Chapter Text
Sapnap does this thing with his face when he’s displeased, George notices early on their first day in London together. It’s a little quirk of his mouth, and then his tongue comes out to wet his lips. George doesn’t bother to tell him that’s just going to dry them out more in an early Spring in England, but he’ll either figure it out himself, or he won’t.
He also doesn’t wait until his bladder is full before pausing to go to the bathroom. This confuses George more than anything else, to the point that he follows Sapnap all the way to the tiny little bathroom in his flat and listens to his stream, trying to give Sapnap the benefit of the doubt, but no. It’s a personal choice to pee that many times when he could just go the once every few hours.
George’s first instinct is to call Dream and complain about this, the tentative awkwardness of Dream’s refusal to come a barrier low enough for them to hurdle over now, still there, but no longer restrictive.
“I always forget that he’s, like, shy,” George says to Dream on Discord when George returns from the Airbnb where his friends are staying. With extra people, there aren’t enough places to sleep and George has a perfectly serviceable bed just a two minute walk down the pavement. He isn’t missing anything when Tina and Karl are already passed out and Sapnap was heading that way, and now he also won’t have to wake up to other people’s noise. Really, he knows he decided to go back to his flat so he could call Dream.
He doesn’t want to call Dream too much and appear ungrateful to his friends that came to visit him, but he doesn’t want to leave Dream out, either, and now he’s torn between telling Dream every detail of everything that happened and gatekeeping the entire thing out of pettiness that Dream chose not to fly out.
“Me, too,” Dream says, voice low and rumbly. He sounds like he’s in bed. “Did he loosen up, though? Was anyone mean to him?”
“You’re not his dad,” George reminds Dream, but it’s honestly sweet how Dream wants to look out for Sapnap. He wonders if Dream’s had another version of this conversation in regards to George.
“Then why does he call me Daddy Dream all the—ugh, no, I can’t even finish that thought,” Dream says, laughing quietly into the phone. George hears the soft purrs of Patches and can guess without being told that she’s lying on his chest and keeping him company.
At least someone is.
“I’m going to tell everyone you like being called Daddy Dream,” George says just to be an asshole. His neighbor—the doctor, not the lawyer—next door starts yelling loudly through the paper thin walls and George tunes it out with a vague sense of annoyance.
“Yeah, well, if you’re the one to say it, maybe I would like it,” Dream says, outrageously flirting in an attempt to keep George from doing just that, because they both know he would. He’d get Karl and Sapnap on board to call Dream that nickname and it wouldn’t be too long before all the fans adopted it in good faith, too.
George hates that Dream knows turning the bit into a flirtation will get George to drop it, hates that he’s that predictable to Dream, but also loves that he’s that known. It’s a mixed bag.
“Shut up, you’re such an idiot.” George puffs air into his phone to annoy Dream.
“Seriously, though, he’s okay? He looked fine on stream, maybe a little quiet, but I know he can get overwhelmed with—”
“He was fine, Dream,” George says. “It took him like an hour, and then he was his annoying self.”
“Good,” Dream says and he means it. “I wish I—”
George lets him get away with it. They both know what he was going to say and they both know George’s response to it. No point in stirring that up again, because they’re both too stubborn not to argue about it once more.
“How was dinner?” Dream asks instead.
George recounts their pleasant night out and the delicious restaurant they went to, Tina’s find, along with the obscene noises Sapnap made in his appreciation.
“Yeah, he does that,” Dream laughs. “You get used to it. Freaked my mom out at first until she realized it was a compliment.”
“Ew,” George says. His eyes are drooping with the alcohol and the long day. He has to get up relatively early tomorrow, too. They have a brunch planned before Tina and Karl have to fly out. He’s really going to miss them. It was sweet when Quackity, Karl, and Tina heard he was lonely and—well, it was nice for them to visit. Even Quackity leaving a day before Karl could get there—his heart was full seeing all his friends. Tommy and Tubbo and the Brighton crew, they’re all good and nice and he likes them, but they’re not his people. They’re not his ride or dies.
The fact of the matter is that he was supposed to be in Florida three months ago. He was supposed to meet his best friend and start vlogging and doing IRL content—he has idea after idea written down in the notes app of his phone, password protected just in case he ever gets his phone stolen, and then his visa got denied.
And with it, his mood plummeted.
George spots Sapnap’s dented cap on the floor of his room from when he changed earlier. There’s a warmth in his chest knowing his friend is so close—close enough that he’s punched him seven times today, close enough that George told him to his face that his nasty ear infection was leaking out of his head.
He’s existed with Sapnap and Dream as his online friends for so long that he worried, silently to himself, that the transition into IRL friends would change things, would mark them differently, like fitting a Philip’s head screwdriver into a flathead screw.
Luckily, that doesn’t seem to be the case.
“What did you do today?” George asks Dream, tired of hearing himself talk and ready to listen to Dream go on and on about something that caught his attention. He likes listening to Dream when he gets like that. He finds it comforting to listen to the way Dream’s brain works, the leaps he can make in seconds that take other people hours.
“Not much,” Dream answers. George isn’t surprised, it usually takes him a little prodding before he goes off.
“Then what was it? Surely you didn’t lie in bed all day,” George says, starting the prodding.
“Maybe I did,” Dream says.
“You didn’t go take a shit?” George asks and Dream barks a delighted laugh. There’s a swoop in George’s stomach—he loves making Dream laugh like that. “You didn’t eat or—”
“Okay, fine, idiot, I’ll—I’ll tell you,” Dream says, still quietly laughing. “I really didn’t do much, just texted you, but a friend of mine reached out. The girl from the Christmas party, remember her?”
“No,” George says immediately, but he remembers. Dream’s family does a big block-wide Christmas party every year and the whole neighborhood comes. It’s one of the few things he left the house for in the last two years. Dream’s mum makes a big deal out of it, goes all out making food. She’s the spearhead of the entire thing and thus encourages Dream and his siblings to come. There’s not a lot of things Dream would flat out deny his mother these days.
“Well, she reached out to ask a question about—about something dumb, and we wound up talking a bit,” Dream says. George lets the information sink in, remembering the abrupt end of Dream texting him during that party. Stuck in his own house on the other side of the world, George felt the sting when Dream got distracted by an old friend. George spent the time staring at the blank walls of his flat and trying and failing to play online chess. He has never liked when Dream disappears without warning.
“What did she ask?” he wonders, slipping into his bedcovers.
“Nothing important,” Dream sighs heavily, “but it was nice not being asked questions about YouTube for once, you know? As much as I love our friends, like, sometimes I don’t want to talk about YouTube statistics and the algorithm.”
“That’s a load of bullshit,” George says because he knows it’s not true.
“George, c’mon.”
“You love talking about that shit,” George says and he knows because Dream’s always the one bringing it up in their conversations, always the one encouraging George to make more videos, edit said videos, upload the videos. George loves statistics and he’s always happy to indulge Dream’s obsession, and especially happy when those statistics equal to real world money that winds up in his bank account, but George never ever is the one to bring this conversation up first. It’s always Dream.
The sheets are cool on his feet when he sticks his legs further down under the covers. “I would believe you, but I know you’re lying.”
“Okay, well—” Dream huffs a deep breath, probably disliking that George rightfully called him out. “Well, for once it was nice not being ‘Dream’ to someone, I guess. It was nice to catch up with someone who only knows me as Clay, but isn’t my mom or sister, you know?”
“That makes more sense,” George says magnanimously.
“Anyway, she was the only cool person at the last Christmas party and she kept me sane then,” Dream explains. He never told George more than that after the fact. If George remembers correctly, they got into a playful argument about whether water is wet that lasted off and on over the next week.
“I’m glad you talked to a friend,” George says and he means that, even if a part of him wants Dream to only talk to him. It would be hard if Dream had a group of their friends around him and George couldn’t be there. He understands the isolation Dream’s dealing with, even if there’s a small raisin of resentment because Dream could have come here, he could have been part of this, but chose not to because of the face reveal.
When that resentment boils up, George remembers what Dream said that made it make sense in his head. “I don’t want to come over there for a week and then just have to say goodbye to you, George. I want to never have to say goodbye.”
“Enough about me,” Dream says in the present. George hears Patches yowl and push off Dream’s chest, announcing her departure. “What else did you guys do? What happened after dinner? I got a weird text from Sapnap.”
George doesn’t drink, not as a rule. He doesn’t abstain, but there’s only one thing sorrier than a man alone in his depressing blank flat while he waits to move—and that’s an alcoholic one. He can practically feel Dream’s judgment from here if he were to start drinking heavily to ward off the pain.
But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t drink socially. He just doesn’t have a lot of social calls these days, at least not ones that happen in the real world.
“We played a drinking game,” George tells Dream with a bit of a can you believe how juvenile that was in his voice.
Dream makes a noise of interest and then goes, “What game did you play? Never Have I Ever?”
“No, no, we played the other one, the—the one everyone played in Year 7.”
“That means nothing to me, idiot,” Dream says, blankets crinkling around him announcing that he’s turned onto his side.
“Truth or Dare,” George says when the name comes back to him. It’s been a long day, in his defense.
“Oooh,” Dream says, taking an interest. “And what truths did you reveal?”
“I told them how annoying you are,” George says, as serious as anything. “It felt good to get that off my chest.”
Dream just laughs like George knew he would. “What did everyone else confess?”
George is already laughing when he says, “They also confessed how annoying you are. It was a real—” he can’t finish the thought he’s so pleased with himself.
“Shut up,” Dream says. “I bet you talked about the girls you fucked in college, and—”
“Uni,” George corrects, not for the first time.
“—the stupid code you want to create.”
“No,” George says, turning serious. It’s late and he’s tired, but he wanted to talk to Dream. “They asked about—I only did one truth and the rest were dares.”
“What did they ask about?” Dream asks, picking up on the weirdness George can’t contain. He doesn’t want to tell Dream that they asked about them, the two of them.
“Is it true Dream’s in love with you, or what?” Karl had asked, a proud grin on his face while the others fell over in shock and incredulity. George had felt his mouth gape open, words fleeing him. He took a deep sip of his drink, and when they called him out, he claimed he had to drink because he doesn’t know the answer.
And that, at least, is the truth.
“Something dumb, there was nothing juicy there anyway,” George says, trying to move on. The trick with Dream is that you have to give him something else or he’ll fixate on the thing you don’t want him to. “The dares were super dumb, too, though.”
“Oh?” Dream asks and George congratulates himself on properly turning the conversation away from the awkwardness of Karl’s question, of not knowing what to say. He was so caught off guard, he almost clammed up. As far as George believed, everyone else knew there was nothing there between them. He thought they were all in on the joke. So it was out of the blue to be asked about Dream’s feelings. There really isn’t anything—they don’t have feelings for each other. “What did they dare you to do? I didn’t see any crazy tweets.”
“Tina made me try to braid her hair, which was lame,” George says, starting with the easiest one. Bless Tina for attempting to corral the chaotic energy of the night. She alone kept George from officially daring Sapnap to take a bite of his own shit.
“You know how to braid hair?” Dream asks, the same tone of voice he always does when George reveals something he’s never heard before. Dream almost takes it personally when George hasn’t revealed every detail of his life to him. It’s not George’s fault—he’d let Dream know everything if he could. He just doesn’t remember most of the time.
“Yeah, but it’s been a long time. My sister used to force me. We’d take turns playing her stupid girl thing, and then we’d catch frogs.”
“Are you good at it?” Dream asks and George loves that this is a topic he wants to get deep into. He’s such a weirdo.
“Not particularly,” George admits. “I’m not the goat, but I’m not trash.”
“Oh so you can’t even do, like, mermaid braids?” Dream asks, fake disappointment making George smile against his will. “Dutch braids? French?”
“No, none of those,” George says, giggling a little. He’s finally warm under his blankets.
“Amateur,” Dream says. “I’ll have you know I can do French braids and I almost got the mermaid braids right one time.”
“Whoa,” George says, aiming for sarcastic and winding up just sounding impressed. “I didn’t know I was talking to a real braider. Are you on the leaderboard for braiding? Going to start speed running competitively?”
Dream’s little laughs lighten George’s heart. There’s nothing better than making your favorite person in the world laugh, and these small moments—these times when it’s just the two of them in the darkness of night—they’re the times he feels closest to Dream.
“You can braid my hair if you want,” Dream offers and then they both sink into the unspoken truce—that Dream won’t show George what he looks like, and George pretends like he doesn’t mind.
“Is your hair long enough to braid?” George asks, as casually as he can, like he’s not grasping for any real detail of Dream’s—everything.
Even in person, Sapnap’s been reticent on everything about Dream. He’s teased George with knowing what Dream smells like but he also surreptitiously presented George with a hoodie he stole from Dream that George immediately put in his bed to hide it away from prying eyes. He added it to his magpie hoard of little trinkets from Dream. Even now, he reaches up to feel it underneath his pillow, the scent already fading.
Sapnap hasn’t cracked—he won’t explain what Dream looks like, and he doesn’t have any pictures of them on his phone. George knows. He looked. Sue him.
He doesn’t like to show to anyone how much he wants to know more about Dream—how he wants to know the slope of his nose and the exact shape of his eyes. He has to know the man he’s been friends with for years, the person he put his horse behind. He refuses to admit aloud that he even cares—split on appearing above all that, and wanting Dream to understand that he honestly doesn’t care what he looks like, whether he’s ugly or handsome or somewhere in between. He just wants to know.
Sapnap has been a letdown in that regard.
“What were the other dares?” Dream asks after a pause.
George casts his mind back, remembering the giddiness of being tipsy and surrounded by his friends. Even with the dumb dares, they had a great time. “I had to call someone they chose in my phone. That was stupid, they just didn’t pick up. Kind of an L dare.”
“That is dumb.”
“So they made me—oh wait, fuck, you’re going to think this is hilarious,” George says, excited when he remembers the last dare he had to do. It was so funny, the kind of thing that drinking and socializing makes hysterical in the moment.
“What?” Dream’s interest is piqued, George can tell he’s got him on the hook.
“They made me kiss Karl,” George says, holding his breath to hear Dream’s laughter—it doesn’t come.
The kiss itself wasn’t—it was nothing to write home about, just chapped lips against his own and Karl’s too strong cologne in his nose. On pain of death he wouldn’t admit to anyone, not even Dream, that the way Karl’s hands sat on his shoulders was kind of nice.
The touching, he—he didn’t realize until the first time Quackity came to visit and started sprawling all over him, how much he missed touch. Sleeping in the same bed as Quackity, feet occasionally brushing, their body heat under the same blanket kept George going for ages. The pandemic gave and took so much from him in equal measure, and a silent victim was George’s skin.
He didn’t care for the kiss, but he did like the way Karl tackled him afterward and dissolved into hysterical laughter.
“Dream?” George asks when Dream’s silence stretches on too long.
“Yeah?” Dream says, clearing his throat.
“Okay, why are you being weird?”
“You kissed—you and Karl?” Dream asks, voice affectedly light in a way that isn’t fooling George. His heart drops. Fuck. Dream is going to make this into a whole thing.
“It was just a joke, Dream,” George says.
“No, I know.” Dream’s voice is high, unconvincing. “Yeah, it was just a—why did they choose that, anyway? Like, why did they—”
George really doesn’t want to answer that it came out of the question he refused to answer, that they spent more time teasing him for his deep friendship with another man, than—he can’t put that on Dream. Not now, not when they’re already feeling fragile about Dream staying in Florida while so many of their friends are here.
And, a small part of George knows that he doesn’t know the answer himself. He couldn’t answer their questions because he—fuck. If George has to think about Dream potentially actually having feelings for him, then he also has to contend with talking about those feelings with Dream. He doesn’t want to do that. He doesn’t want to have to feel guilty about asking Dream to edit his videos or buy him takeaway or stay online with him and play a mindless game because he’s lonely. If Dream ever confesses actual, real romantic feelings to George, things have to change.
There’s a reason he doesn’t bring it up. He doesn’t want to rock the boat. What they have now? It’s great. It could only be improved by meeting in person, and one day they will.
“It’s Karl,” George settles for saying. “Why does he do anything? He thought he would make me uncomfortable and I’d pussy out, but he was dead wrong.”
“You always commit to the bit,” Dream says, finally sounding a touch more like himself.
“Exactly. I’m the greatest,” he says.
“Hey, I gotta—” Dream says, as awkward an ending to their call as always. George got used to it a long time ago and now finds it pretty endearing. “Talk to you tomorrow.”
“Okay, bye,” George says and Dream disconnects right away.
He puts his phone on his nightstand and plugs it in to charge. They’re supposed to get up early for brunch and he decides in the moment that he might not care if he misses brunch as long as he can sleep. The questions presented tonight about Dream having feelings for him get shoved down inside George. He doesn’t want to think about it, and so he simply won’t.
The last thought he’ll entertain on the subject is that even though he spared Dream from Karl’s question, he still feels like he messed up somehow.
When Sapnap returns back to Orlando, there’s a noticeable shift in Dream. George can’t pinpoint it, and it takes him a few weeks to even realize the difference. There are large blocks of time now where George has absolutely no idea what Dream’s up to.
He’s not creepy, or controlling, or—none of that. He’s just used to Dream mentioning what he’s up to for the day, or the foreseeable future. George can see meetings on Dream’s calendar, he’s even in some of those meetings, and he usually knows when Dream’s going to sleep. But now there are hours of time once or twice a week where he basically drops off the grid.
George doesn’t need to know where he is, he doesn’t. He just—he likes knowing what Dream’s up to when they aren’t in an active call. It’s the same thing as Dream liking to talk to George on his way to shoots for Tommy’s vlog.
When he builds up enough courage, he asks Dream about it.
And when he’s not satisfied with Dream’s answer, he asks Sapnap.
“I dunno, bro,” Sapnap says, taking his sweet time on his turn for online chess. “I’m not, like, his keeper. He chooses to stay at the house and I choose to go hang out and actually do things, you know?”
Somehow this is also not the answer he wanted. “So you have no idea where he is or what he’s doing when he drops off the map?”
Sapnap steals his pawn and George lets him. All part of the plan. Sapnap says, “He’s probably just sleeping, bro. Chill.”
George snorts. “He’s not sleeping.” Why would he sound so tired later in the day if he was sleeping? There’s nothing mysterious about sleeping, ergo, he would tell George if he was just going to sleep.
Seeing the dead end he is in this particular situation, he gives up and springs his trap, catching his friend in check mate.
“You’re trash,” he says before he really starts celebrating.
Months of this go by—George streams occasionally, though it’s lost the luster it once had. He plays chess, he talks to Dream, he approves merch designs. He talks to Quackity and his other friends. Life goes on while he waits for the visa.
He renews the lease on his flat for a month-to-month rental instead of the full six months. He travels to visit his mum and dad, and even takes a special trip to bother his sister at her flat with her boyfriend, and offers to pay for dinner just so he can lord it over her forever. He sends Dream pictures of cute dogs he sees around the city.
Things keep happening and George spares Dream no details, but doesn’t receive the same courtesy. The gaps in his whereabouts continue to add to George’s increasing frustration.
And then, three days after Dream’s birthday that changes.
They’re in a call one night watching the premiere of the season finale episode of Better Call Saul on George’s shared screen through Discord when it happens. The episode is good—they’re both on the edge of their seats, pausing to throw theories back and forth, and just as the episode ends and George is ready to talk about it more in depth, Dream’s breath hitches.
“What?” he asks, needing to know immediately what caused that sound. Dream doesn’t—George knows all of Dream’s sounds. He has them memorized in a not creepy way, it’s just all he has of him.
“Nothing, nothing,” Dream says, trying to wave it away, but George can tell just by the way he says it that his attention has shifted to whatever caused the sound. It was probably a message of some sort—a text, since he still has his full screen up to watch the show with George. Who would be texting him now?
“No, Dream, what is it?” George presses the issue. Whoever this was ruined the moment for him. The new episodes only drop once a week and this is the last one. This is his and Dream’s little ritual, the one hour a week he’s guaranteed to have Dream’s full attention and this person—whoever this person is—went and stole that from him.
Sure, they talk all week long, oftentimes keeping each other muted while they work simultaneously, but still. This was their time to talk and now Dream’s special brain shifted from their weekly discussion to whatever this is.
“Really, it’s nothing,” Dream tries again. George can hear him set his phone on the desk and the breath he lets out reminds George of when he’s trying to calm himself down.
That only makes George more anxious. Is there some new controversy dropping? Does he need to get on Twitter and start digging for news? A familiar sense of dread starts filling him up. He prepares for a siege war.
“Tell me,” George demands. He knows how he sounds when he’s like this, a little too childish, a little too prissy, the exact way he’s tried so hard not to be for so many years. He can’t help it, though. “Tell me right now.”
“No, no, it’s—”
“Dream.” George’s voice is firm, he needs Dream to realize he’s serious about this.
“George, it’s really not anything.” Dream’s voice is hitting all the markers of reassurance, but without the knowledge, it’s not working on George this time.
“Then tell me, idiot. Prove it’s nothing.”
George hears the sound of Dream picking his phone up, a distinctive rustle of the plastic hitting wood. “Fine. I’ll tell you.”
“Fine.”
“It’s a topless pic from a girl I’ve been fucking,” Dream says challengingly. “Is that what you want to hear?”
George’s chest feels like Dream’s fist came through the computer and punched him in the ribs. All the breath leaves his body. “What?”
“She wanted to get together tonight, but I knew our show was coming on and I told her I couldn’t, so now she’s sending me pictures to let me see what I’m missing.”
“Dream, you’re—” George isn’t sure where he’s going with this. Whatever he thought Dream’s message was, for some reason this never entered into the equation for him. “You’re kidding.”
The large chunks of unaccounted for time start to make sense if he—
“Of course I’m not kidding,” Dream says, sounding offended. “I’d show it to you, but I wouldn’t do that without—you know I wouldn’t share people’s—I’m not—”
“Chill, Dream, I didn’t ask you to send it to me,” George says. There’s a numbness spreading over his entire body, some kind of protective cover for the volatile emotions churning underneath that are out of his reach. He’ll take the numbness.
Who is she?
How long has this been going on?
What do they do together?
What does she look like?
Where did Dream meet her?
Does Dream have actual rizz?
“Well, the show is over now,” George manages to say, even through his dry mouth, “you could go over there and—yeah.”
“She usually comes here,” Dream says. They’ve never talked about this, about sex. George doesn’t know how Dream’s managed to keep this girl hidden from him, from Sapnap, too. Sapnap would have spilled to George immediately if he knew something.
“How do you know her?” George hears himself ask. He feels like he’s at the bottom of a well and there’s someone else wearing his skin and asking the questions echoing up out of him. “Does she know who you are? Is she trustworthy? Are you like—”
“George, damn,” Dream says with a lighthearted chuckle. “Let me answer some of those before you keep spouting them off.”
“Fine,” George says. He’s been staring so insistently at his PC that his eyes burn. He forces himself to blink and to take a sip of his water from the Mr. Beast cup.
“She’s—remember the girl from the Christmas party?” Dream asks. George vaguely remembers talking about this girl. “That’s—that’s her. Our moms are basically best friends.”
A rock sinks in George’s gut because that sounds like some kind of romantic shit like in the movies. He’s going to lose him, then. George knows. He’s calling it right here and now. He’s going to lose Dream to this girl and never hear from him again. They’re going to fall in love and Dream is going to drift away from him with the best intentions, but it’ll happen.
And then they’ll be nothing to each other.
“Your mums are best friends, huh? I thought I was your mum’s best friend. Her special friend, at least.”
“Shut up, do you want to hear about it or not?” Dream asks, but George knows he’s not annoyed.
“Go on,” George says. “Tell me how in love with her you are.”
“Ew,” Dream says, to George’s befuddlement. “No, it’s not—we’re just friends with benefits. We aren’t—there’s no feelings there. For either of us.”
George doesn’t believe that for a second, even if Dream seems to think it’s true. “But you’re fucking her.”
“Well, yeah,” Dream says, a little defensively. “The sex is pretty good. We’ve known each other a long time and there’s no—she’ll call me out on something if I need it and she’s not afraid to tell me when I’m sucking at something and how to, like, do it better.”
“Oh my god, she’s giving you sex lessons.”
Dream is not as embarrassed by this revelation as George would like him to be. “I mean, I guess. But it goes both ways. I’ve helped her get really good at sucking dick, so.”
“Oh my god,” George says again, desperate to change the topic now. There’s a strange feeling in his gut he can’t name, some force working its way through him that he doesn’t recognize and he finds scary. It’s like in a horror movie, the screen too dark to make anything out before a hand or a face jumps straight out at the audience.
“She’s really good at it now,” Dream says.
“How often—” George means to ask How often do you see her or maybe How often do you have sex with her, but he can’t find the words at the tip of his tongue.
“And I can make her come multiple times,” Dream brags and George can just imagine him leaning back in his chair and putting his arms behind his head, chest puffing out in pride.
“How did it—” This time George is determined to finish a thought. He spits out a little too aggressively, “How did it start?”
“It was her idea,” Dream offers. “When we reconnected at the Christmas party, she—she’s had this crush on one of the guys we grew up with, you know? Like our entire childhood she’s been so obvious about it. And when we started talking again, she suggested it.”
This doesn’t make any sense to George. “What? She just out of the blue offered to fuck you?”
“Pretty much,” Dream says. “I said no at first. I thought it would be another complication, another—another person to figure out I’m Dream but she ended up figuring it out herself a couple months later.”
“She knows you’re Dream?”
“Yeah, and she’s—George, she’s not going to sell me out or anything. She’s a good person, and our families have known each other a long time.”
George isn’t sure about that. He’s learned that you can’t be sure who’s going to let something slip. He remembers his childhood friends Chet and Eric and how close they were. He remembers the way Chet came out to him and Eric and the promises the two of them made to keep it quiet, to treat him the same. But George also remembers how Eric betrayed that promise not two weeks later. He remembers finding Chet beaten on his front lawn, the craven way Eric retreated with his new band of friends, yelling slurs at Chet.
George remembers the terrifying notion of what can happen when you trust the wrong people. He let Chet pull away from him, like George had something to do with the attack. George didn’t protest, just quietly went off to university and made new friends while he mourned the loss of two people he cared about. For all it was Eric’s betrayal of Chet, George felt like it was his, too.
He learned not to trust anyone with secrets that intimate—not until Dream and Sapnap did he find friends of that caliber again.
It doesn’t matter that Dream’s known this girl since childhood.
“She’s not going to say anything,” Dream says confidently. George wishes he could believe him, but it’s not his decision. One thing about Dream is that he’s going to do whatever he wants. He’ll listen to reason, but he’s too stubborn by far.
“You know her better,” George says. “Biblically, some might say.”
Dream laughs more at George cutting the tension than the piss poor joke.
“It’s nothing serious,” Dream tells him. “Just a way to blow off some steam since I can’t just go hook up at the club.”
The twist in George’s stomach doesn’t go away, but he has to play his part. “You don’t have to defend it to me. I just wish—”
“What?”
“I just wish you’d told me sooner.”
“Oh, you wanted to know, George?” Dream teases him. “What else did you want to know?”
The next time Dream entertains his guest, he makes sure George knows about it. Now that George has been made aware of the situation, just like everything between them, Dream wants him to know every detail. He wants to talk about it, analyze how he can do better, walk George through the whole thing.
It’s torture.
“She said I can—I mean, if you want, I can send you something.”
“Dream,” George says, caught between exasperation and desperation. He’s sitting at his desk, talking to Dream from his PC. “That’s not normal. You know that’s fucking weird.”
“We’re bros,” Dream says flippantly. “Bros do weird shit, and we’re closer than most.”
George doesn’t disagree about being bros, even though that feels like a drop in the bucket compared to what they are. Dream continues, “I showed her your picture, she thinks you’re cute. It’s fine.”
“It’s still weird, though,” George says. He rearranges his body, tucking his knee up under his chin. It’s so hot in his flat, he’s in his underwear and a light cotton t-shirt only.
“It might be weird, but you haven’t said no,” Dream points out and George hates how well Dream can read him sometimes, he really does. “I don’t want to cross your line, either, but Ciera’s into the idea. She thinks you’re lonely over there in London and you could use some inspiration to get over here to America faster.”
“I’m already going as fast as I can,” George says, not appreciating the reminder.
“I know, I know,” Dream says kindly, the only other person in the world who gets it, who understands the desire to apparate to Orlando. “This is her way of being nice to you. She’s my friend, and she knows what you mean to me.”
“What I mean to you,” George repeats. Dream never ceases to amaze him, the way he’ll just whip things out like that. George needs two factor authentication and a lobotomy before he’ll admit anything.
“You’re my best friend,” Dream says like he’s saying it for the first time. “You’re my favorite person in the world. And since I’ve vouched for you, she already knows you’re cool.”
“And that translates to sending me her nudes?” George asks warily.
“Hey, if I looked as good as her naked, I’d be sending my nudes everywhere, too. Consensually, of course.”
“Dream,” George says, this time as an admonishment. He still hasn't seen Dream’s face but Sapnap says he’s not ugly. Sapnap hasn’t budged since March, and he won’t send George pictures of Dream either, won’t even describe his face in detail. George once asked him if it would be a bad idea for Dream to face reveal, and Sapnap said no. He said the fans would eat him up entirely, and George has to trust that he’s right about that.
Like he can’t let it go, Dream adds, “I think part of Ciera, like, gets off on the idea of you having access to those pictures. So don’t worry that she’ll be uncomfortable or whatever.”
George doesn’t respond to that. He’s not sure how he feels about being a vehicle to Dream’s little sex games with his friend. And yet that part of himself that he hates is glad it’s him. If it has to be anybody, he’d rather it be himself than Sapnap. He’d rather be the one than Karl or Sam or Ant or—or anyone else. It’s right that it should be George in these games, even if the games themselves are weird and convoluted.
“Do you want them, yes or no?” Dream asks, a veil of frustration hiding his vulnerability when George doesn’t respond.
George pauses to think—there’s no one to catch them on his phone, it’s not like he lives at home and leaves his phone unlocked where his mum can stumble across them. The worst thing that happens is that he just doesn’t like them
His hand curls into a fist and he wants to pound it on the desk, but he doesn’t because Dream would hear that and read into things. George is too curious by far. An ugly part of him wants to know what it is about this girl that draws Dream in. He wants to know what she has that Dream finds so irresistible. He detests this part of himself that can’t just let things go, that he has to know.
“Yes.” It comes out clipped.
He can practically hear the winning smile in Dream’s voice. “Alright, then. I’ll send you some.”
Over the next week, Dream sends whatever pictures he gets from Ciera to George. The first one isn’t even scandalous. She’s not naked or doing anything wild, it’s almost like a profile picture the way it shows her from her shoulders up, hair styled prettily and teeth shining white in her big smile.
She’s beautiful. Of course she is. He knew she would be from the way Dream talked about her and while George can objectively realize she’s gorgeous with her tanned skin and her vibrant blue eyes, she does nothing for him.
That’s normal, though. People aren’t attracted to every beautiful person in the world, it varies. He knows it varies.
The next picture is a bit more shocking, more on the order of what George thought he’d be receiving. She’s lying in bed naked, with the tops of her breasts in frame, but cut off before any actual nudity is on display. It’s a tasteful shot and it would pass on Twitter.
Her personality shows through a bit more in the next one, taken from the same bed, there’s a mischievous smile on her face in this one while her hands cup her chest to keep her nipples from showing. George’s brain is so influencer based that his immediate reaction is that she probably had to prop her phone on something and set the timer to take the shot. This is his favorite picture, but not for the reasons it might be another man’s.
And then the day comes when he receives the first nude shot. It’s taken in front of a mirror and over her shoulder, showing her bared back, tan and smooth, and includes the curve of her hips and ass. She’s looking over her shoulder with a smirk and George gets why Dream is into this.
After that, they get more risque—photos of her in bed lying on her stomach with the camera over her shoulder showing her ass, pictures of her in front of that same mirror in expensive looking underwear with lots of lace and ribbons, sitting on her haunches with her legs spread. There’s one that’s particularly spicy of her lying in her underwear with one hand slipped down the front of her panties.
Dream continues to forward the pictures to George, but he doesn’t comment on them. George worries that Dream’s going to ask him to critique the pictures, or ask what he’s doing with them, and to that George doesn’t have a good answer. He’s not beating off to them, they don’t do enough for him in that regard, even though they’re objectively lovely pictures. But he doesn’t know what he’s supposed to tell Dream—that he is or that he isn’t. He’s not sure which one is more offensive.
Instead, he keeps the pictures in their Discord DMs, and every once in a while, he looks. He wants to see what Dream sees in her.
She’s not George’s type, is the thing. Ciera is beautiful, he can’t deny that, but neither the swell of her breasts nor the sultry look on her face can stir him. His favorite part of her body is her stomach, and for some reason she rarely shows herself in an angle where he can see it.
The pictures come semi-regularly and George starts to wonder why she’s sending so many. Dream said they aren’t like that, that there are no feelings, and he said it with a confidence that meant he believed it. But was he wrong? Does she have feelings for him and Dream’s about to drum up trouble by breaking the heart of one of the few people in the world who know him by both identities, one of the few people who has his face?
A nervous tension accompanies George for weeks and he has no idea how to bring it up. He thinks they’re headed for trouble, but can’t articulate that to Dream, and so he stays quiet. He looks at each of the pictures as they come in, but he and Dream don’t talk about it more than that.
Until Dream can’t be on stream because he promised Ciera she could come over.
“You said you would stream with me,” George whines and then hates himself for sounding like that.
“You said you were streaming way later,” Dream argues. “You said this evening, and it’s only three in the afternoon.”
“Well, it’s evening here,” George points out. They don’t often have these kinds of miscommunication.
“George, I can’t. I promised—okay, I thought I would have more time. Ciera’s coming over in like fifteen minutes, and I—”
“Oh,” George says because that’s all he can say. He’s never been subjected to knowing when they were going to… “Okay, so when will you be done?”
Dream huffs a little sarcastic laugh. “I don’t know, George, we don’t exactly time these things.”
“Well surely it’ll take you two minutes flat,” George says.
He can feel the eye roll through the line. “It takes me longer than that, George. Come on.”
“How am I supposed to know—you know what?” George says, deciding he can’t handle this right now. This isn’t an argument he wants to get into. “Nevermind. I’ll see if Karl wants to stream instead.”
“No, wait, I can—”
“Too late, Dream,” George says and then, knowing it’ll be the best way to end this, he hangs up.
The stream goes… well, it happens. It’s not his best stream and his brain is entirely too scattered while trying to keep up with Karl and pay attention to the game, meanwhile unasked for images of Dream and Ciera locked in an intimate embrace keep bombarding him. He’s not—he can’t even tell how he feels. It’s just weird to know that right now, somewhere over in America, Dream’s having sex. It’s just awkward to have that information.
Even more strange is that he knows what Ciera looks like naked, knows her from several different angles, and yet he has nothing from Dream. He has no idea what he looks like, no idea what his body might—this isn’t important.
George wrangles his brain like a shepherd with his flock, getting his thoughts back on the forged path, the safe territory.
A couple hours into the stream, he sees chat spamming Dream’s name. Sure enough, he checks his viewers and sees Dream’s name in there. He’s watching.
He doesn’t give him the attention he clearly wants. George knows he could sign into his other account, his secret account, the one the world doesn’t know about or even other content creators, just George and Sapnap—he could use that one if he just wanted to watch. Using the Dreamwastaken name means he wants attention. He wants chat to get George’s attention and George isn’t going to give that to him today.
Maybe that’s a touch vindictive, but George wants Dream to know he’s mad he ditched him for sex.
Stream ends and George begs Karl to stay in call with him, something that isn’t hard unless Karl has other projects to handle, which is often. That man stays booked and busy. When he’s not busy, he doesn’t like being alone and it’s easy to corral him into a call and force him to entertain George.
They talk about random shit for hours while different friends join and leave—Sapnap, Foolish, Corpse—and all the while George struggles to not remember that question Karl asked so many months ago—he was dead wrong. Dream doesn’t have feelings for George.
He can’t.
Two days later, Dream messages him about something stupid Sapnap said, and then they’re fine again. Neither of them mention it—they just forge ahead like nothing happened.
Dream listens to George talk about the charity football match he agreed to in a weak moment. They work on a training program for the next week so George doesn’t embarrass himself too fully. Things go back to normal. Dream continues forwarding Ciera’s pictures to him and they jump in and out of VCs throughout their days.
They part ways around noon for Dream to sleep, in the part of his sleep cycle where he’s likely to crash for eighteen hours, and George uses the time to call his other friends—Quackity talks to him while he drives and Wilbur rambles about a new song he’s working on. He even plays a few rounds of Bedwars off stream with Hannah and Sylvee. Anything to take his mind off the long wait for the visa. They ditch him, and just as he’s worrying about how he’s going to fill the time until Dream’s back online, a Snapchat notification surprises him.
Taking off his headphones, he pulls it up to see it’s a video from Dream. They don’t send each other too many Snaps, besides the occasional shit one (from George) or a cute picture of Patches (Dream). Dream won’t even send selfies on Snap, too paranoid to trust his face to any form of media. Or George.
It’s a video.
Curious, George doesn’t hesitate to click on it.
His brain can’t make sense of the moving images at first—too much peachy skin, a darker tone juxtaposed next to milky white, and then there are the noises. Squelching sounds he usually only hears late at night in the privacy of his bedroom and his incognito tab, the half wild moans of someone on the brink of pleasure. It’s—this is a blowjob. Dream’s sent him a video of Ciera blowing him, and George—suddenly George can’t breathe.
He’s too frozen to click off, too entranced, too startled—a cornucopia of emotions and only some of them nameable. But his eyes don’t leave the gorgeous mouth sucking on the tip of Dream’s cock. He feels saliva pool in his mouth inexplicably, probably a byproduct of the revulsion he should feel. Instead, he watches the perfect mushroom head slide easily in and out of her mouth, a pink tongue toying with the slit he knows sits prettily on the tip, and he feels trapped.
He can’t look away.
The video auto replays and George still doesn’t click off—a lurching in his stomach he can’t stop as it pools out like magma—hot and destructive.
Another notification comes through and George clicks on it.
Same setting, but now she’s taking that cock down further, a big hand tangled in her hair like it’s directing her mouth. Something below George’s waistband stirs. His heart’s beating erratically and still he cannot move his attention away from the screen of his iPhone.
“Are you really going to—” Dream says, cutting himself off with a low moan. His voice is deeper than normal, and George shudders to realize that’s what he sounds like when he’s horny, when he’s getting off. And now, George thinks, he really has collected all of the sounds Dream can make.
“Are you really going to send this to him?” Dream manages to ask at what sounds like great cost.
Ciera’s lush mouth pops off long enough to answer back, voice equally wrecked, “I already sent one.” She giggles devilishly and Dream gasps.
George wants to die. He thinks he might.
“No way,” Dream says, challengingly. “You—” Her lips take him in again, the phone shaky and it’s obvious now that she’s recording. George hadn’t even been able to give it a thought before. But this angle, it has to be her. “You didn’t send shit to him.”
Her cheeks hollow as she sucks really hard and then lets him slide out of her mouth long enough to look at the camera and give it a silly little wave. “Hi, George. I hope you enjoyed the show. I’ll finish him off now and send him back over.”
“Ciera!” Dream says, like he’s realizing she’s serious. Maybe he saw the camera, maybe he didn’t think she’d go that far.
“What? You said you were fine with—”
The video cuts off there and George presses down on the screen to watch it again, notification be damned. He needs—he needs more.
When the video finishes again, he thinks somewhat comically that he’s seen Dream’s dick before he’s even seen his face.
How many best friends can say that?
When Dream calls him later that night, neither of them mention it. The call proceeds like normal, except for the hardness in George’s pants that eventually fades away.
Dream’s in a great mood. And when George checks his email and finds a request for an interview for his visa, his mood soars to match.
Things are happening.