Work Text:
Take a breath, now. Take another. Feel air in your lungs. Let your limbs return. Yes, move your fingers. Have a body again, under gravity, in air. Respawn in the long dream. There you are. Your body touching the universe again at every point, as though you were separate things. As though we were separate things.
— End Poem, Julian Gough
He mentions it without any further thought, the first time it occurs to him.
Dream is just sort of talking aimlessly about future plans while he’s doing a space, and when someone asks him if he plans to stream more often, he latches onto the thought for a few moments.
It’s something he’s been thinking about, these days. He’s never loved streaming, not the way he loves making videos, but he’s found that the further he steps away from it, the more he occasionally catches himself missing it. He can’t even remember the last time he streamed, let alone the last time he did so on a consistent basis.
“Yes, actually!” Dream answers, reflecting internally on when, if ever, he’d actually been able to hold true to such a promise. “I know, I know, you can’t trust that I actually will. But I do want to, I actually kinda miss it, I miss playing Minecraft more often.”
He’s scrolling through replies when one sticks out to him. You haven’t actually been a consistent streamer since you quit speedrunning, smh.
“Yeah—I know, I haven’t really had anything I consistently wanted to stream since speedrunning, other than, like—I don’t know, other short phases. I feel like I can’t force it though, something has to capture my attention naturally.”
Dream reads through more replies, sighing when it’s all variations of the same thing, people lightheartedly teasing him for being untrustworthy.
For whatever reason, his mind wanders back to speedrunning. It’s not something he’s even bothered to think about in ages, he doesn’t even know what the current world record is. But he can’t lie to himself, it’s a little appealing to imagine returning to it—not with the intention to actually compete for any leaderboards, just to prove a point—to prove he’s still good. That he could still be one of the best, even.
“It could be fun to try speedrunning again,” he says, thinking out loud. “Not like—I wouldn’t submit runs, obviously. I wouldn’t even be allowed to. But it could be cool, just to try and beat my old times, and stuff. To prove I’m not totally a fraud.”
He’s quickly distracted by something else that someone asks him, and he forgets all about the idea until a few days later, when he’s sitting in his office with George brainstorming ideas for videos.
Dream looks at the word speedrunner where it’s written in thick black letters on his whiteboard, used in countless potential title ideas. He wonders, briefly, if it’d make his content better if he were to get back into speedrunning, to have a dedicated reason to play Minecraft all the time again.
He’s read at least a thousand variations of the same overused jokes across Twitter and Reddit—how can he still call himself a speedrunner when he doesn’t even speedrun anymore? It’s not something he’s ever taken as serious criticism, but he does wonder if maybe there’s a slight point buried somewhere in there. Maybe it’d be easier to come up with ideas if he were more well-versed in current strategy and techniques, if he could feel himself constantly improving like he did when he had a reason to be competitive.
“Do you think I should try speedrunning again?” He turns to look at George, spinning in his chair to face where he’s leaned back against the wall with his legs crossed on the spare bed.
George’s nose wrinkles. “What?”
“Like—think about it. We could get so many videos out of that, like, if I wasn’t washed. It would be easier to have me compete against multiple people, and stuff. And—”
“Why speedrunning, though?”
Dream shrugs. “Because I was good at it. I kind of miss—not speedrunning itself, not that much, but I miss having a reason to try that hard. I miss having, like, concrete goals.”
“You were kind of obsessive about it,” George says, without any trace of malice. If anything, Dream thinks he sounds a little concerned. “We had to, like, remind you to drink water, do you remember?”
“Well,” Dream scoffs. He does remember that when he’d been really fixated, George did have to periodically force him to take breaks, not dissimilar to the way he still currently will distract Dream when he’s been holed up editing for days at a time. “I don’t think I’d get that into it again. I wouldn’t aim for world records, or anything. I just kinda want to beat my old times.”
George frowns. He looks conflicted, and Dream isn’t sure why—he’s not asking George to do anything, and if he thinks it’s a waste of time, he’s not sure why George wouldn’t just say so. He’s never had any issue giving Dream honest feedback before.
“You think it’s a bad idea,” Dream says, filling in the blank when George still hasn’t said anything. “I’m not committed to speedrunning again, it’s fine. You can tell me if you think it’s stupid.”
“It’s not—I don’t think it’s stupid.” George sighs, his brow furrowing. “I just—I don’t know. People still don’t shut up about the stupid cheating thing, wouldn’t you just be giving them more to complain about?”
And—oh. George is worried about him.
He’s not wrong, either, Dream definitely doesn’t expect the world’s warmest welcome back to a community that he still finds himself needing to explain himself to, years later. But truthfully, spite is almost an even better motivator to give it another try.
He knows that George doesn’t like the idea of something like this, though—he’d never admit it, but Dream knows that he worries, that all of the bad faith criticism and deliberate misjudgement of his character probably gets to George more than it gets to Dream.
“It might be kinda rough at first,” Dream sighs, rolling his chair over to nudge George’s knee with his own. “But I think people will chill out when they see I’m not attempting to get world records or anything. And I’m not, like, an obnoxious kid with a massive ego anymore.”
“Debatable,” George teases, and Dream bursts into laughter. “Could’ve fooled me.”
“Okay, whatever,” Dream scoffs. He knows he probably laughed harder than the predictable joke actually warranted. “Seriously, though. I want to try again, just to see if it, like, can even hold my attention.”
“Why do you want my validation so badly?” George laughs, rolling his eyes when Dream just shrugs in earnest. “You can do whatever you want.”
“I mean, yeah, but—you’re my partner.” George’s nose wrinkles, as if he doesn’t know exactly what Dream means. He raises his eyebrows, just because he also knows how easy it is to get Dream flustered. “Okay, shut up, not like that. All I meant was that I value your opinion. God forbid.”
George’s expression softens, like he can’t even help it. “Well, I think you should value your own instincts. If you think you’d enjoy it, then—just do it. You know that I’ll—whatever.”
You know that I’ll support you no matter what, Dream hears.
“Okay,” Dream decides. “How hard can it be to relearn, right?”
-
Dream feels like he may as well be learning how to play an entirely new game.
He watches the most recent world record, and then the one before that, and—he understands most of what he’s seeing, but it all happens so incomprehensibly fast that it blurs together. It used to be impressive just to get into the Nether in less than ten minutes—now people can beat the game in less than seven.
He’s also surprised to find that everyone still runs on 1.16.1, that apparently nothing new has been added in recent versions to make runs any faster than they were when he stopped playing. He looks up a few runs on the most recent version, curious if it would feel any more attainable to shoot for a 1.20 record with less competition, but instantly remembers why he doesn’t want to do that when he’s confronted with the existence of piglin brutes, and the inability to boost gamma.
Dream does his research—he downloads a program to reset nine seeds at a time, because apparently that’s something everyone uses now, and then he downloads the bot to calculate stronghold distance based on eye throws, even though he sort of resents the idea of using it. It feels like cheating, even if it’s allowed.
He decides that he definitely needs to brush up on his skills before he even attempts real runs, so he spends hours just practicing bastion routing, then one-cycling.
Some new strategies are easy enough to pick up—it only takes Dream a couple tries to figure out how to find buried treasure without a map—and some he can’t ever see himself actually attempting during a run, due to the ridiculously low chance of actually pulling it off. He gives up on mastering zero cycling after about twenty minutes.
Dream definitely doesn’t think he’ll be pulling off sub-10 minute runs any time soon, but he feels good the more he practices, the more he takes the time to learn. It’s been so long since anything in the game felt like an actual challenge, since he had any solid goals to work toward or anything to indicate concrete progress. After a week of grinding, he’s able to consistently get all the eyes he needs without messing anything up, and he’s reluctantly gotten the hang of calculating the stronghold location.
What Dream hates, more than anything, is resetting. He feels like he spends more time re-rolling seeds than he does actually playing the game, which frustrates him more than any gameplay ever could. He wants to play, he wants to feel like his chances of doing well are determined first and foremost by his own skill, not just because he happens to roll an unbelievably lucky seed after hours of restarting in hopes of getting one.
It’s this newfound resentment for the monotony of resetting that leads him to an interest in a completely different category of speedrunning—he gets curious about all advancements.
The last time Dream followed speedrunning, it was considered impressive to be able to get all the advancements in less than 10 hours—but it was still a relatively unpopular category, then. He’s not surprised at all when he finds out this, too, has been optimized into oblivion, and the current record for 1.16 is less than two and a half hours. What he is surprised by is the discovery that the same one person has held the record for years, continuously out-doing himself and competing in a league of his own.
He’s watching one of Feinberg’s older world records—a two hour, fifty-five minute completion—the first ever run below three hours. From a gameplay perspective alone, Dream is instantly impressed by his mechanical skill, but what he finds most fascinating is his decisiveness, how masterfully he’s able to make split-second judgements without a moment’s hesitation.
Dream understands very quickly why no one is able to compete with this guy. With the VOD still playing on one monitor, he opens Feinberg’s channel where he uploads all his runs on another, and sees that not only is he known for his AA category domination, he has a bunch of “Winner’s POV” tournament VODS uploaded too—clearly, he’s just that good at Minecraft in general.
Dream feels a small spike of jealousy. If he wasn’t constantly feeling pulled in twenty different directions with other fixations and career moves and priorities, if his passion for speedrunning hadn’t been so tainted by controversy, if he still played Minecraft on a daily basis—could he be this good?
Without any warning, George barges into Dream’s office and disrupts his train of thought. Dream jumps slightly in his chair, slipping his headphones off and resting them around his neck while he turns to see what George wants.
“I thought you were working.” George wrinkles his nose, his eyes narrowing at Dream’s screens. “You didn’t answer my text. I assumed that meant you were working.”
Dream scoffs. “This is work. Well—kind of. This is research.”
“Research,” George repeats, amusement bright in his eyes. “I’m pretty sure you don’t need to watch streams to know how to play Minecraft, I seem to recall you playing it before. At least once.”
“This isn’t even a stream,” Dream argues, shaking his head. “I’m watching—I kinda want to learn how to do all advancements. It’s like—less dependent on the seed, if you’re good you can make it work even on a not-great seed since you get an elytra anyway, stuff doesn’t have to all be super close. It looks fun.”
George’s brow furrows, but he’s clearly intrigued. He shuts the door to Dream’s office behind him before hopping up onto the bed in the corner and making himself comfortable. “Doesn’t that take forever?”
“Not anymore,” Dream explains, unplugging his headphones and pressing play on the video to let George watch. “This guy—Feinberg, he’s like—he’s goated. He just keeps beating his own record, he’s down to two and a half hours now.”
“Feinberg?” George seems to recognize the name, to Dream’s surprise.
“You know him?”
“I mean—no,” George laughs. “But he was in that event I was in—the Hunt and Run thing. I teamed with him before I died, he seemed nice.”
Dream hums, relieved to know that someone this prominent in the speedrunning community was nice to George. He always worries that his own controversial presence has ruined opportunities for George or Sapnap to make friends—or even just conversation—with other creators because both of their reputations are so tied to his own. It’s an undeniable weight off his back to know that, apparently, this guy was at least polite enough for the sake of performing well in an event, which he supposes is much better than the outright hostility he’s conditioned himself to expect from speedrunners.
Dream expects George to ask for something, to nag him until he’s convinced to go do something George would be more interested in, but instead he rests his chin in his hand, propped up with his elbow on his knee.
Something warm settles in Dream’s chest. George couldn’t care less about speedrunning, but he took an interest in it when Dream did the first time just because he saw how excited Dream was about it. He has even less of a reason to start caring about it now, when Dream hasn’t even entirely made up his mind about whether or not he wants to get fully sucked into this world all over again, but George is along for the ride nonetheless.
George cares because Dream does. It shouldn’t be that simple—but somehow, it always is.
-
Dream starts making notes as he watches more of Feinberg’s past runs, noting what things he changes as his times get faster, what the biggest risks and time losses seem to be. He hasn’t decided to start attempting his own runs yet, he thinks he may want to save that for a stream, so he’s committed to studying the most difficult mechanics before he humiliates himself.
More often than not, George joins him. It becomes a sort of routine—whenever neither of them are busy with anything else, when Dream is in his office and George knows he doesn’t have any videos to be working on, he lets himself in and Dream automatically turns off his headset and switches to playing the VOD out loud.
George usually spends most of the time scrolling on his phone, not nearly watching as closely as Dream does, but Dream always appreciates the company nonetheless, and his occasional commentary is always amusing.
“He kind of reminds me of you,” George blurts out, startling Dream out of his focused tunnel vision.
“What?” Dream pauses the video, realizing it was probably very pointed for George to make this comparison while Feinberg was in the middle of a tangent disproving a dumb comment someone made in chat, backed by his own encyclopedic knowledge of Minecraft mechanics. “Is that—is this a good thing, or—”
“Yes, stupid,” George scoffs, rolling his eyes. “You’re like—I don’t know. The way he talks reminds me of you, kinda. Especially when he’s really focused, he reminds me of how you get when you’re excited to talk about something.”
Dream opens his mouth and then closes it, struggling to put into words what he’s thinking. There’s just something sweet about George thinking of him—seeing traces of him in other people who are unapologetically passionate about what they love to do. It makes his face feel warm.
“Thanks?” Dream manages, dumbly. “I’m taking that as a compliment.”
“Why are you, like, being an idiot over me saying something mildly nice.” George brushes off the sincerity with his typical sarcasm. “Is it that surprising for me to be nice to you?”
“You’re always nice to me,” Dream says quickly, unable to be anything but honest. George is always nice to him, even if he’s reluctant to let that go acknowledged.
“Well.” George shrugs. “I was just saying, like—I don’t know. It’s admirable, like, being able to dedicate yourself to something just because you love it. That’s—that’s so you. I don’t even know if that’s a compliment, it’s just how you are.”
Dream feels inexplicably like he could burst into tears. George isn’t often the type to freely offer up observations like this. It’s one thing to know, rationally, that George cares about him—that George thinks highly of him. It’s another thing entirely for George to so easily state something that he admires about Dream, without even needing to be prompted.
“You see the appeal, then?” Dream deflects slightly, tilting his head back toward the screen. “Do you think I’d be any good?”
George nods, not even hesitating for a moment. “You’re good at anything you care that much about.”
Dream’s face heats up again. It’s embarrassing how compliments from George feel like they’re worth a thousand times more than praise from anyone else.
-
Dream doesn’t mean to get obsessed—he really tries, at first, to let this just be a hobby, something to fill his time when he doesn’t have anything to work on. Unfortunately, he’s never really been great at balance.
Time gets away from him easily, once he starts actually attempting runs. Well—once he sort of attempts runs. He runs on set seeds, at first, wanting to practice the mechanics and get used to actually pulling off all the necessary steps in the right order without also needing to rely too heavily on RNG.
It’s a good strategy, he thinks, when he’s able to pull off his first ever completion the same day that he first begins making attempts—it’s not a fast completion, his timer reads nearly 6 hours when he finally respawns the dragon for the final achievement, but he feels proud of himself nonetheless. Dream has no idea how long it’s actually been since he sat down at his desk, but—he realizes that his stomach aches as soon as he wonders how long it’s been since he ate something.
As if on cue, George opens his door and barges in without knocking. Dream knows it has to be George before he even turns around, because Sapnap would’ve knocked.
“Dream,” George says, a bizarre scolding tone to his voice. “You’re ignoring me again.”
“I’m not—I told you I was practicing runs! I know I answered.” Dream protests, completely certain that it hasn’t been that long since—
“Dream,” George repeats, shaking his head. “That was—you replied to me, like, fourteen hours ago. You do realize that right? Have you not moved since then?”
Dream frowns. Okay—maybe time really got away from him.
“Um,” he starts, suddenly very aware of how hungry he is, and how heavy his eyelids feel. “I mean—I just did my first completion. So I knew it was like, well, more than six hours, obviously, but I didn’t—”
“You finished a run?” George’s face lights up, and Dream breaks into a matching grin.
“Set seed,” Dream clarifies. “I haven’t tried random seeds yet, but—it’s a start! I might be able to stream without humiliating myself after, like, maybe another day of practice.”
“How about a day of sleep first?” George raises his eyebrows, his tone light but a hint of genuine concern evident in the way his forehead creases. “And when was the last time you ate anything?”
Dream doesn’t like the idea of George being worried about him. He shrugs, not wanting to lie, but knowing that the truth would inevitably make his frown deepen.
“Dream,” George says his name again with a sigh. “I’ll heat up the leftovers from when your mum was here.”
He turns on his heel and leaves—apparently heading to the kitchen—without waiting for a response.
Dream groans when he turns back around to shut down Minecraft, the screen suddenly feeling too bright for his sore eyes and his stomach aching now that his focus has been broken. He turns off his PC, accepting that George has a point, he could probably do with a break before he makes any further attempts.
-
Dream’s return to streaming speedruns goes about as well as it possibly could go—meaning, there’s quite a bit of backlash, but it’s nothing beyond what he was prepared for. It’s all the same talking points he’s heard a thousand times, things he doesn’t even feel the need to respond to, because he knows they come from a place of bad faith.
For the most part, people are excited. His audience is ecstatic when George pulls him into a call, under the guise of “providing content” because “Dream is too focused”, but really Dream knows George just missed him.
They’ve grown clingier, spending nearly all their free time together while they’ve had plenty of it to spare. Dream knows that although he’d never admit it, George was bored without being able to keep Dream company.
Dream may have been slightly distracted once George joined—he may have caught himself making more careless mistakes than he typically would, too busy listening to George’s rambles—but it doesn’t feel noticeable. It’s his first stream speedrunning in years, and he’s trying out a new category no one has ever seen him play before, so he thinks most of the slip-ups go unnoticed.
In the end, each of his attempts are killed by poor RNG outside his control, and he’s too tired to keep resetting after giving up three hours into a run that died to awful biome luck.
He’s scrolling through his timeline later that night, most of it consisting of clips of George from his stream, when his attention is caught by his own name in the caption of a clip that isn’t from his stream.
He clicks on the video, his eyes widening when he instantly recognizes the streamer’s voice—it’s a clip of Feinberg talking about him.
[Reading a chat message] Did I see that Dream is learning AA? Yes, man, do you really think there’s any chance I didn’t fucking see? I got, like, twenty million messages about this already—like, as if I need to give him permission or something, dude, more attention on the category just means more people playing, more interest, and that’s always a good thing! I don’t want to see anyone whining—no, he’s not submitting anything for leaderboards, guys, stop being stupid. At least know what you’re talking about if you’re going to bitch about it—he said like a thousand times that he’s just running for fun, he’s not trying to compete for records or anything. Yes, obviously I was watching, I literally had to. I knew people would want me to talk about it and I was also just curious. I was impressed, honestly. Say whatever you want about Dream, I’m not gonna stop you, but I was lowkey impressed by how much he did his research, like, it was actually surreal hearing Dream explain how shulker yeet works to 15 thousand viewers. And he explained it well! Credit where credit is due, man. I was actually impressed. I think the only thing that stuck out to me—I mean, I didn’t watch the whole time, but the only thing that I noticed while I was watching—is that he needs to work on his nav, he kept having to ask chat for directions to his portals and stuff which was always a huge time loss. But that’s something you just get better at playing more, that’ll just come naturally honestly. Considering he said he just started learning a couple weeks ago, assuming that’s true, he’s picking it up pretty fucking fast. He could easily sub-4, if not sub-3.
It’s validating in a way that Dream didn’t even realize he needed to hear. He doesn’t particularly care to rehabilitate his image, not anymore, but it’s nonetheless a breath of fresh air hearing someone call out their audience for unfair criticism.
-
Dream sets his sights on a sub-4 hour time. It feels like an attainable goal—and not only because Feinberg said so.
His first ever on-stream, verifiable completion is four hours and thirty-seven minutes, which—37 minutes sounds like a lot of time to shave off, but Dream knows he can do it. He starts getting a little pickier with which seeds he plays, accepting that sometimes he needs to reset even if he’s already made it to mid-game.
He gets a 4:16 completion two days later, his hands shaking violently through the entire endgame, and instantly ends the stream without saying goodbye. He’s too shaky to play another, too frustrated to talk through all the things he should’ve done differently that could’ve easily saved sixteen minutes, and too hyped about the massive improvement to be overly analytical yet, all at the same time.
Naturally, Dream runs downstairs to find George and talk to him instead.
He’s sitting on the floor in the living room when Dream finds him, his back up against the couch with Naomi curled up in his lap. She startles at the sound of Dream’s loud footsteps, but her eyes have already shut again by the time Dream makes it over to the couch.
“Dream,” George scolds him in a whisper, exaggeratedly jutting out his bottom lip and shaking his head. “The kids are sleeping, be quiet.”
Dream chokes back a laugh, his heart lurching with fondness when he notices Milo lying down behind George’s shoulder, stretched out and taking advantage of the otherwise unoccupied couch.
“Why are you on the floor?” Dream whispers, gently sitting down beside Milo and letting his knee knock against George’s shoulder, by all means closer than he needs to be.
“Milo wasn’t letting her sleep,” George pouts, stroking Naomi’s back protectively and glancing down at her tiny sleeping face. “I sat down to, like—get between them, because she was trying to sleep and he kept trying to play, but then she fell asleep on me and I just—didn’t want to move.”
Dream feels like his heart might explode.
“You’re like the cat whisperer,” he teases, aiming for a joke, but in the hushed tones they’re both speaking in, it lands somewhere too sincere. “Nick is going to be pissed when he gets home and sees that you’ve stolen his cats.”
“We stole his cats,” George argues. As if proving his point, Milo shifts and paws lightly at Dream’s hand where it was resting on the couch. Dream complies easily, scratching behind his ears and petting him lightly once he settles again and seems to fall back asleep.
“Milo likes you the most,” George continues, when Dream looks back down at him. “He doesn’t listen to me. He doesn’t respect me.”
Dream bursts into unbearably fond laughter, because there’s something equal parts sweet and ridiculous about the way George insists on talking about the cats like human children.
“Milo doesn’t listen to anyone,” Dream points out, “and I don’t think he respects anyone, either. Well—only Patches.”
“That’s not true,” George argues, a stubborn crease between his eyebrows. “He listens when you tell him to stop doing something—like, at least fifty percent of the time. He listens to me zero percent of the time. It’s probably because you’re, like, Patches in human form.”
“What?” Dream sputters, officially unable to follow this train of thought. “What does that even—why are we talking about this? I came down here to tell you I got a new personal best, I actually forgot.”
“You got a new PB?” George’s eyes light up, his mouth curling into a grin.
“4:16,” Dream says, running one of his hands through his hair and then shaking it out. “So fucking close.”
“Oh my god?” George cranes his neck to look back and meet Dream’s gaze, brushing his shoulder against his knee in an excited nudge that Dream knows is intentional. “Half an hour shorter is crazy. You’re going to get it next time you stream.”
“Well, I don’t know about that.” Dream sighs. “I got really lucky in this one. I got a trident, like, less than 3 minutes before thunder. And if I hadn’t already had a channeling book from the stronghold I doubt I would’ve had time to—”
“Shut up,” George scowls, elbowing Dream’s calf. “You can review it and pick it apart for me later, let me be excited first.”
There’s something so George about that—cutting him off and refusing to let him venture into self-deprecating territory, while instantly clarifying that he is interested in Dream’s rambling and will still want to hear about it later. Dream slides off the couch and joins him on the floor, wrapping an arm around George’s shoulders in a half-hug to satiate his need to be closer without disturbing Naomi.
“I am,” George says quietly, his gaze to the floor. “Excited for you, I mean. Were you nervous?”
“Extremely,” Dream whispers back. He tries and fails not to dwell on the feeling of their hips pressed together. “I don’t think I’ve ever been that shaky, not in ages anyway. I forgot how much, like, adrenaline I get from this kind of thing.”
“It’s kind of—funny,” George says, his breath hitching before he gets the word funny out, as if there was something else he contemplated saying instead. “I never got to see you like this. How into it you get.”
“You’ve seen me be super into other things,” Dream points out, “music, coding—”
“Not the same,” George argues. “That’s work, technically. That’s like—creating something that serves a purpose, ultimately. Speedrunning doesn’t serve any purpose, you’re just—like, passionate about it for the sake of it.”
“So, it’s a waste of time?” Dream jokes. He doesn’t want to say what he’s really thinking—you keep saying things like this, lately. He’s afraid to put George on the spot, to draw attention to how kind he is, to reveal how disarmed Dream feels.
“Stop being an idiot,” George groans, his voice so soft that Dream thinks he wouldn’t have even heard him if he were still sitting up on the couch. “You care about it. That’s what makes it so—fascinating. It’s why people love to watch you do it so much.”
“People, including you,” Dream teases, squeezing George’s shoulder and leaning a little further into his side. “I’m sorry if it’s—a lot. I know I’m so, like, obsessive, when I get like this. I’m sorry you have to keep reminding me to take care of myself. I promise it’ll pass eventually.”
“I just told you to stop being an idiot,” George grumbles. Dream’s pulse jumps in his throat when he looks up at him, when he realizes they’re so close he can see each and every freckle scattered across the top of his cheeks. “I wish I could’ve been here the first time you were ‘like this’.”
“No you don’t,” Dream answers quickly, shaking his head as if he can shake off the distant memories of what was—at the time—one of his lowest moments. “It’s all so—tainted. I’m glad it wasn’t your problem to—deal with me.”
“I could’ve helped,” George says, frowning just slightly, like he’s making an effort not to. “I should’ve been here.”
Dream recognizes the way his voice falters—sees the hesitance for what it is, everything that they don’t talk about hanging precariously in the silence while Dream finds his voice.
It’s something that still seems to loom over each and every interaction they have, when they aren’t careful. In nearly every sense, their lives are shared—but somehow, Dream still can’t escape the fear that they’re on borrowed time. That just as quickly as George settled into his permanent place in Dream’s life, into all his visions of the future, he could slip away.
Dream knows, rationally, neither of them have anything left to lose. Only everything.
“It was—rough,” is all Dream can manage to say, because George doesn’t even need to hear it, he already knows. “But this is better. It’s like—a second chance, kinda, to create actual good memories that aren’t going to get tainted by anything. A redo—or, ha, a reset. Like in—”
“Like in speedrunning,” George finishes, like the word-association was already on the tip of his tongue before Dream had gotten to it. “Tell me when you go live tomorrow,” he adds, absentmindedly scratching behind Naomi’s ears when she stirs in his lap.
“I didn’t even say I’m streaming tomorrow,” Dream laughs, “I hadn’t decided that yet.”
“You will.” George is smiling when he says it, a tiny bit smug. “You got a 4:16. You’re going to stream again tomorrow because you know you can sub-4 now.”
Dream shrugs, not bothering to argue since he’s probably right. George knows how he thinks—maybe too well.
-
It takes around two hours of playing out slow-pace early games only to inevitably reset before Dream gets a good seed.
He calls it inside his head the second he enters the nether and spawns inside a bastion, and a fortress loads in within his render distance. This is the one, he almost says out loud. It has to be. He catches himself before saying as much out loud, not wanting to jinx it. But it just feels like it’s the one.
When he’s an hour into easily the best run he’s ever played, George knocks at Dream’s office door before letting himself in without waiting for a response.
“Is this good pace?” He asks, his brows furrowing when Dream pauses the game and turns to see what he needs.
“Really fucking good,” Dream says, his voice coming out a little strangled. He’s been dead-silent for the last ten minutes, too focused to even spare a glance to his chat or attempt to commentate.
There’s so much to remember in an AA run—it’s nearly impossible for Dream to focus on the tracker and make sure he doesn’t miss anything and attempt to be entertaining, especially since he’s never been much of a natural streamer. Which, of course, George knows.
George also knew Dream was on good pace before walking in, because he’d been watching. Dream’s chat had been quick to point out the instant George popped up in the viewer list, and George knows enough from watching VODs with him and watching Dream practice that he has to have known he was on a crazily good pace. Dream knows that’s why he’s here—to take off some of the pressure.
George doesn’t talk too much, mostly keeping quiet to let Dream focus, and when he does speak it’s usually just to break up any particularly long silences. He’s good at this—fitting himself effortlessly into Dream’s space as if he was always meant to be there.
Dream is just barely below the three hour mark when he finishes collecting ancient debris and begins to set up for the final, most complicated advancements.
The only crucial thing he’s still missing is a thunderstorm, to finish with trident advancements—the most heavily RNG-dependent element of a run, and the most common thing to be missing from otherwise record-setting times. Dream hasn’t allowed himself to fixate on it, since there’s nothing he can do, and he’s already decided he’ll count this as his new personal best even if it is a thunder-less run.
Then, as he’s flying over to a pillager outpost to get Bad Omen for the first of the two times he’ll need it, the sky darkens. George notices it before Dream does, and it’s the sound of George gasping and jumping to his feet that makes it click in Dream’s head—this is the one.
Dream plays out the rest of the run on autopilot. He refuses to freak out, to panic and risk throwing this opportunity when he knows what he’s doing, he knows he’s capable of pulling this off.
George has somehow produced a second chair from thin air and moved to sit directly beside him, which Dream doesn’t even notice until he pauses to take a deep breath after he finishes with How Did We Get Here? and George passes him a bottle of water.
“You’re almost there,” George says, so gently that Dream thinks he could cry if he weren’t so focused on consciously keeping his hands steady.
Dream doesn’t let himself look at the timer until he’s back in the End, until he’s placed the last crystal and the animation of the dragon respawning has started to play—he’s done. It’s just a matter of seconds left, he’s just waiting for the last advancement to pop up in chat, and the timer—
“3:24!” George shouts out the time just as Dream’s eyes land on it, faster than Dream has even processed the number itself. “Dream!”
“Holy shit,” Dream chokes out, too breathless to shout, staring open-mouthed at his screen. “Holy shit! George. George. I did it?”
“Well, I’m pretty sure 3 hours is less than four hours, last I checked,” George teases, but he’s beaming when he grabs onto Dream’s arm and forces him out of his chair, shaking it and jumping up and down while Dream is still processing. “You destroyed sub-4. 36 minutes, Dream. You’re insane, you’re literally—”
He bursts into laughter that cuts whatever he was going to say when Dream’s brain finally untangles itself, and he pulls George into an embrace so crushing he might actually lift him off the ground, just for a second.
“Oh my fucking god,” Dream whispers, breathless and muffled when he buries his face in George’s shoulder, latching onto him and refusing to let go. “I’m still good at this.”
“I told you,” George whispers back, and Dream hears nothing but pride. “I told you, didn’t I?”
Dream lifts his head, finally, and he truly does intend to let go of George and release him, but their eyes meet and suddenly Dream is face to face with the brightest smile he’s seen George wear in weeks, maybe months. His eyes are lit up with so much completely earnest excitement, so much satisfaction, like he never doubted for a second that Dream was capable of this, and—he didn’t. Dream knows he didn’t, because George has had nothing but complete unconditional faith in him for as long as he’s known him.
George—who has kept him company throughout every single one of his most inconvenient, ultimately unimportant hyperfixations and never once complained, who treasures all of Dream’s accomplishments and takes as much pride in them as his own, who somehow always knows exactly what Dream needs even when he’s too much of a coward to come right out and ask for it—is smiling up at him with so much admiration and patience and love worn so transparently all over his face, that Dream can’t even consider doing anything other than leaning down to kiss him.
He’s not even thinking when he cups George’s face with his hand and pulls him in, because he doesn’t need to. Whatever excuses he’s always made not to do this are the furthest they’ve ever been from the forefront of his mind when George’s eyes widen in the split-second before their lips meet, and somehow, impossibly, he smiles even wider just as they collide.
It’s definitely not a perfect kiss, because they’re both smiling too much for it to be more than a peck and Dream’s hands are sweaty and in a single, terrifying moment of panic he almost pulls away and does something stupid like apologize before George covers his hand with his own, guiding him to press their lips together more firmly and—oh, George is kissing him back.
There’s something almost frantic about how fervently George moves his mouth against Dream’s, something impatient and aching and—with a soft gasp, Dream realizes—desperate, like he’s been waiting for this. Or, more likely, like he never thought he’d get the chance to have this.
George swallows the noise Dream makes and pulls him impossibly closer, one of his hands tangling in Dream’s hair at the base of his neck so naturally that it makes his knees feel weak. Dream is suddenly all too aware of his own hands and what he’s meant to do with them, brushing his thumb over the faint stubble along George’s jaw and feeling the way George nearly shudders into the touch, and—Dream knows this is it.
He knows it with the same certainty that he’d felt like he was going to beat his personal best—and then did. It’s the same certainty with which he’d known he wanted a life together, a career together, that he’d offered George a place in his videos and his home and his future and his heart—sometimes, Dream just knows.
As soon as George kisses him, Dream thinks it might be the most sure he’s ever felt of anything. He wants this for the rest of his life—and he’s not afraid. Because George kisses him over and over and it feels like a promise—like a sure thing. An inevitability.
It’s only when Dream backs into his desk and knocks his chair out of the way that he remembers—for fuck’s sake, he’s still live.
“George,” Dream whispers when they break apart, praying his microphone sensitivity is low enough not to have picked up any of this. “I need to—”
“End your stream,” George interrupts, loud and clear, his pink and kiss-swollen lips curling into an incredulous grin.
Dream considers ending without saying a single word again, partially because he knows how wrecked his own voice is going to sound, but more pressingly because he hears how George sounds, and Dream can’t stop staring at his mouth, and he thinks he might die if George doesn’t kiss him again and—
“Okay, bye guys, Dream is being an idiot,” George says, leaning over Dream to grab at his mouse and tabbing to end his stream. “Sorry for the—awkward silence, thanks for being here, and stuff. We ran to go—um, tell Sapnap. Yeah, uh, that’s why we weren’t talking. We’re going to go—celebrate now. Bye!”
Dream holds his breath until he’s absolutely certain he’s no longer live, and then starts laughing so hard he needs to sit down on the bed to catch his breath.
“Sapnap isn’t even here,” Dream chokes out, shaking his head while George just pouts and rolls his eyes. “That was—so ridiculously suspicious, they’re going to—”
“Oh, because you were so helpful,” George whines, grabbing onto Dream’s hand and wrapping it around his own waist as he sits down and leans into him. Dream presses a kiss to the familiar crease between George’s eyebrows that always appears when he frowns exaggeratedly like this, because he’s thought about doing so probably a thousand times but now he can—now he knows he can.
“It was just funny,” Dream says, still grinning like an idiot. “It was—cute. You’re so cute.”
“Stop.” George shakes his head, but he can’t hide the way his eyes soften and the corners of his lips twitch. “Is this—okay, whatever, actually. I was going to ask something stupid.”
“Tell me,” Dream insists, pressing another kiss to George’s forehead when he starts to protest, then the bridge of his nose. “George. You have to tell me.”
“I was—okay, I know it’s dumb.” George sighs, squeezing Dream’s hand. “I was going to ask—like, I know this irrational—but this isn’t just—it’s not just adrenaline or hype or something, right? Like, you actually want—”
“Baby,” Dream doesn’t even mean for the pet name to slip out, but he doesn’t regret it when he sees the way George’s blush deepens. “Just to be clear, I’ve wanted to kiss you for way longer than I’ve wanted to get a sub-4.”
George scoffs, but Dream doesn’t miss the way his smile softens, or the way any remaining traces of tension seem to melt away and he sinks further into Dream’s side.
“Good,” he mumbles, resting his head against Dream’s shoulder. “I thought so, I just—you know. Wanted to make sure.”
“I’ll tell you as many times as you want,” Dream promises, pressing his lips to the top of George’s head. “Always.”