"Dream," George says, "can I talk to you?"
Dream's heart plummets. He can feel the nerves he'd managed to calm cracking at his throat. The jungle trees on his screen sway with nauseating motion.
He didn't think it'd hurt so much to hear his name leave George's tongue. All the moments it's been spoken with kindness, annoyance, patience, or frustration blink by him in fleeting recollection.
He's dreamed of this. He's yearned for this.
He parts his lips in an attempt to mount the enormous hurdle pressed into the silence, where George's voice reverberates absently.
"Hi," Dream forces out.
It's feeble, and shallow—George wastes no time before responding, "now, please."
George disconnects from the group call.
Dream's eyes flutter shut as the other listeners butt in with confused questions and awkward laughter. The noise fills his headphones and he nearly raises a hand to wrench them off; push the anxious chatter away.
A message from Callahan pops into the game chat: ooooh ur in trouble.
"Oh man, Dream," Tommy pitches between scuffing laughter, "feels like you've just been called to the principal's office. What the fuck did you do?"
"Tommy—shut it," Wilbur says quickly, tipping between subtle warning and playful scolding, "you want your mum coming in and telling you off again?"
"She hasn't done that in ages, dickhead."
They tumble into mindless bickering, lifting the attention to another topic that Wilbur pointedly refuses to deviate from.
Dream is numb. His avatar stands unmoving in his lengthening inaction.
You whisper to WilburSoot: thank you.
He eyes the Discord window on his second monitor, the list of names, the locked voice-channel where George's icon looms patiently.
Trouble. Danger. What did I do?
Sapnap startles him from his muddled thoughts as he orders, "talk to you later, Dream."
Dream's chest tightens.
He exits out of the game, and mutters, "screw you."
Their friends join in with stammered, quick goodbyes, and he can't bring himself to pass any words back before the overlapping of voices is cut off sharply by his disconnection.
His arrowed cursor floats over George's name.
He knows he can't run from this. The inevitability returns at once to frighten and calm him, guiding his fingers down against the slick plastic of his mouse to select the channel with a light click.
Dream enters the call.
He is greeted with silence, and fidgets with his hoodie strings anxiously. George's presence alone is deafening.
"You're back," Dream says finally, unsure of where else to begin.
Blankly, George responds, "I am."
"When did you get home—"
"Two hours after I got service," George interrupts.
Dream's pulse spikes at the sharpness in his tone.
George says, "you weren't picking up your phone. I had to join that call so I knew that you'd answer me."
Dream ties and unties his drawstring into knots. He feels dried up—out of tears, out of luck, out of time. Words die before he can manage to wrap them with the thinnest threads of coherency.
"I need you to explain," George says, and Dream slowly clenches at the fabric on his chest, "whatever the fuck it is that I've been staring at on my phone since this morning."
Dream's grip tightens as pain drives needles into his sternum. It's happening. It's happening.
"It's—it's all there, George," he says softly, "what needs explaining?"
"What—what needs," George repeats with shrill frustration, "oh my god."
After a careful pause, Dream's voice falls low, and strained, "I really missed you."
He hears George blow out an unsteady breath. "Dream. Dream. I'm trying to—to do this, don't make it difficult. Please, just, explain this. I'm not crazy. Explain it."
His eyes close.
"Can I...can I listen to your voice, for a moment?" Dream asks, and his desperation skitters shock across the phone line, "please. Tell me about your trip, and then we'll talk. Is that okay?" He brings his knuckles and bundled cloth towards his mouth. "George?"
His exhales shake against his fingers, as he waits with searing patience for George to reply. Days and nights of aching for this, yet not in this way, mock his anguish.
Please, he begs internally, please.
"No," George says.
Dream's eyes open. "N-no?"
"I can't believe you," he mutters, "I really, really can't believe you. We don't talk all week, then the second I'm back you slap me with this—this—confession? Hate letter? I don't even know."
"Look—" Dream tries, but George's quick words stop him.
"No, no, you think that somehow I'd want to talk about my trip? That you deserve that much?" George questions with thorned anger, spitting, "I don't understand you. 'Maybe I should just fuck everything up,' fuck you. Fuck you."
His voice is ugly.
Dream withers. "I just wanted to talk to you."
"You want a distraction. I'm not gonna give that to you."
"I don't," Dream says, but it tastes like a lie. "I know you're not happy with me right now but—"
"Of course," George interrupts sharply, "of course I'm not happy, Dream. You wrote me this bloody mess and then ignored my calls all day. How else do you expect me to be feeling?"
"George—"
"Surely you thought about me, right? About how I'd feel, reading it and having to try and figure it out, on my own," George seethes, "you had to have thought about how I feel. How I felt." His voice suddenly loses its fire, "you...you know how I felt. You know what I told him. So...why?"
Cold corners of selfishness and guilt press into the slats of Dream's ribs. He thinks of how this would be going if he hadn't let his destruction get the best of them—exchanging small pieces of their week, catching up, getting close, sharing laughter.
The foreign way with which George speaks to him now is enough to make him wonder if they'll ever get back there.
"I..." Dream smoothes over the wrinkled creases on his chest, "I got lost after he told me that. I don't know. I started writing notes to myself that I didn't mean to send you—and it was an accident. I'm sorry."
"It doesn't sound like you were writing to yourself."
"I know," Dream repeats, "I'm sorry."
"Please say something else."
"George, I—" He lets out a frustrated breath, pushing away from his desk. "I'm fucking terrified, right now. I don't even know where to begin."
"Pick somewhere," George snaps.
Dream gets to his feet. "It's not that easy."
"Not that easy? Then why did you send it—"
"It was an accident."
"Oh, an accident," George says, dripping with singed sarcasm, "yeah. Okay. The least you can do is own up to yourself."
Bitterly, Dream growls, "I have. Trust me."
George falls silent.
Dream hates the way it carves into his chest, regret already seeping into him as if every word that drops from his lips pushes them further apart.
The cutting edge in George's voice appears often in their conversations with Sapnap, but Dream has only heard the shards of silver directed at him once alone, years ago.
The three of them had been headfirst in an hours-long call of competitive gaming, tossing toxic words and empty insults bogged by swears. Determined to find a pressure point after being tormented for the night's entirety, Sapnap had fired a series of relationship-related comments about crushes and feelings and George's single-lifestyle that hit the mark unexpectedly.
George got angry.
Sapnap kept pushing and Dream followed, entertained by the reaction they so rarely get to see. After having a piss-poor day, Dream fell into the amusement of teaming up against George until his tongue slipped and fractured the space between them.
Dream said a string of crude words that he can't recall—they'd left his mouth faster than he could snatch them away—and George broke.
He turned on Dream in scathing judgement; unexpected hurt. He suffocated the call with a high-strung, emotional thread about how the opinion Dream holds of him matters, what he says matters, the concept wringing his throat and pausing their game immediately.
It was enough for Dream to take George from the call, and sit in privacy for forty minutes to undo his harsh comment and apologize. Dream has been mindful since then to keep his tone gentle and teasing impersonal—to never hear that side of George's voice again.
Yet now, he's standing in his room watching the tension in his fists, and George's anger reveals the shade of fragility underneath as he quietly says, "just say you hate me."
Dream's head snaps up sharply. "I don't." His chest tightens at the empty pause that follows. "George. You don't believe that."
"What else am I meant to believe? Why would you write such angry things to me?"
The weakness of George's angry things strikes Dream with deep sorrow. His mind mournfully passes over the hot-headed words he'd created in those notes—pained that George could interpret them in that way, pained that George thinks he could ever be hated.
Dream's sleepless nights and lonesome fevers cup the tension in his jaw, relaxing where the joints meet his cheeks. His mouth slackens.
"Because," he spills, "I've been thinking about you nonstop, and I can't remember the last time I felt this way, about anyone."
His heart pounds. He slowly leans forward to press his palms flat against his desk.
"Felt," George says, "what way."
"George," comes Dream's weightless breath, "some part of me needs you."
His head hangs between his wired shoulders. Light from his keyboard and screens glows against his sprawled hands. The dark surface beneath them is scratched and worn from years of use.
"But..." George's words break as he recites, "I haunt you. And hurt you."
Dream wonders how many ghosts he has collected in his life; how many he has created from dust and unsent letters.
He wants to slither into denial. He wants regret to steal it all back. "Yes."
The pain swipes low, and deep. "How could you want someone who does that to you?"
"You're worth it," Dream says, "every second of it. You live in me, George."
He hears George's breath catch in his throat.
For a moment, he can nearly see it, the silhouette wavering opposite the field of fire that has grown in their distance. The mirage almost brings him to his knees. The flames climb higher.
He pulls his hands off of the desk to wipe the hollows of his cheeks. His feet step him aimlessly away from the monitors.
"When we met," George says with unexpected, tender caution, "I was so enamored by you."
Dream stills, his socks falling silent against the soft carpet. His calves and stomach and shoulders tense.
"Everything you said," George continues, "everything you did, every time you so much as talked to me or said my name. I wanted to make you laugh. I wanted to be with you, every second, of every day."
Chilling warmth blooms from Dream's cheeks down his neck, and collects in his chest with vivid sensation. His lips part helplessly.
The small wobble in George's voice grows, "and you looked right through me."
His eyes widen.
George clears his throat, and returns with an even tone, "so I grew up. And we grew close. And I got to know you as, well, you—stupid and bold, extremely loving, kind of a maniac." He pauses. "But I got over it."
Terror, and fear, and confusion pool in Dream's stomach. He grasps blindly for the back of his chair behind him, fingers squeezing the plastic and mesh with force.
"Then we...we started changing," George says, "I held you at arm's length, but then you learned how to spin me. And it was fun, a-and exciting, some part of me realized I still..." he trails off, then floods with fierce emotion, "what am I supposed to do with this now, Dream? Why are you doing this to me now?"
The pain in his voice is saturated with disappointment, cold rain, empty nests. Weakness takes the wind from Dream's body.
"George," Dream struggles, "I didn't—"
"What do you expect me to do? To—to let myself go back there?"
He hears George sniffle, and the plastic in his grip begins to shake.
"It's different this time," Dream pleads.
"How?"
Wounded passion falls from his lips, "because I see you now, and I want this."
"Do you?" George presses angrily, "what is 'this' to you, Clay?"
A thousand and one needs and desires rush forth into his mind with bright furor. It's early mornings, late nights, tender touches and soft conversations, light and laughter and darkness and depth, "it's—it's—"
"Can't be a life-partner, right?" George asks, his trembling voice cutting Dream's thoughts in half, "couldn't be that, could it?"
A shuddered breath rips through Dream's lungs.
A life partner.
No, his naive memories recount with deep misery, that's not really my thing.
"Yeah," George stings, "yeah. I heard about that. It was when I was starting to feel a bit better, too, not so sick to my stomach anymore. I can't tell if any of this is serious to you, or just some—some lonely game."
Dream's world tilts with steep shame and panic, the ground beneath his feet swaying as George's words push him into oblivion. "I lied," he begs, "I lied."
He shoves the chair from his rugged hands and takes staggered steps away.
"You...what?"
"I was scared of how much I want it," he confesses, carrying himself to the opposite end of his room as it courses through him, "it knocked me down, George, and I lied. I was just trying to get away from it because I've seen how it can end. I saw it with my parents." His movement dies as he lets the weight root him firmly to the ground. "But...you. I want you in every way I can have you."
In the quiet that reverberates in the call, Dream's chest rises and falls rapidly. His muscles tense and relax. The release stitches his wounds back together.
"You aren't joking?" George asks slowly.
His eyes flutter as the anger eases itself from George's words.
"God, no," Dream breathes, "really, really—no."
"How...how long have you not been joking for?"
Dream stares into the mirror hanging above his dresser. His face is flushed, his hair ruffled by the bulky headphones covering his ears, the logo of a flame on his hoodie centered right over his heart.
"A while, without realizing it," he says, "but I started to let myself around the time of the chess stream."
"...Oh."
Whatever chance I had, he thinks. "Did I miss you?"
George sighs. "It's not that easy, Dream." After a beat, he mutters, "I'm going to kill Sapnap."
Dream smiles dryly. "Not if he kills us first."
George makes a small noise of approval, and Dream's chest yearns. He wants to take the opportunity and run with it—drag them off of this path and hide in the tranquil underbrush of sly jokes and light normalcy.
The distraction would only delay them further, though, and the past seven days of suspense have been enough for Dream already.
"I was looking forward to talking to you the second I got back, you know," George says quietly, "all week. Everything I saw that was pretty or thought of that was funny I meant to tell you."
Tell me, Dream wants to say, take us away from here. "I'm sorry."
George's words carefully drop from his mouth as though they're made of secrets, "it rained when I was there, Dream. I...wasn't sleeping well, and it woke me. The grass was all dewy. I laid in it, for a while."
Dream remembers how he'd oozed into his lawn in the buzzing heat, carved empty after days of silence from George. Did the same hurt push him to feel the wet farmlands, too?
He pictures George bundled in pajamas and warm clothes, leaving dark footprints in the grass as he wanders beneath the rain. He can see him sinking to the untilled ground, and gently laying in the dirt and green.
He wishes he could have seen the drops collect on George's cheeks. He wishes he could have laid next to him, under a gloomy England sky instead of his blazing Floridian sun. He could have pressed a palm to the water-dappled fabric on George's chest, or brushed away the mist on his skin.
"It kept raining," George says, "and I kept missing you. I felt safe, in missing you. And then..." his softness turns to hail, "and then it's six in the morning, and you've sent me something that's just dangerous. You normally know when to stop but this—this?"
Dream tries to not think about George holding the notes in his open palm, eyes tearing over the glowing words as the author whispers in his ear.
"I thought you cared more," George finishes with low inflection, "than to do something like this."
Dream's shaky fingers pinch the bridge of his nose. "Please let me explain," he says, "I care so much it's killing me. When I said I've never felt like this before I meant it—I can't eat or sleep or think straight when it comes to you." His fingers crawl over his eyes to squeeze at his temples, his vision trapped in slight shadow. "It's like I have to breathe you in to keep my head on right. I'm obsessed with you. So...so when he told me that I might have missed your feelings, so fucking close to mine, I just..."
He exhales with unease at the lumps forming in his throat.
George silently lets him writhe.
"I hate that I've hurt you," Dream says, "I hate it so fucking much. I know I felt it even back then—I wish I could go smack some sense into my old self for being such an idiot. I've been such an idiot, George." He hears George huff quietly. "I'm sorry that it came from such a dark place, I...I wish you didn't have to find out like this." His brooding melts to a solemn murmur, "I would've done it all so differently."
The tiredness in his tone mollifies them both.
George hesitates before asking, "how would you have done it differently?"
"I could've sent you a nice letter," Dream says, his words soft, "hell, I would've even handwritten something if I knew that—that this..."
"What—what would be in the letter?" George voices with timid pause, then adds, "if I could even read your handwriting."
The gentle shift comes through Dream's headphones to glow with light between them. His heart picks up its sporadic pattering.
"A daily log of everything Patches does by the hour," he offers delicately, and George hums, "or the amount of times I burnt my mouth on food, because I know that makes you happy, for some reason."
"Just wait for it to cool," George says gently, "you're so impatient."
Dream grins, and says, "I'd have written about how much I wanted to hear you smile, just like that." He pauses, tone quieting fondly, "and tell you how much I miss seeing it. How much I—I...want to kiss you, like I have in my dreams."
His eyes tilt up to the white ceiling and circling fan. It feels beautiful to say it at long last.
"You dream of that?" George breathes.
Dream presses an empty hand to his cheek. "All the time."
The fire before them crackles with unknown direction, unpredictable intention.
He hears George sigh, and the breeze gently sweeps sparks onto his face.
"What are we supposed to do, Dream," George asks with tremors of faraway fear, "at this distance, with our different lives?"
His hand falls to link with the other in a nervous grip behind his back. "I don't know," he says.
He thinks of their friendship, of the long late nights and hours of calls and close jokes and frustrated bickering. The clumsy workaround of time-zones, schedules, personal grey-matter. The accidental moments when Dream's overambitious self pushed George into silence, into invisibility.
He thinks of how many times he'd rushed, too far, too fast to the edge of daring.
With his words, Dream bows remorsefully before the gold-plated throne. "Do you?"
He knows there is no room for an apology, anymore. The weapon that rests on the back of his neck has been held in his own grip for too long, and should fall into George's hands, and his hands only.
"I..." George touches the axe gently to the base of Dream's skull. With one fatal swing, Sapnap could be right—his destruction is their undoing. Justice is their unmaker.
George's whisper swings, "I think it's too much." His voice breaks, "I think this might be too much."
The blade cuts to bone.
Dream's head drops.
Severed, hurting; he feels his blood rush to his ears.
"What do you mean," he says, staring at the carpet with dead eyes, "what does that mean."
"Dream, I—"
"Are you—are you over me? Is that it, then, and we're not even gonna try, you—you're calling it?"
"No," George assures feverishly, "no. That's not what I...I just don't want to lie to you. I know how important honesty is to you."
Dream softens in a matter of rapid, tumbling seconds. Throat tight, he forces out, "then tell me."
"I have so much," George says, "for you. I can't explain it. It's like it's—it's bigger than me, and I taught myself how to deal with it. I was okay, dealing with it."
Dream sinks to the floor, weakened by the torrents of emotion washing over his tired body. His elbows dig into his knees as he presses his knuckles to his mouth.
"This is just so fast," George continues shakily, "you said it, too, that you're angry and...and undone. Because of me." Dream recognizes the strain of tears in his fragile voice. "I don't think I'm ready for that. For you."
The words flood his skull with merciless, vulnerable force. Dream's face falls into his hands.
George whispers, "I'm not ready for you."
In the cold silence that envelops his plunging world, Dream's pulse thumps heavily in his ears. The blackness of his palms rebounds his warm breaths against his nose and mouth.
Antigone, his head rings with twisted sorrow, bury me, too.
He wants to slide backwards in time, to the moment he crouched under the bending moon on the darkened shore. Had he waded in slower, and brought George waist-deep in the purple water, perhaps they could have sank with grace instead of fury.
Why did I have to burn it all?
"...Are you there?" George asks.
Dream's hands slip down from his face. "Just...give me a second."
"Okay."
He clears his throat, then hesitates.
Not ready for you. Not ready for you. Not ready for you.
"So you still have feelings for me," Dream says finally.
George's voice is hollow. "Of course I do."
A broken huff passes through Dream's lips. "But you don't think it's a good idea to...to..."
"Be anything more than friends," George finishes with audible strain.
Dream's heart bleeds. Tears spring into his eyes, and he tries to blink them away, yet the droplets cling to his lashes with warmth. A harsh whisper tears through him, "fuck."
"I'm sorry," George chokes out as he repeats, "I'm so sorry."
"You're sorry?" Dream questions in disbelief, and George makes a pitiful sound in confirmation. "Don't, George. Don't apologize. This is all on me."
"It's not, I should've said something sooner or—or been more honest with you, I—"
"No no no, you didn't have to." Hot streaks slide silently down Dream's tinted cheeks, his breath threatening to hiccup unsteadily. "You did everything right. You...you're right." He sees small splotches hit the dry carpet, heart churning with his dreams, his obsession, his recklessness. "I wasn't thinking about how any of it made you feel. I got so caught up in everything that I—I lost it. I lost us."
George sniffs. His words are nasally, but fall with extreme softness, "I really, really like you."
Dream squeezes his wet eyes shut. "Maybe—maybe don't say stuff like that."
"Sorry." The echo behind George's whisper tears into Dream's chest, "just don't know when I'll get the chance to again, after this."
"Oh," Dream says, "oh."
When they sever their fraying phone line, and he pulls his headphones from his skull, what will become of them? He'll watch himself fall headfirst into the unfamiliar pit of call-less nights and censored conversations—drawing curtains and ringing his mother and forcing himself to not dream of George.
Where will his words go, then?
"Well—what if we...do this now?" Dream suggests weakly, hoping traces of fear don't weigh heavily on his plea. "Get it all out, no matter what happens when it's done."
After a brief silence, George asks, "r-really?"
Dream nearly smiles at the faint hope in his voice. "Maybe it'll be good for us. I don't know."
"Okay," George says.
"Okay," Dream breathes, "okay." He blinks away the smudges in his vision. "I want to say so much, you don't even know."
George huffs. "Write me another note."
"Hey. That is so, wildly unfunny."
"Give me some slack, arsehole," George mumbles, then pauses. "Can I...ask about that?"
"Sure." Dream wipes his face with his forearm. "Gonna make me super fucking nervous—but sure."
"Are...your dreams really nightmares when I'm there?" George asks. Quiet passes over him. "A while ago you said it was the opposite."
"I don't know," Dream admits, tugging his sleeves over his thumbs. "They're not like my other nightmares at all, but I hate the feeling of waking up without you here so much that they might as well be."
He nearly misses George's small voice utter, "oh."
Dream anxiously wrings his hands together. "You sure you want to talk about this?"
"Yes," George says, then adds faintly, "please."
Dream freezes at the subtle breathlessness that reminds him of fallen power lines and flickering candles. "...Alright. What else do you want to know?"
"What was the dream you had?"
Dream's stomach flips at the strange intimacy the question carries. He wishes he knew why they inevitably communicate this way—in the raw, unbridled realm of unconscious thought and unspoken heart.
"You were in Florida again," he says, "except this time it was in my house. In the bedroom across the hall from mine." His teeth sink into his lip momentarily, and it tastes like salt. "You had a suitcase and brown shoes and a hunting knife. I...I didn't know it wasn't real, at first."
He accepts the hours he'd spent sprawled on the guest bed, phone lying on the empty mattress, the strings of his earbuds curling in the space where George had been.
"I wished so badly that it was real," he whispers, "and once I started kissing you I couldn't stop. Or that's what I thought, until I did stop and...held you. Close."
"That sounds really, really nice," George says softly.
"It honestly scared me." Dream fiddles with his sleeves. "I...I realized just how deep this thing I have for you goes. More than just—just—"
"Wanting to melt me?" George supplies with a slight cheek in his voice.
Dream's hands still.
"Yeah," he says, "exactly. When I woke up, I wanted to talk to you. More than anything. I had to reach you somehow."
"To reach me," George says in a tone Dream doesn't recognize, "you repeated that a few times. Why?"
"You said something like that in the dream," he reveals quietly, "that the reason you kept showing up is because I reach for you."
"I don't think reaching is the right word," George muses.
Dream tips his head back playfully, and sniffs away the salty sting from his nose. "Oh yeah? Do you have a better one?"
"You make yourself sound softer than you actually are."
"Maybe you just see the worst in me," Dream says. A smile tugs on the corners of his mouth as the call becomes silent.
George's words are heavy with sharp disappointment. "That's not funny."
"It's sorta true."
"It's not," George says flatly as though they've had this conversation a hundred times before.
Dream expects to hear George's shaded generosity, or baited compliments.
"You're sweet," George says, "but you also like to fight. A lot. I see it when you slip up and forget that you're always trying to coddle me." Dream's lips part in shocked rebuttal, but George quickly finishes, "that's why it's not reaching, when you do shit like this. It's more like...grabbing. Or taking."
"You fucking let me," Dream says, taken aback by his tenacity, "making me think about bruises and stuff."
George snorts. "You started it."
"And you got scared of me," he presses.
"I didn't."
Dream's heart thumps with tangled emotion. "Then why did you back away?"
"Cause I actually use my brain," George says, "and didn't want stuff to go too far."
He remembers how he felt standing in his lightless bathroom, phone in hand and dangerous intention in mind. He would've done anything for George.
Maybe that's the problem.
Dream mumbles, "you and your bad habit of leaving me hanging."
"You're ridiculous," George says, but Dream can hear hints of light amusement. "You're the one with the bad habit of constantly trying to take things, all the time. Like you're some kind of Greek hero."
A sharp grin floods Dream's face with heated satisfaction, and he murmurs, "can't take what isn't mine."
"Dream," George warns.
"I know," he says lightly, and reels himself in.
Comforting quiet cozies them for a few careful heartbeats. Dream is grateful to have what he's been longing for from the moment George's failing reception halted their conversations.
He knows parting from this could be a painful goodbye. He wades in the strange gold they've created, basking in what may be his last taste of paradise for a long time.
George's voice comes through his headphones with surprise, words warm and hesitant as he says, "not yet, maybe."
"Not yet?" Dream echoes, disoriented brows pinching together in slow-moving motion.
George takes his confusion and guides him, patiently, to the newfound in-between. "Even though it's not yours now, that doesn't mean it won't ever be."
Hope and pain blend together in a breathless, half-step of his racing heart. They seem like they're one in the same—made from the same dust, the same love.
"This isn't a 'no,' Dream," George continues, "it's a 'not yet.'"
