Work Text:
“a thousand miles seems pretty far,
but they've got planes and trains and cars.
i'd walk to you if i had no other way.”
***
George is tired. He feels it in his bones, a wearisome, persistent ache that begs him to succumb to the warmth of his bedsheets. Streaming for five hours straight had been far from the best idea, but his friends had pleaded desperately for him to stay online, time zones be damned.
He yawns, eyes fluttering nearly shut, when his phone vibrates abruptly in his hand. It’s a text from Dream.
“undeafen, idiot.”
George sighs, rubbing at his face with bleary knuckles. His hands are cold against his skin; the heel of his wrist pushes awkwardly into the curve of his cheek. He types a brief response.
“no. too tired.”
Instantly, his phone rings. George hesitates momentarily, then picks up. He always does.
“George.” Dream’s voice is low, smooth, a slow trickle of honey that makes George’s throat stick.
“Dream,” he replies, simply. It’s habitual, at this point, to swallow down the affection that comes with saying his name. In George’s current state of exhaustion, though, softness creeps its way in, leaking through his teeth and across the crackle of the speaker.
Dream hums quietly, a toneless noise of gentle disapproval. “Don’t go.”
The honesty in his tone is shockingly raw, raising goosebumps across George’s arms. He almost shivers from the force of it.
“I’m serious,” Dream says insistently when George fails to speak. “Don’t.”
“Dream, it’s four in the morning,” George protests weakly. In the dim light of his room, his monitor glows; pencilling his silhouette against the wall in shades of dappled grey. George uncurls his back, stretches, watching his shadow do the same.
“So?” Dream is unerring, an arrow slicing through the thin material of George’s shirt and directly into the space between his ribs. George feels the singular word hover unsteadily in the air, the flint to the bonfire. So?
“So…” he begins tentatively. “So, I need to sleep, Dream. I can’t just pull all-nighters because you want me to.” George is lying. He can – he would, without question or need of convincing.
“You can’t?” Dream’s question is phrased more like a challenge; it’s clear in the way his mouth shapes the cadences of the words, raising the inflection slightly. George forces himself not to rise to the bait.
“I can’t,” he repeats. He’s doing the right thing, he knows, but it still feels so terribly wrong.
Dream sighs heavily. “Can we at least talk for a little bit before you go? I’m done with the rest of the guys.”
He sounds light, casual, but George has long since learnt how to read between the lines of Dream’s words. He takes a selfish moment to think about how Dream only wants to talk to him and nobody else. He savours the knowledge, tucks it away into that small, obstinate Dream-shaped space in his chest that gnaws at him almost constantly.
“Sure, we can talk,” George says indifferently, like he’s not being eaten alive from the inside out by longing. “What do you want to talk about?”
He winces at his stilted conversation starter, but Dream chuckles, a familiar sound that always, absurdly, makes George think of flowers bursting into full-petalled bloom.
“I don’t know,” Dream says quietly. “What do you want to talk about?”
George exhales, sleepiness kissing the neural pathways of his brain, liquefying him at all angles. “One sec,” he mutters. “Gonna turn off my monitor.”
“Getting into bed, huh?” Dream asks, amusement suffusing his voice with warmth. George makes a soft noise in agreement, stumbling clumsily over to his mattress. He sinks into the soft embrace of his duvet gratefully, then turns his phone on speaker mode and places it on his bedside table.
There’s silence, for a moment, and George wonders what Dream’s doing right now. Maybe he’s also in bed, just like George, staring up at his ceiling as something flits, unspoken, in the thousands of miles between them.
“Penny for your thoughts?” he says, eventually, when the absence of noise becomes too much to bear.
“Hm,” Dream replies. “I was thinking about you, actually.”
George swallows. Dream is blunt, that he knows. But hearing phrases like that fall from his lips still sets George’s cheeks aflame and his pulse a fluttering rhythm.
“What...specifically about me?” George asks. It’s easier to be bold in the dark, in the odd liminal space where reality is a blurred oil painting; a Monet’s impression done in languid, fluid strokes.
“When you’re coming to Florida, obviously,” Dream says. “With Sapnap fully settled in now, it just makes sense.”
George brushes off the sting of bitterness at the reminder that Dream and Sapnap are, yes, living together in Orlando.
“We’re just testing it out, okay?” Dream had told him a month ago when he’d broken the news. “We’re seeing if it works – living together, streaming together, all that shit. And if we like it - if we think we can manage it - then I will literally be the one to buy your plane ticket, George. So you’d better have your stuff packed.”
George had nodded, the muscle in his jaw clenching. Jealousy was an ugly thing – a disease, worming its way into the hollows of George’s lungs, stifling his breath and choking his words.
He would be fine. He would be fine. He would join them soon.
“So buy me a plane ticket and fly me over already,” George says, in the present. “I’m packed.”
He is, basically. George could leave tomorrow, if he really wanted to. He could leave tomorrow, and the prospect is as frightening as it is exhilarating. George gazes out his window at the moon, hanging silver, an ethereal crescent illuminating the depths of the night sky.
“Oh yeah?” Dream murmurs. George hears the faint clicking of him typing on his keyboard.
“Yeah, I’m not kidding.”
“Great. Check your email,” Dream says, with all the nonchalance in the world. George’s brain stutters to a violent halt.
“Dream, you didn’t,” he breathes, wanting to believe he’s wrong with every iota of his being.
“I did,” Dream says, and although George can’t see his face, he knows Dream is beaming from ear to ear. “I’ve had the tab for available flights from Heathrow open ever since we first discussed all moving in together.”
“You have?” George says, disbelievingly. It would be so easy to shunt this conversation back into safe territory; to pass it off as banter between friends by calling Dream a simp, and Dream calling him needy in response, and the two of them falling into the simple dynamic of the past. But now, with him and Dream, the jokes stopped being all that funny a good while ago.
Something had shifted – George can’t put his finger on when, exactly, but he knows with such true conviction that it had – between the two of them. Gone were the dramatic, false confessions of love. They had been replaced with quieter, softer moments of affection; Dream giggling at a thumbnail glitch George had made on call for fifteen minutes straight, George texting Dream every time he saw graffiti of a smile with the caption “hey look it’s you :]”. The list ran on, unending.
Even Sapnap had said something, George recalls with sudden clarity.
“Did you know how much he talks about you? Jesus, dude, it’s insane.” Sapnap had brought up out of nowhere during a call with just the two of them last week. “Like, it’s always George this, George that, y’know?”
George didn’t know. He’d wanted to, though – wants to hear Dream say his name despite having heard him do so a million times before.
“Have you checked your email?” Dream’s demanding voice cuts across George’s thoughts, an abrupt yank back to current day.
“No,” George apologises. “Sorry, I just – it hasn’t processed properly for me, yet. I’m actually coming to Florida?” He cringes, hating the way he sounds so eager.
“You’re actually coming to Florida,” Dream confirms happily. “And it’s taken you long enough! I’ve been waiting so patiently.”
“Oh, shut up,” George says dismissively whilst fighting off a smile. He screenshots the email confirmation of the plane ticket, sends it to Quackity with ‘!!!!’ as the caption.
Dream clears his throat, a little self-consciously.
“When you come,” he says, and for the first time in George’s life he thinks Dream might actually sound hesitant, “there’s so much I want to show you.”
George thinks of dirty blonde hair, and green eyes that he’ll see as golden, and an embrace he’s been craving for years.
“So show me. Show me it all.”
***
fin.