that it's me and you

by sappymix1

Summary:

George walked through time like it was an elevator door.

Press the button for the second floor, and you’re at the dawn of a revolution. Press for the third, the world is at war and you’re searching for a bomb shelter. Get a bit too eager, reach up for thirty-three or something crazy, and the sea levels have risen and you’re coming out twenty meters under water. Or something like that. Most buttons, you were just going through a normal life, but Minecraft hadn’t been invented yet.

Every time he met Dream was a bright light. A little piece of stardust, torn from the sky of some place and some time and smashed against his crumbled mental timeline, until it made its own little beacon to guide him there.

-
George finds Dream in every life he looks for him in.

Notes:

• For brokenlikeastitch.

George walked through time like it was an elevator door. 

Press the button for the second floor, and you’re at the dawn of a revolution. Press for the third, the world is at war and you’re searching for a bomb shelter. Get a bit too eager, reach up for thirty-three or something crazy, and the sea levels have risen and you’re coming out twenty meters under water. Or something like that. Most buttons, you were just going through a normal life, but Minecraft hadn’t been invented yet. 

That was only one way of conceptualizing it though, and it was only one part. Only the part that was the way he interacted with it. Time itself, he visualized as a timeline. One expansive and one annotated, with scribbles in his rushed handwriting mapping out people and memories as he tried frantically to organize all of the lives that he lived. 

Every time he met Dream was, on that timeline, a bright light. A little piece of stardust, torn from the sky of some place and some time and smashed against the crumbled paper, until it made its own little beacon to guide him there. 

Starlight, marking hours spent lazily cuddling with the cats on the couch while Dream’s eyes sent sparks up the bare skin of the arm he threw over Patches’ back, making his hair rise and prickle. Sushi trips and hair cut dates, and of course the occasional stream. It was the most worn out button on his elevator, the easiest place for his fingers to reach. Home, in a way that the others weren’t, even though they were filled with pieces of it. 

Pieces of it. What an insufficient way to describe it, even if that was what it was. Sometimes, George wondered if the way that he felt about the other lives was unfair. Especially because they technically came first. Especially because he had spent so much time in London alone with his fluttering eyelids being the only thing stopping him from finding Dream’s arms and a face that he could never quite remember when he woke up in his bed with his phone buzzing with discord notifs. But he was that George, first and foremost, and this Dream was his Dream. 

It was hard to imagine anyone else, when they were face to face.

LA, Dream got home late. Rather, Dream gets home late; it’s hardly a one time thing. If Florida was slow and quiet, then LA was loud and fast. Dream had rehearsals and meetings that kept him out more hours than not and while George wasn’t holding the burden of a fucking tour, he had meetings and calls and streams and videos to be in and silly lunch dates with Larray. When he wasn’t tied up with work stuff – not that all of that was work stuff, but it was stuff that made him get out of the couch, so it was all filed in the same folder in his mind, if broken up by different tabs – he floated aimlessly around the pool while blaring Minecraft music from his phone and tried to add a few letters to the LA house to make it theirs. 

This time, he was laying on the floor. 

He knew that Dream would probably have a heart attack if he wandered through the door to see him like this, convincing himself in a, like, millisecond that George was dead or dying or whatever, but that didn’t seem persuasive enough to make him actually get up. The floor was hard and comforting against his back, in a way that his bed wasn’t. The way that it moved ever so slightly made him feel seasick, sometimes, when he was the only one sprawled across it. The carpet scratched at his neck and the bare skin of his arms, but it was kind of nice. Like gentle nails brushing over his skin but, like, everywhere all at the same time. 

He laid on the floor on his back, scrolling through TikTok watching quick videos about small animals and ADHD boyfriends and how to turn a paper towel roll into a phone stand. It was, a little bit, lonely. He wished that he had asked Dream to bring sushi home, and then he regretted the wish because that would just have kept him away longer. George knew that Dream was exhausted – physically, mentally, whatever other ways you could be he was probably that too – and the guilt would have made the seasick feeling come back if he had made him take a detour. Because Dream wouldn’t have said no, obviously. George probably could have woken him up in the middle of the night and whispered across the center of their bed that he desperately wanted sushi from somewhere an hour away and Dream would have been scrambling putting his shoes on the wrong feet to go get it for him. Dream was just like that. Loving like that. Self sacrificing, like that. 

George rolled over onto his stomach. His shirt – that white one with the pale blue earth graphic he liked that was worn too thin from too many runs through the washing machine – rode up and the tiny tendrils of the carpet scratched against his stomach in a way that was a little bit too itchy and he dragged the fabric back down. Maybe he could order sushi himself. He automatically switched tabs to his texts with Dream, and his thumb lingered over the keyboard. The automatic urge that seized his chest was to text him asking what he wanted. He knew Dream’s sushi order by the same prickling heart. He made himself close the messages app, a zoomed-in picture of Dream’s face from a silly angle winking at him as he tried not to feel dumb. Being lonely felt cringe, sometimes. Maybe because there was a bit of clinginess wrapped around the loneliness like a gross parasite. George shuddered, all the way down to his feet. 

He went to doordash, and he entered Dream’s sushi order and then his own, and he ignored the tracking thing that popped up in favor of going to see where Dream was. His phone, rather, but what was Dream if not inherently connected to some sort of electronic device? That’s what he had been for so long, afterall. 

Ten minutes from home. George closed his eyes, but he forced them back open when he began to feel floaty and disconnected. No. He wanted to be home to kiss Dream’s exhausted lips and to feel the music that had crossed through them when Dream finally got back. 

It felt like a long ten minutes, though. When the lock finally clicked, he was back to drowning in the depths of Tiktok. 

“Hey,” Dream said, apparently not surprised or concerned by the sight of George on the floor as George had worried that he would be. To be fair, he could definitely hear the obnoxious music playing from the video on his phone. People who died abruptly while walking across their living room probably didn’t pull out their phones to watch TikToks after they had gotten all comfy and dead on the floor. Still, it was a position that raised some questions. Dream didn’t kneel down next to him or whatever, but he did set his bag down. “What are you doing down there?”

“Rotting.” George scrambled up, resting his weight on his wobbly arm until he found his center of gravity. Mermaid style. “I ordered us sushi. You’re hungry, right?” 

Hardly a question. George always told Dream that he should get something to eat while he was at the studio or the rehearsal space or wherever he was working that day, and Dream always said that he would, but they still ended up most nights eating together as the clock hanging on the wall ticked to ten, or eleven, or twelve. Together, because George always knew that Dream was going to get wrapped up in what he was doing and inadvertently break his promise, so he most nights didn’t have dinner until late either. 

“Sounds good,” Dream said anyway, and George could hear the exhaustion in his voice. It was enough to spur his muscles and joints and, like, tendons or whatever the other stuff that made up his limbs and ached after trips to the gym with Sapnap were to get him the rest of the way off the ground.

“You should stay home tomorrow,” George said, and once he was on his feet, he brought his hand up to rest on Dream’s chest. He could feel the up and down of his lungs going in and out. Dream had been working on his breath support lately, under the harsh but good guidance of the vocal coach George had met accompanying him weeks ago. That was something that, he knew, probably did not have any impact that you could feel. Any physical change to the body that George knew so well. He was probably tricking himself into thinking that Dream’s chest felt a little firmer, a little stronger, when his palm found its home against it. He just liked touch. He liked thinking about what was happening inside Dream where he couldn’t see it. The pathways carved in his brain like rivers. The way that the blood pumped through his heart. 

Dream laughed, heavy and a bit rougher than it would normally be when it wasn’t late and he wasn’t tired and worn down from singing the same notes and melodies again and again. “Okay.”

He wouldn’t. He had a tour, and obviously George got it. Still, he let himself indulge in the idea, and he stood on his tiptoes to kiss his lips. He thought about the kiss of the microphone. He wondered what sound it made when Dream, still not fully used to it, got a bit too close and they touched. 

The doorbell rang, and George jumped when the noise echoed louder than anything had in their house all day, but Dream was too sleepy to. Dream just laughed, laughed at how his eyes widened in the way that made them look even bigger and darker like they always did when he got jumpscared like that. George was just glad that he didn’t automatically throw his arms up the way that he often did, the silly paws up gesture that Dream and Sapnap had both teased him for despite them being even worse with horror games than he was. 

“Relax,” Dream said, voice teasing if there was anything not drowned out by the thick layer that was just fond. “Can you get it? I want to change.” 

Dream always dressed comfy, but George got what he meant. So much stuff embedded into the fabric and their skin and hair when out in LA; it felt nice to put on clean pajamas. George washed his hair so much more when they were here, mostly because his pillow still smelled too new and not enough like any of the scents of home that he had become accustomed too. He didn’t know if he wanted his hair to stop smelling like the pillow or for the pillow to start smelling like his shampoo. 

“I guess.” George drew out the second word, and Dream punctuated it with a kiss to the spot right in between his eyebrows before leaving to find his bedroom and, probably, the sweatpants he had thrown on the floor that morning. George went to go pick up the sushi off of their doorstep. They didn’t have cameras yet like they did in Orlando, but they would soon. Dream hadn’t said so, but George had misjudged where – when, rather –he woke up once or twice, and he knew that he would bring it up soon. Not that he couldn’t have worked that out without the cheat code. 

When Dream came back, he was wearing the pants that George had guessed that he would and George had set their respective orders at the right spots at the table. Dream had only been drinking water and tea lately, something about preserving his voice, so George got him a cup of water and then himself one to match. 

Dinner was quiet, but happy, and George could feel the pull of sleep and time pulling at his limbs and his chest when Dream gave him the last piece of his to try. It felt a little bit melancholy, sometimes. He knew that for Dream, no time passed. It wasn’t like George was leaving him alone. Tomorrow, he would wake up next to him when his early morning alarm went off, and it would have only been one tomorrow for Dream. Still, George missed him when he was gone. Of course he did. 

Sushi led very quickly to Dream’s head resting on his chest as they laid in George’s bed. It was still a quiet night, both of them exhausted even if in very different ways. Dream, the type that came with doing a million things when you were new and fragile, the things that he was a little bit even though George knew that Dream would scoff if he called him that. George, the type that came with jetlag and boredom and trying to establish a new routine when it felt like every thing in the world was trying to fuck it up for you. Still. George’s fingers tangled in Dream’s curls of their own volition. Well practiced, across centuries. 

Dream fell asleep first, his breath slow and his head falling at an even worse angle against George’s chest. One that would make his neck hurt in the morning. George, always wanting desperately to prevent Dream all of the pain that he could, nudged his head with the back of his hand until it was in a position that looked less like it would cause long lasting damage. 

George let his other hand fall lax in Dream’s hair, even though he knew that both of them were too restless of sleepers for this idyllic position to last the night. Doing so just felt right. The same way that sleeping with Dream at all did. 

It was hard to imagine anyone else. George’s eyes finally drifted shut, and when they opened again, it was a different Dream laying beside him.

-

Rome always felt so yellow. 

Maybe it was because it felt like he was always there in the summer. Maybe it was because he – a younger him, one much less happy and much more lonely – had lived through the year without summer and any blue skies felt miraculous. Maybe it was because he had gone through more itchy sunburns here than he had in any life he had lived. They didn’t have sunscreen in the eighteen hundreds, you know. And this life didn’t suit itself much to spending all of your time in the shade. 

But Rome was yellow. Happy memories tinted in lemon and gold and the color of Dream’s Minecraft skin, even though it always felt absurd to think about that here. It felt a million years away. Two hundred, yes, but when he counted, that always felt too small. Maybe it was because this was the life that always seemed the least real. 

This George never got seasick, reinforcing his earlier – later? – opinion that what made his stomach twist at home was being alone. This George also couldn't sail, which rather quickly took care of that first problem. 

Maybe he thought of Rome in yellow, because he spent so much time there laying down staring up at the sky, blinded by the yellow glow of the sun and how the light struck gold in the halo of Dream’s hair up above him. 

This Dream wore thin, wire rimmed glasses. He always said that they were because he spent his entire childhood up late squinting at the faint text of defective books they got for cheap from the publisher they lived above back in London. Nothing but the street lights and moonbeams that made it through the window next to his bed to shine light on his book meant that he had spent a lot of time straining his eyes. Now, he could see for miles and miles of sparkling waves, but it was his own handwriting that he couldn’t read on his own unless he buried his face deep enough into his notebooks that the tip of his nose smeared the still drying ink. Thus, reading glasses. George never would have guessed, looking at his Dream, but they suited his face well. A pity, therefore, how frequently Dream managed to misplace them and had to morosely request that George read aloud letters from friends back home and issues of The Examiner and new snippets of poetry from Keats and Shelley and Byron. 

Luckily, they had found his glasses this morning, left on the mantle of the fireplace. George had teased Dream, asked how they could possibly have ended up there when it had been much too warm to light a fire for months, and Dream had just grinned and tucked them back into the pocket of his flowy white shirt. 

George watched as the wire glasses slowly slid down the slight curve of Dream’s nose, gravity pulling at the slope of his head and made more efficient by the slight shine to his skin from the heat. When they got low enough to undoubtedly be uncomfortable to him, Dream reached up with the hand not clutching his pen to slide them back to the worn dip on his nose where the band rested. A tiny, barely noticeable mark, but always the sign that Dream had been doing either a lot of writing or a lot of reading lately.

When Dream fixed his glasses, his focus was shattered, and shallow murky green met deep brown. 

“Hi,” Dream said, and George could see his face better than he had been able to before when he smiled and his head moved ever so slightly to more fully block out the sun. “What are you thinking about?” 

Dream always asked that question. Every time he came upon George, it was the first thing on his lips. George remembered, easily, when they had first met. Both because it had been… a remarkable moment, to say the least, and because it was one of his favorites to bring out and hold in the soft hands of his heart. They had been at Eton, back then. George had been living in London – in London, too – and he hadn’t really known what he wanted to do with this life yet. It always felt weird, making decisions, when they didn’t feel like they were really his to make. Who was he to dictate this George’s life, when he already had his own? It felt selfish, in a way. But he had ended up enrolled in university, anyway, and he had been waiting anxiously outside of the headmaster’s office waiting to talk about something to do with finances when Dream had sat down next to him and asked that question. 

What are you thinking about?

George had answered being kicked out. Dream had replied, in slightly different words, you’ll never fucking guess what just happened to me. 

George did not get kicked out, but he dropped out the next semester, albeit leaving on better terms than Dream had. Leaving, to follow Dream around Europe chasing his inspiration and being chased by the occasional tax collector. A million new places and a million new beds for him to wake up in after falling asleep in London or Florida or LA, and a million whispered inquiries into what he was thinking about. A hundred more lives, all tucked up securely into this one.

At the bottom of a boat in Rome, George answered “you,” and Dream laughed, louder on the empty expanse of the lake than it would have been at the place they currently called home. 

“Don’t laugh,” he said, slightly indignant. “I was. It’s hard not to when I can see about three things and you’re one of them.” 

“I figured that you had fallen asleep, honestly,” Dream said, and he set his leather bound journal slightly to the side to brush his hand through George’s hair. This Dream kept his hair the most similarly in length to George’s Dream, and he found that he mirrored his real self in turn. Just a little bit longer, because haircuts in Italy were expensive and his Italian was still a bit shaky. “You’ve been quiet.” 

George shook his head, sighing softly at Dream’s touch. He didn’t want to sleep, not now. It wasn’t home, but it was, too. Because of, well. The obvious. The hand in his hair, the soft thighs under rough fabric that he rested his head on. Dream still smelled like citrus, even in another century. “No. I’m tired, though. Too tired to talk.” 

Dream laughed again. He laughed easier in Rome than he had in London or Switzerland or even Pompei. Maybe it was all of the time spent on the water. Lazy summer days floating on the lake darkened both of their freckles and made George feel so, so weightless. He reached up to brush his hand against Dream’s cheek, just because he could. Dream’s skin was warm, and George’s fingertips found one, two, three new freckles. 

“Then don’t let me bother you,” Dream said, but his voice was hardly harsh. His fingers stayed entangled lightly in George’s hair, and he ran them through it in between scribbling new words and thoughts in his journal. 

It was warm. George could feel the sun heating him, tingling from his ears all the way down to his toes tucked in inflexible leather shoes, and the sensation made him sleepy. It was surreal, and safe feeling. Storms would probably blow in later, and they’d have to get off the water before the wind picked up and before rain began pounding on their windows. It had freaked George out the first time, the same way that hurricanes had in Florida, while Dream had been nonplussed. Just like the hurricanes in Florida. 

“Hey.” George reached up, suddenly, to bat at Dream’s arm. He was starting to feel too hazy and sleep-heavy, and he needed the distraction. “Read me your writing.”

Dream wasn’t bothered by being distracted. He straightened his posture and began reading aloud in that voice he always used. Dream’s poetry reading voice was nearly indistinguishable from George’s Dream’s lore voice, which had made George laugh so hard he nearly cried the first time he heard it. That had been a nightmare to have to explain, that he wasn’t laughing at Dream’s poetry, just the way that he read it, but that also wasn’t something that Dream should internalize too deeply either. 

Dream read what he had been working on aloud as George gazed up at him. George didn’t know anything about poetry, not in this life and not in any of his others. He didn’t know what poetry counted as good, but everything Dream read to him sounded like a masterpiece. 

-

It was a little bit hostile, the first time they met in the 18th century. 

George put a star on his mental time map at the night when Dream stopped someone from punching his fucking lights out at a slightly shitty – by twenty-first century rich streamer standards, anyway – bar in somewhere that he eventually found out was Boston. George had not done anything to deserve it, to be clear. 1770s Boston, as it turned out, was an interesting place to be while visibly - audibly? – British. Apparently, this version of himself hadn’t lost his accent to Orlando, Florida and Minecraft streamers. 

George hadn’t done anything, and Dream had told off the drunk guy who tried to punch him. Dream had, also, utilized the phrase “loyalist scum” and told him to “get the fuck out of his tavern.” Turned out, shit hole bar belonged to Dream. And was actually a tavern – whatever that was. That was the first time they met, and probably the most intense things had ever been between the two of them. But, apparently, no matter the universe, George had never been good at avoiding Dream and Dream had never been good at being mad at him. The second time they met, Dream asked him his name and what possessed him to make a reappearance at somewhere he had been kicked out of less than a week earlier. The third time, he bought him a drink. It was disgusting. George had forced himself to swallow three times before Dream took pity on him and fetched him some apple cider. Somehow, he just knew. The fourth time, the night ended with them making out in the basement behind a barrel of something after George had teased Dream to the point of being obnoxious. This Dream, apparently, found the slight antagonism fun. Well, maybe antagonism wasn’t the right word. But it was teasing and flirty, and George quickly began frequenting his bed more than the hotel room that he had taken up residence in. 

History and politics had never been George’s thing, but even he could tell that things in Boston were simmering to a boil. Dream was passionate about it in a way that was contagious. George went to see him speak, whispered phrases and shouted words that sounded familiar enough that George knew that they would survive the wreckage of two hundred years. Listening to him was sort of like falling in love every night. He had forgotten how hard 18th century buttons hastily sewn onto an old shirt were to get undone quickly. 

Waking up in this Dream’s bed was always a bit of a shock. It was winter, and all of the blankets that Dream piled on top of them weren’t enough to keep George from feeling like he was freezing. Thank god that his Dream would never want to move out of Florida. Thank god that the only place George wanted to go was LA. He didn’t think that he was cut out for New England. Between Florida and California and even Rome, he had gotten much too used to being warm. 

Dream was never next to him when he woke up here, not that it bothered George that much. This Dream’s commitment to having a million things on his plate reminded him most of all of his Dream. Trade music and merch and editing and meetings with Manager Ken for politics and speeches and meetings with fucking Sam Adams. Yeah, the guy from the beer bottle. Didn’t really look much like the portraits George had found back home. Not to mention, running the tavern and the inn attached to it. In terms of Dreams that George worried about, they all made the list, obviously. But Boston Dream was probably sitting at number two, in half because sometimes he worried that when he woke up here next, he’d be in jail or on a British’s soldier’s fucking bayonet or whatever other horrible things could happen to someone here. This was the first time that George had landed on a fucking war. He didn’t like it much. 

He had made Dream promise him not to enlist. Dream, he thought, would make a great idealist young soldier. The type that they wrote books and movies about. The type that fucking died, in the way that was the most tragic and heartwrenching and made you want to sob your eyes out. Not that George would have cried any less if he had died to an infected paper cut never having seen the battlefield. 

But Dream had promised. He had other roles, and maybe those roles weren’t any less dangerous, but they made George feel less sick when he thought of them. 

There was an obvious solution to this issue. George had a cheat seat, to all of this, back in the twenty-first century. A quick google search, flipping through census pages. He had learned that his cheat sheet was bullshit in a small bookshop in London when he was twenty-four and couldn’t find Dream’s surname on the side of any of their precariously stacked poetry books with lined spines and pastel colors. When he asked the shopkeeper, an older woman with thick, thick glasses framing wide gray eyes who obviously would know the name of the writers hanging with the Shelleys, she told him that she wasn’t familiar. She’d asked what poem he was looking for, and George’s mouth had dried up when he tried to recite the stanzas Dream had recited to him in their hotel room in Geneva. He wasn’t a poet. He couldn’t say them like Dream had, and so he couldn’t say them at all.

But he had found that the nook Dream occupied was carefully filled. Tucked away where the wrong George and the wrong Dream couldn’t find it. George couldn’t have found out what happened even if he wanted to. He thought, maybe, he could jump, parkour through time and land farther on the timeline he already knew, but every time he got onto the ledge, he couldn’t manage it. Nobody told him how this time shit worked. Nobody had ever told him that he couldn’t egregiously fuck it up. When he was younger, his sister had liked science fiction, and she would summarize her books to him while they walked back from school. A lot of time travelers fucked things up. He was more afraid of that, than he was of not knowing. 

One thing George had come to know, though, was that people acted like people anywhere. Even in a war, Dream was still Dream and George was still George. 

He forced himself to climb out of the safety of Dream’s thick blankets and tried not to wince when the cold air of the room above the bar hit his skin. He could, already, hear the noise of moving and talking downstairs. It had always permeated the wooden paneling as easily as the cold did, and it was only his natural penchant for being an absurdly heavy sleeper that kept him from waking up early with Dream. 

George skidded across the floor, his socks snagging slightly on the jagged edge of one panel, and he pushed through Dream’s drawers until he found a pair of his own trousers and a shirt that looked familiar. Familiar as in it was probably his, anyway. Most of Dream’s shirts were pretty familiar to him too, by this point. He got dressed quickly, trying to minimize the amount of time in between when he took his night clothes off and replaced them with thick, rough fabric that the expanse of his chest and down his thighs was exposed to the raw air. He thought, absently, that he should learn how to build a heating system and smuggle the knowledge back to 1773. Surely that wouldn’t cause the irreparable hole in time that he was terrified of accidentally stumbling into. 

Once dressed, George grabbed a scarf off of where Dream or him – he couldn’t remember who had last worn it, because although it was Dream’s, it was also a deep blue and forrest-y green pattern that had made him giggle the first time he saw it and still made his chest light up lemon yellow when he wrapped it around his neck – had looped it around the top of the bedpost. Scarf, thicker socks, leather shoes with worn soles that he would have to take down the street to have replaced but had been putting off for days. A jacket, one that Dream had bought him. It was nice, and it was thick, lined with something that George’s twenty-first century mind that shopped mainly online couldn’t identify but was so warm. He remembered the day that Dream had given it to him well. The way that he had smiled the entire time, his mouth just slightly open, in a way that George knew from another Christmas meant that he was a little bit nervous, just as much as he was excited. How he had said I know you don’t like the cold, like it was the easiest decision he had ever made, to spend his money in the middle of his city being thrown into a war on George. George didn’t like gifts, much. He wore it almost every day. 

Dream had a mirror hanging on the wall. George didn’t know a lot about history, and he knew probably less about mirrors, but he had been surprised to learn how recent getting a clear image of oneself had become an easy achievement. He glanced at his slightly warped appearance in the mirror. He looked like he belonged here, but maybe that was just the way that the glass twisted his face. Normally, he thought that he had the face of a man who obviously knew what Pokemon and Twitter and the fucking Dream SMP were. He made a face, that sucking on a lemon one that he always did when he referred to an extremely modern thing, the feel of which tasted sour in his mouth. The fucking Sons of Liberty would have gone crazy with DSMP lore discourse. 

Lastly, he reached to where Dream had left his nice hat, that type of floppy leather one that came to a point stuck out in front of his eyes. He had been, ridiculously, delighted by it the first time he saw it. It was a far cry from the cat beanies that his Dream always kept only a few inches from his fingertips and George knew that everyone here wore them, but there was just something about Dream with a stupid fucking hat crushing his curls that felt like home. Well, actually, the cat beanies George thought were kind of epic, but still; it was close enough. This hat could be epic too, if he really were a 1700s British transplant. He wondered, briefly, what word that version of himself, one without the whole time travel fuckery, would have chosen for it. Maybe, like, rad or something. 

Okay, probably not.

He tucked the hat over his own curls, and leaned into the blurry mirror to make it straight. George, as a rule, didn’t really like himself in hats, but he beamed at his appearance and he felt a rush of happiness. Another life’s, sure, but maybe this one’s too. 

The staircase from Dream’s personal rooms to the bar downstairs was in the center of the house, which you would think would help it retain the heat, but it wasn’t so much warmer as it was stuffier. George hurried down the steep stairs, and he wondered if Dream could hear the thud thud thud of his footsteps, muffled ever so slightly by the poor quality of his shoes. He wondered if the sound of him coming downstairs every morning was as familiar to him as the way his footsteps echoed around the staircase – they kind of just sounded like wood; he didn’t know how else to describe it, and he certainly didn’t know how to do so without utilizing Minecraft terms – were to George himself. 

At the bottom of the staircase was a heavy wooden door with a lock, and George slipped the metal key from the pocket of his jacket and stuck it upside down – someone had installed it improperly before Dream had bought the place and it had just become a quirk rather than an annoyance in the years since – in the key hole. They both had one. A key, anyway. Dream had given him the spare one the first time he slept over and Dream had had to wake up for work before him. George had teased him, relentlessly, for selling out to the British. Dream had rolled his eyes, a big motion, one that pulled his entire body with it just like George had seen a million times before in the months since meeting Dream in person, and said that George was a piss poor excuse for a British spy. Then they had, like, mind blowing sex. Really great night all around. So great, that Dream had forgotten to tell George that the lock was installed improperly and he had had to come rescue him from succumbing to the spiders that lived in the staircase anyway. There were a lot more spiders, George had discovered, in houses pre-modern windows and doors and siding, there were a lot more spiders. 

The tavern wasn’t particularly crowded this morning. Just a few people spread out, eating at their own tables and pointedly ignoring everyone else. For some reason, people also came in for breakfast, which George had laughed at the first time, but Dream seemed to accept to be normal, so he did too. That was, he thought, the thing that kept him on his feet no matter where he ended up. Clinging to Dream and accepting unquestioningly that he could follow his lead. What could he say? Dream had asked him to come with him and he had. Dream served coffee for the morning crowd, despite him saying that the smell made him sick. You could not, at any point, say that Dream was not a good patriot. The tea boycott was in full swing and, as thus, you would not find tea at his tavern. Both of them slowly learned to tolerate the smell, at least. 

Dream was off to the side, talking to a man George vaguely recognized as some sort of supplier. He probably had a box of, like, eggs or whiskey or – if they were lucky – apples that he was dropping off. Goods had been harder to come by since the issues with Britain started, but people liked Dream and, besides, he had always been one to fall on his feet. Sure, sometimes he might also break every bone in his body on the way down, but he was always standing. George settled in behind the counter to wait for him to finish, watching with a tiny smile as Dream – posture never quite perfect but he’s tall so, like, who cares a little – talked with the man. Hat, obviously, abandoned for the day, Dream’s hair was shiny from letting George wash it for him the night before and tied surprisingly neatly considering he had done it himself without George’s aid by a thick black ribbon. George reached, not quite self consciously but not not self consciously either, to brush the edge of his own hair. It wasn’t long enough to tie back, not like Dream’s or like a lot of Boston’s residents, really. It had been, once. Covid and quarantine had been as good of an excuse as any to try to match this world rather than any of his other ones. Less constraints, even in the life that had the most eyes on him. He just hadn’t liked it, though. Too long, too much work, too frequently in the way. And there was no fucking way that he was going to be streaming on Twitch with his hair pulled back founding father style. He could imagine the fucking George Washington jokes. 

George didn’t often want to tell others about the, like, time thing. Maybe that was surprising. Maybe he should have. He didn’t know if there were other people like him, other people for whom time was something malleable and easy to swim through, but something about the idea of trying to answer that question always made him feel uneasy. The type of anxiety that made him squeeze his fingers so hard that they went tingly and painful. One of the rare times that he wanted, so badly, to was to tell Dream about the George Washington founding father pulling hair back joke. He thought Dream would find it funny. Both his Dream and the Dream for whom George Washington was a contemporary, a military guy, not one of the subjects of dumb 2020 era jokes. But he didn’t know how to explain to another Dream that he wasn’t really his, or explain to his Dream that he wasn’t only. 

It hadn’t occurred to him until later that a concern probably should have been Dream – either one – not believing him. It had seemed so certain that he would have, and that had probably been right. Rules, he knew, tended to go out the window for Dream when it came to George, a privilege that made him feel like the specialist person in the world. 

George waited for Dream to be done, tracing lines in the wood of the counter as his legs swung slowly back and forth. This was the place that, normally, he would have pulled out his phone and fiddled with Twitter, sent a text, watched a TikTok. Why did everything start with ‘T?’ he briefly mused, before deciding it didn’t matter. He pressed the nail of his thumb into one of the divots of the counter. It kind of, if he quinted a bit, looked like a minion. This was, as he had found, what passed for entertainment in a pre-Breaking Bad edits world. 

“Thanks, Mr. Wastaken; I’ll see you again at the end of the week.”

George straightened his back, pulling himself away from the potentially minion shaped imperfection as Dream came back across the bar. Dream looked happy, content, and George figured that it was probably the result of his presence. Presumption, potentially, but also probably right, so. It hadn’t taken him long to figure out that all of the Dream’s smiled different when he was around, just like he did with them. It was, like, proximity chat but for real life. And with feelings. The happiest place for George was sitting in Dream’s lungs and poking around his ribs. The happiest place for Dream was in George’s mouth. George thought that he had really great teeth. 

“That’s my hat,” Dream said, and he also said good morning and do you want breakfast? and I love you, by the way all at once too. 

I want eggs, good morning, I love you. “No, idiot. This belongs to some Sons of Liberty guy. Not someone who’s sleeping with the enemy.” In as many words, anyway.

Dream scoffed, and under the counter where nobody could see, his hand brushed against George’s waist. He easily, automatically, found the dip where it fit perfectly. They were just lucky like that. Or maybe it was, like, an evolutionary thing. All of the Dreams had held his waist so much that over time it had evolved to expect his hand. It made sense, kind of. Everything about them always felt special. “What enemy? I seem to remember seeing you at a suspicious number of rebel meetings. Have you perhaps left his majesty’s flag behind?” His thumb made a small circle on his waist and George, more so on a reflex than anything else, squirmed like it tickled, even through the thick fabric between their skin. 

“That is slander!” George protested, although not loud enough for the tavern patrons to hear. “I am an – an upstanding citizen of the crown!” Words he had picked up on the fly, but the feel of which had become increasingly familiar when the dusty feeling that came with them crossed his lips. 

Dream didn’t push back, just playfully pulling down the brim of George’s hat – well, Dream’s hat on George’s head – to block his eyes before going to crack an egg on the pan on the stove. The gesture was, despite the teasing feel to it, careful. Dream always moved so slowly around him, like he was afraid that George was jumpy. George wasn’t jumpy; he thought that he was steady, at least with this sort of thing. But he kind of liked how Dream acted like he could be. Or, rather, Dream just wanted to be gentle with him. Maybe it was dumb to try to work out his motives. Rather, Dream just loved him, and he was gentle because he loved him. The hat barely even fell in front of his eyes. George beamed as he pushed it back up. He didn’t particularly like hats, but he wasn’t going to not wear Dream’s hat. 

George followed Dream back into the kitchen, watching him grab an egg – two eggs! Big day – and crack it against the thick back rim of one of his pans. The tavern kitchen was hot and loud and always smelled a little too much like something, but it felt sort of cozy, too, as Dream grabbed a spoon and mixed a tiny bit of milk and some spinach into the eggs and glanced up to smile sweetly at George. “Do you want to go get a drink?” 

George went to go pour each of them a glass of cider while Dream finished the eggs. Dream hadn’t asked for his own drink, to be fair, but he also wouldn’t waste one if George poured it for him. Getting Dream a drink too meant that he had to come sit with George. To be fair again, it wasn’t like Dream wouldn’t give George attention if he wanted it. He had made that abundantly clear every time he held his hand behind the bar or tangled their ankles together under a table just because he knew that George wanted to be close. This was more about Dream’s tendency to stand for absurd periods of time, which George just felt like couldn’t be that healthy considering how fucking uncomfortable he had discovered 18th century shoes to be. Besides, who knew if Dream had even had breakfast or if he had, if he had drank something since. Sometimes, George wished a little that Dream wasn’t so kind and considerate and would just fucking wake him up early so that he could make sure he ate two eggs and some sort of vegetable before he started dragging heavy boxes up and down the stairs.

When Dream brought the plate of eggs, he hardly looked shocked to see a second cup sitting on the counter beside George. It was routine, at this point. More of a game that they played than anything else. An opportunity to take care of one another. George knew that Dream liked doing the same to him, so who was he to reject the same? 

“Are you expecting someone?” Dream asked, and his voice felt full, in that way it got sometimes when he was doing a bit that was probably funnier to the two of them than it could be to anyone else. Already full of amusement at the words that hadn’t even come out but the two of them knew well enough to know were coming. 

“Just some rebel guy.” George met him with something slightly overly dramatic. “I think he’s missing his hat.”

That was what made Dream crack, and he laughed, setting down George’s eggs in front of him before coming around the counter and sitting down in front of the stray glass of cider. George missed apple juice, sometimes, but the caramel taste of Dream’s cider mostly made up for it. He swallowed a sip of it, and his throat was coated with a familiar taste of home. 

Dream reached over and plucked his hat off of George’s head. George could almost feel the way that his hair popped back up where the hat had been pressing it down, the length of time for which it had taken up residence on his head not having been long enough to make it permanently creased and sweaty. It a moment of tiny indulgence, something private even though George could tell from the slight shake in Dream’s hand that he was aware of the same possibility of an extra set of eyes perceiving them that George was, when Dream reached over to brush a curl that had fallen out of place back to where it normally belonged. Then he put the hat back onto his own head. 

George grinned. He took a bite of his egg. “Oh, I guess it was yours after all.”

-

George’s eyes fluttered open to blinding sun and water lapping against his ankle. His first thought: Rome. His second: there’s water in the fucking boat.

He scrambled up, limbs flying, and question marks exploded in his mind when the surface he was napping on went unbalanced and flimsy, nearly sending him spilling him into the water. What the fuck? He just managed to get his balance – trying frantically to get a grip on the surprisingly pliable surface beneath him – and it wasn’t until he heard a wave of familiar laughter hit him instead of the expected salty wave he had been bracing for and he reached up to shield his eyes from the sun that he realized where he was. 

“Dude.” Sapnap was leaning slightly away from him, and George got the feeling that he might have been the unintentional victim of George’s flailing limbs. His hat – George wracked his mind, trying to work out if he had already made fun of Sapnap for wearing a baseball cap in the pool – was tilted at a weird angle and his hair was wet in a way that Sapnap probably wouldn’t ordinarily have been okay with doing on purpose. George didn’t feel particularly bad, though, because the next set of words out of his mouth were broken up by spiking laughter. “What the fuck? You’re, like, actually tweaking out right now.” 

“I was sleeping!” George said indignantly, having realized that he was not floating around in a sinking boat but rather had been sprawled out on a bright yellow pool floatie with his foot dangling in the safe water of their backyard pool. “I –” He strained for something to explain this away with, and he settled on something only a few blocks over from the truth. “I dreamt that I was in a boat. I thought it was sinking.”

Sapnap snorted, letting the water pull his body a bit farther away. “Why am I, like, the only person in this family that sleeps like a normal person?” He turned his head, facing something behind George. “I told you we shouldn’t have let him nap in the pool. We should have just woken him up.” 

Predictably, Dream was a few feet behind George, looking half like a kicked puppy and half like he wanted desperately to swim over and, like, scoop George up in his arms and get him as far away from the pool and the floatie as possible. Dream had, afterall, been the first person to suggest that maybe a pool wasn’t the best idea for a house where one of its inhabitants sleep walked fairly regularly and another did on occasion. Their solution had been that the key to the backdoor stayed in Sapnap’s room. They had figured that George wasn’t capable of climbing the fence awake or asleep, which meant that he wouldn’t be able to get into the yard without it. 

“He was really asleep,” Dream said, and he crossed the remaining space between them in a few short steps to rest his hand on the back of the pool floatie. A subtle gesture, casual. But George could feel the protective streak in it. He readjusted his own position so that his hand was an inch or two back and his smallest finger ever so slightly brushed against Dream’s hand. Even without fully looking at him, he could see the way that some of the tension drained out of Dream’s body at just the small touch. The next thing that he said was directed just at George. “You didn’t even wake up when I reapplied the sunscreen on your face.” 

That was a bit extreme, even for George. But he supposed that he had been pretty out of it. Deep in another life, one that admittedly had less of a hold on him than this one, but still had roots. He had a lot of roots. They weren’t lesser, most of them, so much as they were different. This was the only one that was more. Still, he sometimes ended up in a bit too deep and missed, fucking, like, Minecraft streams and his boyfriend applying sunscreen to his face, apparently. 

“Really?” George said, bewildered, and he reached up to touch his cheeks. He didn’t know what he was looking for. His skin felt a little bit warm, the obvious result of a nap under the sun. But it didn’t hurt. He pulled his fingers back and looked at the tips, looking for white smears or whatever, although obviously Dream would have done a better job than that at applying sunscreen for him. He would have felt bad if George ended up sunburnt on his watch, even though he would have been silly to think it was his own fault. Not that George wouldn’t have blamed it on him, though, obviously. And Sapnap. But he would have curled up next to Dream on the couch later after Dream applied aloe vera or whatever to his burns and whispered that it wasn’t your fault, idiot. Briefly, it crossed his mind to wish that Dream hadn’t applied the sunscreen while he slept so that he would get to be conscious for Dream’s gentle fingers brushing his cheeks later. He thought that that was a little bit cringe. “I guess I was, like, tired.” 

“I thought you were, like, dead or something,” Sapnap said, sounding unimpressed. 

Dream splashed him with his free hand, and George loudly laughed at Sapnap’s screech as water splattered across his bare chest. “No, you didn’t,” Dream said. “I was having to stop you from pushing him off.” 

Sapnap shrugged at that, while George kicked water in his direction too. “What the fuck!” George said, gleefully. “You could have, like, killed me! I could have died.”

“Dream would have saved you,” Sapnap argued, and Dream shrugged because, well. All three of them knew that he would have. It wasn’t much of a question. That was something that, as George had found, was consistent across all Dreams. A little bit self sacrificing; a little bit too willing to fall on the sword for George. Sometimes, George was deeply relieved that he had never wandered into a time where people actually carried real, non-metaphorical swords on the regular. That was the type of weird nightmares he had sometimes, these days. The ones that Dream would wake him up in the middle of and ask if he was alright, and George wouldn’t explain anything because he didn’t know how to tell Dream that he dreamt that he was the fucking Anne Boleyn of Minecraft youtubers. Much less that that was, in his life, a valid fear to have.

“You don’t think you’re going to get sunburnt still, do you?” Dream asked George. “I didn’t put any more on your, like, legs and arms, just your face.”  

George shrugged. “I’m probably fine. Unless I’m not.”

Dream scoffed. The way that the sunlight reflected off of the dappled pool water made his eyes gleam. Dream was awfully beautiful, outside. The way the sun caught his hair, the way the sky and the grass brought out the green of his eyes in a way that even George could tell. It was fucked up, that he had been kept away for it for so long. Guilt wasn’t an emotion that was intimately familiar to George, and he didn’t think that was what he felt now. It was not his fault, because if it was his fault, it was Dream’s too, and he didn’t think that that was the case. Still, he made a note to try to make sure that they had more outside days. More days in the pool. Going for walks down the edge of their road and both of them jumping out of their skin every time a car bumped down the pot-holed street. Neither of them liked the beach, but maybe they should start going. Sapnap could come too and he could drive when Dream got sleepy and wanted to nap on George’s shoulder on the ride home. George wanted to see what Dream’s hair looked like against the sand and the ocean and the setting sun. 

“You’re so, like, annoying,” Dream said, but he leaned in and kissed him anyway. Nothing dramatic, just quick and familiar and casual. The very tips of Dream’s hair were dark and heavy and his lips tasted like chlorine, and George knew that at some point he must have at least stuck the lower half of his face in the water. 

Sapnap splashed Dream – well, he splashed both of them, but Dream blocked George from all but the dispersed edge of the spray – to break them up, predictably. George stayed on the pool floatie, legs dangling in the water and occasionally swinging laxly, but Dream and Sapnap chased one another around the pool, while George alternated between cheering Dream on and laughing maniacally at Sapnap. And screaming when Sapnap turned on him until Dream basically picked him up.

Dream and Sapnap were a very different pairing than Sapnap and George, and they burnt themselves out fairly quickly. They couldn’t bicker and chase one another around for ages and it wasn’t long before Sapnap was pulling himself up out of the pool – “show off,” Dream muttered, when he chose to climb out of the deep end rather than going to the ladder, and Sapnap flipped him off over his shoulder – to go take a piss, and Dream was wandering back to where George was. 

George tangled his fingers in the fabric of his black shirt. Larray was going to tease him endlessly when he saw the snap Sapnap had taken of all three of them about to jump in the pool earlier for still swimming basically fully dressed even when the only people around were Sapnap and Dream. Sue him for wanting to be comfy in his own backyard, or whatever. Swimming shirtless felt weirdly exposed and, if he told him that, Larray would probably stop acting like George had committed a serious crime by wearing a shirt in the pool. But he wasn’t going to tell him. He didn’t mind the teasing. 

“Hi,” he said, and he reached out with his leg to brush his foot against Dream’s chest. Dream mimed grabbing his ankle and he yanked his leg back. “I’m warm. And sleepy.”

“Yeah?” Dream did grab his ankle this time, or maybe grab wasn’t the right word. His fingers wrapped loosely around George’s ankle, rubbing his thumb in a small circle over the bony part that stuck out. Dream’s hand wrapped easily around his ankle, fingertips reaching around to touch his own skin again. It made George’s cheeks redden, ever so slightly. Call it the sun. Call it the fucking size difference demons that both of them were a little bit too obvious about. “Do you want to be done? We can order food.” 

“Do you want to be done?” George pushed it back in his direction. He idly kicked his free leg, leaving the other easily in Dream’s possession. 

A shrug. A small squeeze of his ankle before Dream swam over to stretch to grab his phone. 

“What are you doing?” George called after him, a little bit put off at being abandoned. “This is messed up.”

“Checking the time.” Dream looked at his phone screen for a few seconds – from a distance, George could see him clear away a discord notification and a missed call – before setting it back down. “It’s half past four.” 

George pulled his legs up onto the floatie, waiting as it rocked violently for a few seconds before evening out again to skirt them to the side. Mermaid legs. Fitting, for balanced atop something that looked like a giant seashell. “Okay?” 

“I think your sunscreen was reapplied at, like, just before four.”

Dream still had that vague tone in his voice, and George huffed. “Okay?”

“Well, it takes sunscreen at most half an hour to set before it should get wet, so.”

George realized what Dream was doing before he moved, not that that realization helped him much. “Dream!” he screeched, but he was a sitting duck. Ha. Duck. Ducks love water. Dream’s arms scooped him up – careful, despite everything and despite George’s automatically flailing legs – and suddenly everything was skin and freckles and fucking chest hair for a few seconds. Too soon, it was replaced by the shock of the cool water, and Dream’s loud laughter. George wasn’t laughing, but that was only because he wanted to avoid the mouthful of water that would have come with it. He thought they probably didn’t clean the pool enough to risk it. Everything about Dream was always contagious, though. 

“What the – what the muffin!” The joke word burst out of George’s mouth the second his head breached the surface of the pool, tendrils of dark hair sodden with water falling down around his face. It was padded with shocked, helpless laughter, and he lunged to launch himself onto Dream’s chest. 

It was supposed to be nothing, a dumb surprise attack to make up for the fact that he was soaked, but Dream caught him like it was nothing. An arm swung around his waist and a fall broken by a soft chest and softer hands. George glared, the least hostile look he had ever managed, and Dream beamed back in that way only he could, where it was soft and a little weakened but happy. Just with enough love to weigh it down. Dream was always the type to let himself drown in syrupy love; it had been hardly a surprise to see it baked into the delicate curve of his lips and the way his eyelashes framed his too-big doe eyes. 

Dream smiled at him, and leftover laughter bubbled over George’s tongue and spilt into the water. 

“You’re, like, so dumb,” George told him. “I, like, love you. That’s cringe, because you’re so dumb. Did you know that?”

George didn’t say which part he was asking if Dream knew, because there were still sometimes words that he struggled to untangle from his vocal cords. He thought that sometimes the inside of his throat – was that where vocal chords were? – looked like the tangle of wires he kept behind his desk. And Dream didn’t say which part he knew, just nodded, and his hand found that right spot on George’s waist. 

George so easily fell into this life. Like it was nothing. Like it was everything. Sometimes, it was a surprise when he woke up somewhere else, because he forgot that there was anything else. It was just Dream, his Dream. And Orlando, and LA. And Sapnap, and Patches, and Milo and Naomi. Just them. This was just him.

He stood on his tiptoes to kiss Dream, and he hoped that he would wake up here again tomorrow. It felt too much like losing Dream again, sometimes. 

-

Sometimes, George wondered how he found Dream so easily in every life. 

He had the little stars on his mental map, the shiny stickers that let his sleepy fingers find the right button. But he had to put them there first. Sometimes, he woke up and he hadn’t chosen, nor had his sleeping self selected something familiar. It was always a bit unnerving, having to be that guy from all of the time travel movies. The one asking where he is, the one asking what the date is. Sometimes, he can draw the correct conclusion himself. Oftentimes, his lack of historical background showed and putting together the context clues into a coherent picture was beyond him. 

He was good, though. He had always been likable, always been good at making people like him, even if it wasn’t always on purpose. He could find out where he was and then more importantly when he was, and then it was easy to start building a life. A life, where he left a place for Dream, because he had never not found him within a few months. 

Call it soulmates. That wasn’t the word that George would have used, if he had anyone to talk to about this to, but it was always on his mind. He didn’t know if it happened to other people. Surely it didn’t happen to other people. Perhaps it was self-centered, self-important, self-indulgent, but George had always liked to think that he and Dream were a little bit special. Even when he had been in London, lonely and in love and drowning in too much of both to scoop up with his plastic Mr. Beast cups, it had always felt right. He would have waited for Dream for so many years. Even when it hurt, it had felt like it was what he – George, the guy who played Minecraft; GeorgeNotFound, the guy on the computer screen – was supposed to be doing. 

He had first started dreaming like this while he was there, by the way. It had felt like nightmares at first. He had had a lot of nightmares, back then, and this had felt the same way that a lot of them did. Dreaming that he was with Dream and then having to deal with the grief of waking up and knowing that he wasn’t. Grief felt like such a dramatic word to pull out, but that was what traveling had felt like, back then. Like the world was mocking him, giving him what he wanted more than anything in the world and then shooting it in the chest. He slept so much, back then, and he missed when it was just blank. 

But George didn’t like thinking about that, now. He was thinking about soulmates, even though the word made his face wrinkle up and his toes curl. Maybe that was what they were. Maybe it was just an in every universe thing. Nothing magic or whatever about it. They balanced one another out, and so of course they automatically fell together. It was like when you had two marbles on slanted ground with an even part somewhere in the middle. No matter the incline they rolled down, the marbles were going to find one another in the end. It wasn’t magic, it was just physics. He and Dream were just physics. Just… Dream and George. DNF, if he was feeling light and silly. Of course he always found him. He didn’t have to think about it too hard, because it felt right. 

In this life, George found Dream at a tiny concert venue in 1990s Baltimore, borderline shouting in a microphone. 

Concerts had never really been his thing, this type of music had never really been his thing, but the looking stage always involved taking more risks and more opportunities than he would have ordinarily. When one of his new coworkers – he worked at a bookstore, the first we’re hiring! sign he had found after waking up in a random college dorm and discovering that he was midway through a degree that he already had – said that she wanted to go to a concert but didn’t want to go by herself, he had said that he would go. Who knows – maybe some too-tall guy would stand in front of them and George wouldn’t even be pissed about having his view blocked because he would recognize the set of those shoulders and the saggy jeans (surely they had those in the 90s?) anywhere. 

He hadn’t expected to find Dream on stage. Maybe he should have. Of course Dream was doing something important. He always was – a poet or a revolutionary or the face of fucking Minecraft. It was a surprise though, when he recognized the voice of the lead singer, as twisted as it was from what he was familiar with.

This Dream bore resemblance to the Dream that George imagined existed behind their discord calls, or at least how that Dream had been at one point. Long hair, made wavy rather than truly curly as he was used to seeing it. A smile tugged at his lips automatically. Wavy length. It looked lighter, a true blond rather than dirty or strawberry or whatever fit his Dream’s best. Maybe it was the result of more time in the sun, or maybe this Dream had gotten his hands on a bottle of bleach. Familiar baggy jeans, loose t-shirt with a flannel over it, and those damn fingerless gloves that he had been obsessed with for awhile for some fucking reason. Familiar, though, were the tiny smiley faces drawn on his nails. This Dream had come to the same idea as his. Maybe because this one was the closest to them. It was weird to think about. George would be born in just six years. Dream only a few more after that. 

He only got a glimpse of the smiley faces on his nails in between songs, though, when Dream wrapped both hands around the microphone to say something that George could hardly hear over the grain of the speakers and the sound of the crowd and the way that his own ears still hadn’t acclimated to the change in noise level. The rest of the time, his hands were moving too quickly over guitar strings, frantic sounding chords padding the space beneath equally frantic words. This Dream played music the way that his Dream played Minecraft, made videos, did parkour. Like there wasn’t a question to whether or not he should be. 

He was beautiful. It didn’t feel like watching Dream’s concerts, because the predominant emotion that boiled in his chest wasn’t that warm sense of pride that he had felt those nights in Orlando and in LA. Rather, it was excitement. The same excitement he got before streams and videos.

His eyes were fixed to Dream. It wasn’t until later, when the music stopped for a little bit and he was talking again, that George realized who surrounded him. 

It wasn’t unheard of for George to run into other people he knew, but it was fairly rare. Sapnap as the loyal knight to Dream’s prince. Sylvee as an artist in Rome who painted his portrait once. Punz, an astronaut set on making it into orbit. 

It was rare, and it was always just one of them. This was the first time, where Dream had managed to acquire a group. 

Hannah was on the bass, plus covering backing vocals. She wore her hair the same way that she did as George knew her, straight and sleek, and her red skirt stood out against the dreary colors of the rest of the band and the venue itself. When Dream told the audience that the next song was written entirely by her, George recognized the way she tilted her head, the pride in that and her small smile before they launched into something stuffed with complicated emotion. 

Sam was the guitarist. That, honestly, should have been who he recognized first. Sam was reliable, steady, and the way that he interacted playfully with Dream should have been recognizable anywhere. His easy smile; every time he got close to the edge of the stage it was so obvious that everyone was in love with him. Sam had always drawn that easy affection. He reached over to ruffle Dream’s hair midsong, and Dream laughed out loud.

Looking at the drumset made George laugh, the delighted sound bubbling out of his mouth before he could think to stop it. His coworker glanced at him, but he ignored it, grinning widely. This was so epic. 

Badboyhalo was playing the drums. And surely Skeppy was somewhere in the audience too, then, right? George had always kind of assumed that they were just like him and Dream. He stood on his tiptoes, straining to see over the crowd of people, but ultimately neither Skeppy nor him were the tallest plus it was dark, so it was hard to tell. Not that that killed his good mood at all.

He found him. He found them. George let himself relax, and just enjoyed the music. He’d made it to where he was supposed to be. 

Small shows meant that the band hung around afterwards, lurking around the merch table and chatting with anyone who wanted to. George’s coworker, apparently, was deeply in love with Hannah and needed to buy a t-shirt directly from her or she would literally perish, but despite her rapid fire apologies for making him stay, George wasn’t exactly complaining as they pushed through the dispersing crowd. Maybe, he thought, it was a good thing that he hadn’t run into Skeppy during the show. He managed to be, for the most part, pretty normal about meeting Dream over and over again. He wasn’t sure that he would be capable of extending that normalcy to Skeppy. 

His coworker got them to the table fairly quickly, not that, admittedly, that was as much of an achievement as it would have been even five minutes earlier. Most people had dispersed, and honestly the largest group still there was the group of twenty-somethings drunk dancing to the music the venue was playing in the middle of the floor. 

His coworker quickly – and impressively; George had secretly been worried that she was going to be a nervous wreck, and what if this Hannah was less tolerant of nervous fans than his was? – launched into a conversation with Hannah about songwriting inspiration, both citing a bunch of people that George had never even heard of. Undoubtedly due to their lack of features on the Minecraft soundtrack in the twentieth century, of course. George stood to the side, slightly awkwardly, with his hands clasped together as he watched from the corner of his eye Dream laughing and talking with Bad and a few other unfamiliar faces. 

George… he wasn’t a jealous person in that way. Not in the, like, doesn’t trust Dream way. He was more jealous in the clingy, wants attention, wants to be special way. He wasn’t jealous, he just wanted to be physically attached to Dream’s forehead where everyone could see. Like, like a barnacle. Still, the girl standing next to Dream made him nervous. They had never met when Dream was with someone else, before. The idea that he could have – it was probably unlikely; she was probably just a friend; he was the problem for assuming things, right? – made George’s stomach twist and he wished that he hadn’t gotten that drink that his coworker had promised to buy for him in exchange for accompanying her. 

You don’t know him like that. You don’t get to get upset like that. Except he did know him. His stomach hurt in a way that it hadn’t in years and years. When he was younger and sadder and felt everything like a knife twisting in his chest rather than like a strong hand on his waist. George swallowed, and he hoped that he didn’t look as sick as he felt. 

Except he was being stupid. Dream said goodbye to the girl and he hugged her and he did that weird, like, closed fist that he did sometimes and it looked like it was probably a good hug. It wasn’t the way that he hugged George. The curve of his wrist screamed platonic. Thank god. George still felt awkward and most of all ridiculous, but he didn’t feel like he was about to throw up on one of Dream’s bandmates shoes anymore. The awkward part was new. But it was weird meeting a group of people that he knew and loved but to whom he was a total stranger. He wasn’t, like, going to walk up to Sam and start talking about quails and fucking bull semon like he would in their world. 

It was Sam, though, who quickly took pity on him, introducing himself with a friendly smile and asking George if the drinks here were any good. 

George shrugged, shoulders sticking up a bit too close to his ears. “This is my first time here. I got something – I don’t remember what. It was sweet.” Shuffled his feet. They grew up together, in another life. “I’m George.”

“George?” George wasn’t actually sure if it was a question, but he nodded like it was. “Oh, are you British? That’s sick. Where are you from?”

“London.” The word Orlando nearly caught in his throat, and he laughed slightly to cover it up. He always kept the accent, by the way. No matter where or when he went, it was like he had a sticker stuck to his forehead telling people that he’d been stuck there, once. Everyone when he was in America always asked where he was from, and sometimes he wanted to answer honestly. 

“There’s a pretty good music scene there, right?” That certainly wasn’t a real question, even though he dressed it up like one. Sam was nice, friendly, the type of boy that George wouldn’t have brought home to his mother but would have wanted to. 

He made a face, wrinkling up his nose, at the thought of dating Sam. What was the point he was trying to make? Sam was friendly, and he was obviously trying to disarm him enough to make a conversation work. It wasn’t his fault that it wasn’t. Dream was two feet away, and George could hardly keep his eyes away. Every cell in his body was being pulled by Dream’s magnetism. 

“What, does it not?” Sam said, sounding a bit amused, and George realized that he definitely thought George’s disgusted face was in response to what he said and not some sort of nonsensical inner turmoil that, truly, only he could experience. 

“Oh, no it does.” George twisted his fingers together. “Sorry, I was — thinking about something else.”

Sam was probably used to awkward people, even if George was unused to being the awkward person. He took it in stride. “We’ve been trying to plan a UK tour for ages, it’s just a matter of getting these idiots on a plane.” That made George laugh, honest and genuine, memories rushing back in at the impossibility of getting everyone in their friend group to commit to the same thing at the same time.

He had hardly managed to pull his attention away from Dream and his long hair and his big hands and broad shoulders for a few seconds to focus on his conversation with Sam, when he felt someone stand behind him. 

“Hey, Sam.” Dream’s voice was a little bit more gravelly than George was used to, and George automatically wondered if he was getting over a cold or if singing had grinded his vocal cords a little bit coarser. A memory of a specific moment that made his head spin a little. “Who’s this?”

It was a test of all of George’s strength not to look at Dream like he was totally in love with him. He thought that he was probably at least successful enough not to totally embarrass himself in front of Sam.

“This is George,” Sam said, and then, an addition that George supposed was fair because it was all that this Sam knew about him: “he’s from London.”

“London.” The word felt different on Dream’s lips than he was used to. There wasn’t that weight on it. Dream dropped it like it hardly mattered. It probably didn’t. London was a fun place where they might play a show one day. George wanted more than anything in the world to give it a different meaning to him. Not miserable and negative like it had been for him and his Dream, but the magic that came with knowing it was a place that belonged to someone you loved. Like Orlando was, to him.

George turned around, and he was glad that he had gotten to stare at Dream for so long without anyone paying attention so much to notice. He probably wouldn’t have been able to maintain a neutral face if he hadn’t. Still, his stomach felt like it was falling, as he caught Dream’s eyes. George had never been one for alt or grunge or whatever guys. Dream was nothing if not an exception in most aspects of his life. 

Him already being used to this meant that George got to watch the way that Dream’s eyes widened, and his rosy pink lips automatically parted. A tiny space, one where George desperately wanted to put his fingers. For a fleeting second, George’s heart raced and he wondered if Dream had ended up similar to him. If he already knew him, or knew a version of him, and was shocked to see a familiar face. That was before the way that he saw the way that Dream’s entire face flushed. George grinned, automatically. There’s his boyfriend. 

Sam, obviously, picked up on it too. He leaned over to pat Dream’s back with a grin. “I’ll be back in a bit. Need to do something with the mech. Keep our new friend some company, Dream.” 

Dream muttered something incomprehensible in Sam’s general direction, but Sam just laughed and disappeared behind the merch table. Fleetingly, George noticed that his coworker was still talking Hannah’s ear off. 

Dream smiled at him, that soft way that he always did that made him look so sweet and always made the noise in George’s chest quiet. “Nice to meet you, George.” It had only been a few days, but George had desperately missed the way that his name sounded when said with Dream’s voice. “I’m Dream. Uh, the singer from Shatter.”

George felt a rush of affection at that. The introducing himself part. It was just so Dream, to say that like he hadn’t watched him on stage for the better part of an hour. The same way that his Dream would have said I play Minecraft. “Yeah, I know,” George said, his voice half teasing and half obviously. “How could I forget your hair? There’s, like, so much of it.” 

Dream laughed, and George’s entire heart lit up like the christmas tree they let overstay its welcome two years in a row now. He wondered if this Dream loved Christmas music as much as he loved the loud, angry stuff that he played. “Is that your friend?” Dream nodded in Hannah and his coworker’s direction, and George nodded. It could have been about either of them. “They look a bit…preoccupied, let’s say. The bar is still open. Can I buy you a drink?”

A rush of relief. It wasn’t that he had expected it to go wrong, not really. There were universes in which he had fucked up much more egregiously and in the end, it was still them. It was that he had missed Dream. Missed his laugh and the way that his entire hand wrapped around George’s wrist and the way that he always stood just close enough that they were touching somewhere.

“Yes,” George said, and he thought that his normal, not crazy exterior faltered a bit, but he couldn’t bring himself to care. “I like sweet drinks. With a lot of fruit.” 

-

Sometimes, things in George’s head got tangled. 

His thoughts had always been a little slippery, sometimes, hard to grab onto and harder still to hold. Moreso, now. It was a lot. Stars and buttons and maps. So many lives to keep track of and to try to keep straight. Sometimes, it felt like his brain was an overburdened laptop overheating. Once, it had been hard and he had been home, and he remembered feeling like he was burning, and the only relief had been when Dream had carefully pressed the back of his hand to his forehead and asked worriedly if he thought that he had a fever.

It was a lot, and George tried really hard, but it was unsurprising, therefore, when he fucked up.

It worked a little bit like this: George could control it. Time was an elevator and he wasn’t too short to hit the buttons. He was just sleepy, sometimes, and when he knew he had to travel, he would let the elevator take him where it wanted. He would only make the effort to guide his fading consciousness when he really wanted to end up in a specific place. When he was missing Roman seas or puffy sleeves or afternoons curled up with Patches. 

George slept worse, on tour. That was where he had ended up, by the way. Dream and Sam and Hannah and Bad made it to London afterall, and he had come with them. It was the unfamiliar pillows, never filled with the scent of Dream’s grapefruit shampoo or any of the other smells that he associated with him. Dream smelled like whatever tiny shampoo bottles they had taken from the occasional hotel stop because they had all put all of their money into this tour and restocking on the road was expensive. Nothing smelled right, and nothing felt like home. It was like LA, but too many decades early and worse, because at least they were making LA a home. Hotels in random cities were never going to bend to fit their bones and knuckles. 

So George slept worse. He slept worse, and he was exhausted. The bags under his eyes were bigger than he had seen them in ages, since he’d been pulling late night flights for exhausting trips to North Carolina for something that was basically dead in the water already. He just wanted to go home. Real home. Orlando. 

He was going to do it himself. Find the button, find the star, however you wanted to describe it. And when he woke up, he felt fuzzy sheets that were way softer than the ones in cheap hotels or in the back of the band’s van. His lips automatically curled up into a smile, relieved, finally, and he rolled over to reach for his boyfriend. 

The bed was empty, save for himself, and his hand only found the cold. 

“Dream?” The word was on his tongue before he opened his eyes, but when he did, it just hung there. In an empty room. The wrong room.

“Oh.” George didn’t know why he said that out loud, when there was no one there to hear him. He sat up, legs scrambling up against his chest as he wrapped his fingers into his sheets. 

George was never one to concern himself with physical appearances, others’ or his own. He didn’t spend a lot of time looking in the mirror, staring at his face or his arms or his waist. He knew that he looked different now than he had when he had first started streaming, when he was still in London, because other people said so. The dumb to be loved is to be changed posts that made his heart ache and made him bite his lip. 

His knees were so boney, pressed against his chest. He felt sharp, too small for the person inside his body, and it made him shiver. His hair, when he reached up to run his hair through it, was short and straight. It wasn’t as soft as he was used to. The shampoo he used in Florida, it had made his hair silky and easy to curl, along with the extra length and extra humidity. He was so, so sharp. But he had lost the walls around his heart that kept the soft interior from being pierced. 

He was in London. Obviously. A stupid fucking mistake, one born of exhaustion and blurry eyes and fingers that fucking missed. He was back in his old bedroom, in his old sheets, and most importantly away from Dream. 

It always felt merciful, that he always ended up close to Dream when he traveled. His real life was the only one where he had to suffer through the waiting. It felt like a kindness that the universe didn’t make him do that again. Like, everyone and everything knew that he had done it once and it had fucked him up and doing it again was only going to crack him in half in a way where he wouldn’t be able to glue his shards back together in any way that mattered, with Dream’s help or otherwise. 

A mercy, but it had meant that he had become ill prepared. He had gotten soft and easy to bruise, and he couldn’t handle the distance. His breath caught in his throat, and he swallowed down a painful sob. 

George forced himself to his feet, head spinning with – what? He had never gone back like this. He didn’t think that was something people were supposed to handle. He was unsteady on his feet, and that could have been because he had never had good habits when he was in London – never drank enough water, slept too much and not enough – or it could have been because he was forcing his big twenty-seven year old heart into a scared, miserable twenty-four year old body that couldn’t fit him anymore. 

He caught his own eye in the bathroom mirror when he walked past the open door. Surely he had never been that pale. Surely the eyes under his bags had never been that dark and heavy. 

George felt so heavy, and suddenly the only thing he could do was sit on the floor before his knees buckled. He had fallen asleep in a hoodie, an oversized one with a front pocket and a soon to be faded friend’s logo, and his phone jabbed him in the stomach when he sat down and curled his limbs together. It hurt, like his elbows were cutting through his skin. When he touched his sleeves, he expected them to feel damp, but they were just cold.

It was the same way Dream would put his arm around him when he was upset. The phone stabbing into his stomach, that is. Enough to distract him, enough to make him crack a wet smile and laugh when Dream kissed the tip of his nose. He hated that he was, already, associating Dream with these things. A voice in a phone call, from a discord call passing through his headphones.

George shifted his posture, wiggling his old phone from his pocket. Dream. He should call him. He was probably awake; if had felt like, back then, back here, he was always awake. In sync, or whatever. The thought made his heart ache. That wasn’t something that they had worried about, not in a long time. Who cared if they were in sync, if George could go lay sprawled across the bottom of Dream’s bed and nap while he worked? 

Dream’s contact was at the top of his recent calls, of course. That was something that didn’t change, at least. George clicked on it, and it felt like his thumb stuck to the screen, but he didn’t know what would have made it sticky. Maybe it was just the weight of it all. Despite everything, this still felt hazy and unreal. Calling Dream, hearing his younger voice, having old questions about visas and new homes hovering over both of them, that would solidify it. George was in London, and he was still ages away from getting out. 

He thought that that was probably part of why he felt so sick being back here, too. So weird, so much like he was in the wrong body and it was making his insides boil themselves. He looked in the mirror and saw the face of someone who had no idea how much waiting was still ahead of him. They’d been so young, back then. Neither of them knew what was ahead of them, or how old they would feel by the end of it.

“George!” Dream’s voice was enough to snap him out of spiraling about the future miseries of his younger self. He sounded awake, like he had been up for a while, and a stabbing thought that they were out of sync caught in George’s lungs. He had fucked it up, for the real George that was supposed to be here. The wrong one had stepped in and he had let them get off track. 

“Dream,” George said back, and even he could hear the emotion that his voice was drowning in.

“Hey.” Dream immediately softened, audible even just over the phone, and George heard the way his chair creaked as he moved. Another rush of pain at that, an old familiar sound he hadn’t thought of in ages, and he screwed his eyes shut. “What’s wrong? You sound upset.” 

Dream was soft, but he wasn’t soft enough. No calling him Georgie, or baby, or any of the other sweet things he was used to hearing when he was feeling sad and mopey. George’s breath caught in his throat, and he coughed, painful and ragged as years lost scraped up the insides of his throat. 

“George?” His name again, but this time Dream sounded genuinely worried. Not that he hadn’t before, but now it was more overt in an I need to fix this sort of way. 

“Sorry.” He coughed again, harsh and violent against the silence of his apartment. His chest hurt, and he pressed a clumsy hand against it until he found the rapid drum drumdrum drum drum of his heart. “I – I wanted to call you.” 

George could imagine the way Dream’s lips probably pressed together at that, the confession that seemed charged as much as it dripped easily from the cracks in between his teeth, but he just felt worse when he realized that he couldn’t remember the sheen of his eyes. His face, taken so quickly. After it had taken so long to find. 

The fading memory just made his head feel foggy, adding to the surreal feeling that enveloped his entire body. He wondered if he was getting enough oxygen, if this was the result of his, like, brain shutting down because it wasn’t getting enough air to keep the cells that made up George from dying off. He couldn’t inhale all the way. His lungs were too big for his chest, butting up against his ribs and, slowly and then abruptly all at once, the picture of Dream’s hazy face in his fuzzy brain was replaced with the mental image of his ribs cutting like knives into the flimsy flesh of his lungs as they tried frantically to expand. He took a shuddery, too small breath. What would Dream say, if he told him that he thought he was going to drown on his kitchen floor? 

“George.” He thought, probably, that this wasn’t the first time that Dream had said his name. Certainly, anyway, it wasn’t the type of tone that Dream would have used if he was saying his name for the first time. The gentle worry George was more accustomed to had faded away and its empty space had been filled with something that made George’s stomach hurt in a way that had nothing to do with the tight, cramped, claustrophobic feeling that had enveloped his insides. He had never felt like his, like, spleen was trapped inside one of those tiny treasure chests that they had given him in school when he got too impatient and curious and poked at his loose teeth until they came out at lunch or science class or when he banged his school-issued recorder too hard against his front teeth. He was tiny and puncturable back then, and all he could think of now was the blood on his fingers and the tears on his cheeks. Too small. He was a twenty-seven year old man teething on memories and fucking love or whatever. 

“Yeah,” he said, when he remembered that Dream was waiting for a sign that he was still alive or something. “Sorry – I was thinking about losing my teeth. And my spleen.” 

“Your spleen.” Dream’s voice went down at the end, a sour note that even with the inside of George’s head filling up with other things brought to mind a specific face. A specific tilt of a chin, even if he couldn’t summon up the image of the face that went with it. Couldn’t remember the way that his stubble – beard? When did it become a beard? – felt under his fingers, just the cold tile floor that he had left dirty for too long to be sitting on like this. “I don’t even know where that is.”

George didn’t either, not really. How was he supposed to describe what was happening? He was just pulling at strings until he found one that made it stop. “Neither do I,” he said, and he thought he sounded like he was crying. He hated the idea of making Dream hear him cry. Some things, anyway, stayed the same. 

More movement on the other side of the call. George, irrationally, wanted to ask him to put Patches on. Like she would get it, would put it into the words that he didn’t know how to find. Her tiny meows. He had heard Dream answer her in the same way, a million times across the ocean and in person. Ask for Milo and Naomi, like it wouldn’t crack something in half if he tried to explain a pair that didn’t exist yet. “You’re scaring me, George,” Dream said finally, and George bit back telling him that he didn’t mean to. “What’s wrong? Do you – do you, like, feel bad? Like, you’re sick?” He was stumbling a bit. Over George’s messy knees and in-the-way elbows. 

Sometimes, things in George’s head got tangled up. Stars and buttons and maps, all shoved in a space that also had to fit a million other things. He thought he looked like the tangle of wires behind his desk, or maybe it looked like him. One time, Dream pressed a hand to his forehead and gently asked if he thought that he had a fever. So many lives to keep track of and to keep straight. It was easy to overheat, like a computer that you were asking to carry a thousand pounds and still keep its spine straight.

He thought, now, that he was overheating a bit. The floor was freezing under his skin and he felt bruised and tender and he knew that it didn’t make sense, but he felt like he was hatching. His bones through paper thin skin that had only been meant to keep him while he waited, not to hold him once it was over. He knew if he touched his face, it was probably burning. If he had fans, they would be whirring too loud for him to hear the pear flavored nerves in Dream’s voice. 

“I think I have a fever,” he said, feeling profoundly dramatic for the normal word that he chose. “Dream, I don’t feel good.” 

“Georgie…” He closed his eyes and bit back a sob, but he knew that he didn’t do a good enough job. He hadn’t wanted Dream to hear him cry. “Okay, okay, baby. Do you have medicine? You said that your mom helped you stock up on everything when you moved in, right?” 

Georgie. Baby. He took a shuddering breath, and big hands with scarred knuckles wrapped around his boney fingers as he opened his eyes to meet glassy green. He could count the freckles mapping the space under his eyes, as a thermometer was carefully pressed against his lips. 

-

He had sat with Dream at the end of the world, once. 

Or, rather it had felt like the end of the world. People had said it was. Of course, it was the Cold War, so the world ended once a week for those who kept up with the newspapers. Dream did, of course. This Dream was the son of a wealthy politician, some Congressman or whatever, so he kept his eyes glued to the press. Election news, senate hearings. Every time Kkrushchev took a shit. 

Of course, Dream also had a good head on his shoulders, so when he thought they were going to die, no amount of future knowledge could keep George from fearing the same thing. 

Washington, DC was a miserable city. Gross and humid in a way that even Orlando was not, and the ties that George had to wear made his skin crawl and made breathing even harder than it already was. George thought that he was also, probably, allergic to the entire city. To the grass of the Mall, the pollen of the cherry trees, to the specific fucking dust that coated all of the museums and echoey chambers. Or maybe that was just the natural effect that being a diplomat – assistant to a diplomat – had on the human body. George didn’t think he was cut out for politics, despite having woken up one day in a pseudo aspiring politician’s body. 

“That’s not true,” Dream had scoffed when George had told him that for the first time. They had been at some sort of dinner, the unbearable type filled with career politicians looking for funds for whatever campaign was coming up next and food that never tasted as good as it looked. “You’re fine.” George had bit back a million comments about how Dream was biased and just looked away as his face burned pink.

Dream, on the other hand, was good at it. Awkward in person, sure, and fully deserving of the title nepo baby, if that was something that people in the 1960s called others, but he had lots of firm ideals and a genuine desire to make the world a better place that hadn’t been stomped out of him yet. Plus, he looked less awkward in a suit than George felt. Probably the result of having grown up with it, rather than forced into it much too late. 

But Dream hated the dinners too, exhausted by the small talk and the noise, and that was how they had met. Hiding out in an empty room, trying to avoid DC’s wealthiest old men and women getting wine drunk at 5:45pm on a Tuesday. George had, obviously, known who Dream was the second that he pushed open the door of the room George was hiding out in as he had scrambled to try to fix where his tie was hanging undone over his shoulders. But he liked to think that he would have fallen in love with him regardless, if just for the sincerity that emitted from every part of his body. It was as rare in this life as it was in his own. Funny, the things DC politics and the Minecraft Youtuber scene had in common.

And that was what their lives looked like. Sneaking kisses pressed up against velvety curtains, in halls where it was probably some sort of like mortal sin to look at someone else like that. Limbs wrapped together in the bathroom at the first lady’s birthday celebration after they both had a bit too much wine staining their lips. It was hard to care about nuclear weapons and the Soviets and whatever the fuck Kennedy was doing when George’s main priority was leaving his finger prints on as much of Dream’s familiar freckly skin as possible. 

All the Dreams had the same freckles, by the way. He would have memorized them anyway, because that was the type of person George was and the type of person Dream was to him, but he had tried especially hard because he had wanted to check. They matched up. It made his chest feel warm and staticky to know that he would always know Dream like that, from each first time they met. 

The night the world was supposed to end, he was in Dream’s bedroom. George lived in an apartment downtown, the type that was nice not because the shitty salary he got set him up to afford it, but rather because the British government footed the bill and they needed him somewhere with security. It was cute, a nice view of the boxy city buildings and the traffic surrounding them and a balcony that was just for show because god forbid someone try to get some fresh air in this place lest they risk being shot, or whatever was supposed to happen if George opened the window and stepped out to lean against the ornate metal railing.  

Dream, on the other hand, lived technically out of the city, rather in the Northern Virginia countryside – not countryside in the country way, but rather the country club way – in a big house with lots of lights and just as many columns. George could never tell if it was actually historical or just made up to look that way, but he hadn’t asked. It was a busy home but not crowded, and it was honestly more discreet for them to spend time there than at George’s place. Less people who were specifically tasked with keeping an eye on Dream than there were for George, at least when he was within the comfort of his own walls. Besides, as George found out two weeks in, Dream had been slipping the guy who operated the gate fifty dollars to not snitch on his comings and goings since he was sixteen and rebellious. 

He was on Dream’s bed, wearing a t-shirt that wasn’t his and a pair of boxers that were, and this felt more familiar than most other parts of their life. Casual clothes, his bare knees pulled up against his chest while he fiddled with the trinkets he carefully picked off of Dream’s shelves. The first time he had grabbed one to occupy his hands while sprawled on the patterned comforter that he just knew Dream hadn’t picked out, Dream had pointed out that the same was true of the picture frame on his bedside table and the ceramic dog sitting decoratively on his bookshelf, but George had just shrugged and brushed his fingers over the top of its cool head. It had still been Dream’s. Still, like, took in the same air as him. He didn’t think ceramic objects could absorb smells the way that clothes or pillows could, but he imagined that Dream’s golden citrus-y scent enveloped him when he brought his hand with it clenched in his fist up to rest against his chest.

The alleged end of the world did not so much change what Dream’s home looked like as it did intensify it. His father’s long hours working behind locked doors got longer, and the already tense dinners with Dream’s mother and siblings got more tense. After Dream observed on night eight that he imagined the calls between Kennedy, Khrushchev, and Castro were less uncomfortable for all involved than this and his mother turned so bright red that George – carefully staring at the blue patterned rim of his plate from his spot in between Dream and his youngest sister – had been a little bit worried that she was going to explode, the two of them began finding excuses to be elsewhere when the ornate clock next to the fireplace struck six in the evening. 

One might have assumed that the frantic diplomatic negotiations might have meant that George would be pulled into work more, but that was hardly the case. Luckily, perhaps, given that this was probably the role that George had been dropped in that he was the most ill prepared for. He didn’t think he could change things. But on day two he had hyperventilated in the bathroom of the British embassy a little bit at the idea that there was a possibility that the god damn fucking Cuban Missle Crisis ended differently than he knew it to have due to George’s lack of knowledge about what was actually involved in diplomacy. But the meeting he had been called into was not to tell him that he – not even a real diplomat; just an assistant; definitely not worth all the panicking – really did not have anything to be doing. The British government was talking about pulling him out, pulling everyone out. The White House was okay with it too. Getting someone else’s citizens blown up – blown up? Presumably? George did not really know what a missile was, he was very quickly realizing – was a poor look. 

George didn’t know what he would do if they went through with it. If he was forced to leave Dream behind. The things they had done, in another life, to avoid that meant that the suggestion made his heart thud off beat and made him instinctively curl his fingers together a bit too tightly. Dream would have noticed immediately and untangled them and told him not to hurt himself. Dream was not in the British embassy, so George pressed down on his joints until they popped. 

But George had nothing to do, so he rode out the apocalypse in Dream’s bedroom. 

It did, really, feel familiar. It made George’s chest feel weird when he thought about how much of his and Dream’s relationship had been undercut with painful tension, and how little of it was because of anything the two of them could control. Covid. The visa. The constant mess of their careers. George was used to waiting for the ground to fall out from under them, used to the uneasy feeling in his stomach every time things got good finally and they quickly began to find cracks again and he had to wonder what was next. This was the same. Because, if you broke it down, his fear was always mostly about not wanting to see Dream get hurt again. 

George knew that the world wasn’t ending because he would wake up sixty years in the future to a boyfriend and a cat and a streaming career. Dream didn’t. George wrapped his arms around him from behind, and Dream sitting meant that George could comfortably rest his head on his shoulder, burying his nose in the soft fabric that hugged his broad shoulders. 

Dream had a radio sitting on his desk, and it was always on these days. They used to listen to jazzy things that Dream liked, a taste inherited from his father, and Dream would try to coax George to dance with him in the small space between his bed and his oversized white dresser while George giggled that they’d both just trip over their own feet and they’d break something expensive and Dream’s mom would have a heart attack. Moreso because of the random British man she would find in Dream’s room after he was supposed to have gone home rather than out of distress at a cracked vase and scattered flowers dripping onto the good wooden floors. Now the music was replaced by the drone of the news. George had had the revelation one day that this was basically like a Hasan stream irl and that this Dream would probably have loved Hasan, and the words had been half way out of his mouth as he sat up to share his breakthrough before he remembered that the reference would be lost. Another one of those jokes that were funny only to him. 

The radio was playing now. Day eleven; it was almost George’s birthday, and he wished he knew how many days were left before they could stop holding their breath. Dream turned his head ever so slightly, and his curls caught the light from the last burst of sunset through the window as they brushed against George’s cheek. They looked like fire. The feeling of touching probably would have shot through his body slower if they had been inflamed. “Hello,” Dream said, and his voice was tired. George didn’t have to look at his face to know that the thin skin under his eyes was painted a sick looking purple. George’s old London eyebags had made an appearance when he’d snuck into the spare bathroom to take a shower rather than going back to his own place and caught a glimpse of himself in the fancy, age-speckled mirror. When Dream didn’t sleep, he didn’t either. 

George was mostly thinking about that, not saying anything. Dream reached up to push some of his – George’s – hair back off of his forehead, and George shivered slightly at the touch. “You should come sit with me,” he said, after his vocal cords remembered that they were supposed to be vibrating too. “Your eyes. You look tired.”

“You can’t even see my eyes,” Dream mumbled, but maybe mumbled wasn’t the right word to use. His voice was clear. Just soft. Tired. His hand, the one that George could still feel the ghost of against his forehead, drifted back down to brush against the newspaper spread across his desk. There was the same gentleness there that George had come to associate with Dream. The newspapers were basically useless. Both of them knew that Dream was waiting up for his father to get home and pull him into his home office to deliver an informal debriefing with hushed voices enclosed by heavy doors. Still, Dream’s fingers held them like they were worth the care. It was a tiny thing. It said a lot of the things that George liked about him. 

He said George couldn’t see his eyes, but he immediately turned so that he could as George lifted his own head from its spot on Dream’s shoulder. “I should stay up until he gets back.” 

“I didn’t say that you should go to sleep.” With the loss of that one touch, George’s hands found Dream’s shoulders instead, skirting around his tense upper back and all of the other painful spots and the curls at the base of his neck that caught up in the collar of his shirts and were always a little bit tangled and unruly, even when the rest of his hair wasn’t. “Just come sit with me. I miss you.”

The last part was a little bit like guilt tripping, but it was true, too. He hated the distance between Dream’s bed and his desk. He hated the cold stream of air that flowed in between them and the way that his feet were freezing even though his socks when they dropped down onto the bare wood floor. 

Dream shifted his posture enough to make George’s loose grasp on his waist fall away. It wasn’t a rejection; he, instead, enveloped George’s hands in his. George could feel his cheeks and his nose flush slightly when he looked down to see their hands entwined. He always felt so tiny like this. Dream’s strong fingers swallowed his like it was nothing, but it was gentle. A breath of safety and comfort. George took a shaky breath. That was what he was supposed to be doing, right?

George rarely knew how Dream’s pain was going to end. Or when, or if, for that matter. Knowing this time, knowing that things were going to be fine, it made the familiar ache different, this time, not just worse. He hated not being able to tell him. George wasn’t a natural at the practical aspect of care. He wanted so badly. His heart was bursting all the time but he tripped over his words and his feet sometimes, and other times that discomfort was enough to chew on his ribs until he was forced to fall back on the easy comfort of a joke. That wasn’t the same with Dream, obviously. Lessening Dream’s pain was always the thing that George did. He hated, then, that he could have, now, but he couldn’t. Dream couldn’t know. George had to watch, even as his heart ate itself out of guilt. 

“We can leave the radio on,” he added, when Dream just peered at him, eyes sleepy and the slight crease in between his perfect eyebrows looking like a painful headache. “Just come sit with me. That chair is so uncomfortable. I sat in it while you were with your mother earlier. I think it’s, like, a hundred years old.”

His rambling – not nervous, but a little bit desperate, sure – made Dream’s face crack into a small smile, and he brought George’s hands up ever so slightly to press a rough kiss to his knuckles. Dream’s lips were chapped. George wondered if he could, somehow, get this Dream the fruity flavored chapstick from Walgreens that his Dream loved. 

He could tell by the way that Dream got up from the chair that his back ached. A weird twist and a catch in his breath, like the movement had made one of his muscles twinge weirdly. George didn’t, like, technically know anything about massages, but his fingers were small and nimble and he had always been good at finding the right places to touch Dream. As soon as Dream’s weight dipped down on his mattress, George’s fingers were searching for the tight spot in his shoulders and his side. 

“You don’t have to do that –” Dream started, but George cut him off by pressing his thumb into his right shoulder. That was the hand he always rested his head on when it was getting late and he was still waiting up. He had figured it was probably painful. The way Dream’s breath changed when he touched it confirmed that suspicion. 

“This is nice,” George said, quiet. He had perched behind Dream on the bed, like a bird or a cat or some sort of gremlin or something. His knees were pulled up to his chest but his ankles were crossed cozily. “I like touching you.”

Dream snorted, not quite the wheezy laugh he was used to, but the same sort of gentle noise. He sounded tired, which wasn’t a surprise, sure, but it still made George frown a little bit. “You say such strange things sometimes.” 

An overly dramatic eye roll, the type Dream would have done, even though Dream couldn’t see him from behind. “It’s strange that I enjoy the things that we do?” That was a slightly ridiculous way of saying what he meant. Is it weird that I like touching my boyfriend? Remember when we fucked on the purple antique couch downstairs? He wasn’t not saying it because… he didn’t know how to say that. He wasn’t not saying it because of anything bad. He wasn’t saying it because it was theirs to know. He didn’t need to tell the walls and the curtains and the picture frames on Dream’s nightstand. 

“Yeah.” Dream got quiet – quieter – and George climbed out of his gremlin position to slide to sit next to him. Their thighs brushed, George’s sliver of bare skin feeling rough against Dream’s silky tailored pants, and he dropped his legs to the floor with a soft swoosh. Dream’s hand found his again, and he squeezed it ever so slightly. Dream wore rings, and the metal was cool against George’s skin where his fingers brushed them. 

“You look like you’re thinking. What are you, like, thinking about?” George said, voice barely strong enough to hang in the air between them until Dream grasped onto it. 

“You. Us.” Dream’s thumb brushed over George’s knuckles, the same skin tingling that his lips had pressed against earlier. “What are you supposed to do when the world’s ending and you’re in love?”

George wiggled ever so slightly at that. Love. It wasn’t a new word to either of them, but it made its own indent in the mattress and comforter like it was. “I don’t know. They don’t, like, tell us in diplomat school what the protocol is.” Well, maybe they did. He wouldn’t know.

Dream laughed at that, actually laughed at that, even though it wasn’t that funny. George got a glimpse of his face, leaning back, before the wave of his hair that moved with him got in the way. He was smiling, the George smile everyone always talked about. It was nice to think that he always inspired the same muscular movements no matter where or when they were. A clinical thought, maybe. But didn’t it add a significance to it? “You’re a different type of person, George. You’re not like anyone else I’ve ever met.” He brought his hand up to brush some of George’s hair off of his face again – the DC humidity did nightmarish things to it – and this time his hand lingered, cusping his cheek and resting sturdy under his jaw. 

Something pulled at George’s heart like a bunch of strings – the touch, maybe, or the words. Both? It felt like the edge of something. He could choke on the strings and cough up the stars of his timeline into Dream’s lap. He wasn’t like anyone else. He was Dream’s. 

The world was not ending. George knew that.

He let Dream kiss him like it was. He let Dream kiss him, and he told him that he was his.  

-

“Hey. Georgie, wake up. Wake up, honey.”

George groaned softly, shifting his broken doll limbs to find a position slightly more human. “‘m sleeping.” His knee hit something firm, and he made a wordless unhappy sound, before cracking his eyes slightly open. 

They met Dream’s big eyes, and his unruly bedhead. He was peering – gazing; there was so much softness there – down at George, and the thing that George’s knee had hit was definitely an unidentified part of Dream’s body. “You were talking in your sleep,” he said, voice still slightly cloudy even though he was more awake and coherent than George was. “And, like, moving. Sorry. I can never tell if you’re having nightmares but, like, what if you are and I could have woken you but I didn’t, you know?” 

It was a lot of words, more than George’s half asleep brain could process. He reached out with clumsy grabby fingers and all they found to tangle in was Dream’s old thin Sooners t-shirt, so he rubbed the sleeve between his thumb and pointer finger. “It’s ‘kay,” he said blearily. He didn’t think he was all the way awake. His body felt heavy, his heart weighed down enough to keep his body pressed firmly against their mattress. “I dream a lot. S’lot.” 

Dream didn’t say anything. One of his hands, big and warm and heavy in the same way that George felt, rested on his waist, and George sighed, happy and content, as Dream’s fingers massaged his side gently. It was George’s favorite type of touch. Dream always teased him, said it was like he wanted to be petted like a cat and pressed kisses to George’s side until he laughed and scrambled away with uncoordinated ticklish limbs, but he also did it all the time, any time when he thought George might need a little bit of comfort and soothing. 

It always put George to sleep quickly, even when he wasn’t already primed to be out soon. Their bed was cozy and safe and George was almost gone when Dream’s gentle touch hesitated slightly. His eyes cracked open ever so slightly, just slivers through which he could barely make out Dream’s face. 

“What do you dream about?” he asked, and it was the type of sincere curiosity that only Dream could manage, tinted with the type of concern that only Dream could manage for him.

Roman summers filled with poetry. Early morning eggs and cold winters in Boston huddled together in bed. Castles and old Virginia homes. Piano compositions and searching the stars. Music – Dream’s music – and easy first time laughs.

Hands tangled together, on top of the light sheets Dream’s mother bought before George even had a plane ticket. “You,” he said, and Dream squeezed his hand.

Notes:

hi. putting my history degree to good use lmao.
hi leigh ann!!!!!! happy valentines day <333 i hope you like this i saw they fall in love in every universe and started experiencing untold horrors LMAO also ive never read rwrb but i tried to take some inspo from your posts about it for that one scene so i hope that came across 😭😭 you're so lovely and talented and wonderful and i was so excited to write something for you YIPPEEE
thank you everyone for reading and stuff you should def read the rest of the fics in the valentines day collection :3 title is a random ghost quartet lyric lmao.
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