immediately by crying.
Naturally, Dream immediately imagined the worst. His sister’s kid, under his supervision, like, breaking every single bone in his body. Some freak accident that did irreparable damage to his eyes. Weren’t babies’ heads, like, not even solid? Expecting to walk into a mass casualty event, he rushed out of the bathroom and around the corner, frantically wiping his still wet hands on the legs of his pants.
But when he rounded the corner, he just found George, holding Charlie and gently rocking both of them back and forth while big, upset tears still made their way down Charlie’s cheeks. “You’re okay,” George said, voice so soft that it made Dream’s chest hurt, as he moved his hand ever so slightly up and down Charlie’s small back. “I know, that was a big noise. But you’re safe, okay?” He looked up and caught Dream’s eye. “Hi. Remote fell off of the arm of the couch. He got scared; I think he’s sleepy, too. It’s nearly bedtime, right?” George looked down at the top of Charlie’s head. “Yeah, he’s sleepy. We should probably get him to bed.”
Sure enough, even just since Dream had stepped back in the room, Charlie had quieted down and his tears were already mostly gone. Instead, he was resting his head against George’s chest, eyes already half closed like George’s gentle rocking was already enough to put him to sleep.
In that moment, Dream didn’t think that he had ever loved George more. He knew George, knew that he was sweet and kind and loved so much, but seeing him holding a baby and calming him down was so different. Dream’s mind was, abruptly, filled with bumblebees and flowers and sunlight and the intense need to have a baby with George so that he could wake up and see him like this every single day for the rest of their lives.
“Dream.” George’s voice was enough to knock Dream out of envisioning their next twenty years together. When Dream remembered again that he was standing in the middle of his sister’s house, George’s cheeks were flushed slightly and his entire face was curled up into a shy smile, like he knew that Dream’s tectonic plates had just shifted into something new.
“Yeah,” Dream said, and his voice might have been the tiniest bit too loud because Charlie stirred slightly, picking his head up off of George’s chest. But George just whispered something gentle and incoherent again, and he calmed down. “Bedtime.”
Dream got Charlie ready for bed while George got his water sippy cup ready and then picked out a book for them to read. The sippy cup was cute, by the way. It was in a little octopus huggy to keep Charlie’s hands warm, and it was the most adorable shit that Dream had seen in his entire life.
Once Charlie was comfortably tucked into his bed with his favorite stuffed animals surrounding him, Dream and George took turns doing silly voices as they read him a book about a magic railroad track. They had hardly reached the halfway point by the time Charlie drifted off, and they turned off the lamp and went back downstairs with the baby monitor.
It was funny; it had been less than twenty-four hours since his sister had even asked them to babysit, but it already felt so natural to be watching over a baby with George. Dream could have told you years ago that they would have been a good pair, but it felt nice to have proof of it.
“Hey,” Dream said, once they were settled back on the couch, having pulled up his sister’s Netflix account as they laid down together. “I’ve been thinking.”
“Hm?” George made a soft, curious noise, tilting his head back to look at Dream.
“Do you want…” Dream hesitated, absurd fear twisting in his chest. George just blinked up at him, wide and open. “Do you want to adopt a kitten?”
-
Baby La Papaya Fortnight Ender Notfound-Wastaken was the cutest kitten Dream had seen in his goddamn life. A tiny black fluff ball with the biggest eyes in the world and wide, droopy ears that seemed too big for his tiny body.
The second they had met him, he’d adored George. Dream too, of course, and even Sapnap once they were introduced. He was a sweetheart, even easier to connect with people than Patches had ever been. But it was special with George; he toddled around their house, following George everywhere he went and then curling up in his lap the second he stopped moving.
That’s where they were now. Dream was editing, and he’d left his computer to use his laptop instead so that he didn’t have to be in his room all the time. It seemed good, for Papaya to not be stuck in one part of the house all the time and to get to spend time with both his parents. So George was watching TikToks on his phone next to Dream while Papaya rested on his lap, and both of them periodically reached over to stroke his silky ears.
It was cozy. Patches had also come over eventually and laid down at Dream’s feet, not wanting to be up on the couch but still wanting to be close.
Dream watched the slow up and down of George’s chest, and he felt Papaya’s soft purrs under his hand as Patches’s tail brushed against his bare ankles. Their whole little family, right there. He tilted his head over, to rest on top of George’s.