George was eleven when his mother showed him how to tuck his baby teeth into a small pile of soil and water it until the pile sprouted a tiny black pair of leaves.
He had grown up surrounded by magic like it was nothing. When they were sick, his mother stirred something deep green and bitter smelling on the stove until George could breathe again. His uncle reading his sister’s palm every time he visited them in London was the greatest game in the world. Both of them would giggle when he dramatically announced that she was going to be a world famous actress and travel the world and that singer in the pictures she had on the wall would fall desperately in love with her, followed by some stuff that seemed a bit more realistic but was no less sweet. And at the heart of it all, the trips to Saint Peter’s Churchyard, they began before George could read. Some of the first words he learned to recognize were the ones that made up his great-grandmother’s name, chiseled into uneven gray stone and adorned in little green vines.
But that was the first time George had ever done it himself, rather than simply watched or had it done to him.
Childhood memories were always blurry, regardless of their importance, and this one was no different. But there were two parts that stayed with him, crystal: when his mother handed him a small box full of his teeth and told him this was the most important part, and when he felt the magic rise up through his fingers. Just a tug, warm and deceptively gentle. Tingling electricity rising up through his arms, like he had fallen asleep on his hands. The most important part: “if you want to call upon that feeling,” his mother had told him. A warning, but hardly presented like one. “You have to give it something of yours.” Physical. Or otherwise.
The physical part was easy. Whatever it was, whatever force that his family was tapped into, it was hungry. And it liked flesh and blood and bone and all those other little pieces that made humans humans, but not in a particularly scary way. It wasn’t like George was still using his baby teeth for anything else, anyway. And for most things, that was all it took. A small pearly tooth or two, tucked into a pile of dirt or a few drops of blood from a needle pricking his fingers, and they bloomed into a musty black flower that twisted around his wrist when he reached out to touch its petals. It left stains, like oil, on his fingers, and it only lived as long as it took for whatever he asked for to be fulfilled. A small sacrifice, for a tiny bit of good fortune or protection.
Things got harder, after he met Dream.
-
Dream became Dream while George was sitting on a bench at Saint Peter’s, a wrinkled grocery bag filled with graveyard dirt resting against his bright blue sneakers. The stone bench was freezing and his gray sweat pants were thick but not thick enough to keep his thighs from going numb from the cold, and that was half of what he was thinking about when Dream’s voice traveled through the thin white wires of his earbuds.
“If we’re doing this, we need to have everyone’s cards on the table.” Dream was a good leader. He had the voice for it; he had the personality for it. Magnetic, the type that pulled you in and made you want to give him everything you could. Maybe that was just George. Maybe it was the feelings that he recognized, but was putting off doing anything about for as long as he could. But it seemed like it was something that would extend to everyone else too. Should extend to everyone else, maybe, if they wanted this thing to work.
All cards on the table. The bag of dirt from his great-grandmother’s grave felt heavy against his ankle. It wasn’t a secret, per say. His mother hadn’t told him and his sister to seal their lips, take it to the grave. George shivered. That phrase felt less silly and more, like, binding, when he was surrounded by a couple centuries worth of dead. It wasn’t a secret. It also wasn’t not a secret. And it wasn’t the sort of thing that seemed like it should be explained over a Discord call, to someone who had never seen you in a way that mattered. Who you couldn’t prove to that you weren’t bullsh*tting, that you wouldn’t bullsh*t. George bit his lip, and the cold air tasted like pomegranates against it.
But Dream didn’t live in the world of spells and magic and potions and everything. He was practical and intelligent, and George was too, except for this one thing. Dream probably had his secrets, too, but in a way that was beautifully normal. He lied to his parents about who he was meeting up with that one time when he was fifteen or he still slept with his childhood blanket even as it became threadbare and colorless. Normal things. He probably thought George had normal secrets, too, and it mattered less for some reason, but George assumed that Sapnap was the same as well. Dream wasn’t looking around corners for anything weird, anything that was George’s specific brand of weird. And George knew this, because what Dream followed up with was:
“We have to, like, know we love one another enough or whatever. That sounds stupid. But you know what I mean.” There was something in Dream’s voice that sounded younger than normal, more unsure. Maybe that was what made him sound younger, actually. He sounded shy. Love was a weighty word, even for those who threw it around more easily. “If we’re doing this together, it has to be, like, together. Until the end.”
“Dude.” That was Sapnap. His microphone was worse than Dream’s, but probably better than George’s for the simple reason of being at home in his parent’s house in Texas rather than outside along a busy road using the microphone on headphones that had come for free tucked into a phone box. George shifted again, angeling his body so that his shiny silver jacket hopefully blocked the wind from his headphones at least a little. “You know I don’t f*ck around. I want this for us. With you. And George.”
George made a face, just for himself, at being tacked on like an afterthought, but it didn’t really matter, particularly not when he had thought of Sapnap in the same way just a few seconds earlier. Besides, what was Dream if not the sun that they were both orbiting? It made sense, in a dumb way. Even though it definitely wasn’t the same for both of them.
George tucked his head back into his hood. His mother had cut his hair recently, scooping up the short dark strands that littered the small part of the kitchen counter she had him lean over while she went at his head with a razor and depositing them safely in a plastic bag. She knew a protective spell, one where you burnt a loved one's hair with carefully chosen flowers, and she had been doing it for him and his sister since they got their first haircuts as small children. He didn’t think it protected him much from the cold. He felt like a sheared sheep. His ears were freezing.
“Yeah,” George said, and his voice echoed loudly in the cemetery. A car honked down on the street and a dog barked in response. “I’m okay with forever.”
A gust of wind drowned out whatever Dream said next, and George thought he heard his great-grandmother’s rough, faint voice on it. He wasn’t good enough at listening, yet, to know what she was saying.
Yeah. It really wasn’t the same at all.
-
An important thing was, George thought, that he never let it tamper with the numbers. The YouTube statistics and the algorithm that were Dream’s own book of tricks. He did the types of things his mother had done growing up; light a candle and put in a quick ask to whatever ancestor he knew had made a deal with their magic in life if they could in death maybe keep Dream from falling into a pool full of alligators or being swept away by a hurricane or whatever other misfortunes could befall someone living in Orlando, Florida who hardly left the house. He wondered, briefly, sometimes if his ancestors had envisioned themselves doing something a bit cooler than checking up on some great-great-grandnephew’s troublesome crush. His grandparents had a house, this big one, outside of London, with long windows that had always scared him as a little kid when they went to visit and a grassy hill outback that the fog rolled over early in the morning. There was a hallway in the middle of it, full of family portraits. George had to pass through it every night when he went to sleep in his uncle’s old bedroom, and he never felt smaller than under their gaze. Strict looking women and tired men, or tired women and strict looking men. Kids dressed up in uncomfortable looking clothing and the odd pet cat. They were, apparently, the past feeders of the magic. Who George could sometimes reach out to now and hope for an answer. The last time he went there, before covid, he had walked up and down the hall and worried about how many of them knew about the things that were buried inside of his chest. The things he didn’t ask for.
But those weren’t this thing that he didn’t ask for. He never buried his teeth in soil and asked for something that would further their careers, and it wasn’t some great moral standing on his part that he didn’t. It really wasn’t about him at all. It was Dream. George imagined, sometimes, mostly on the late nights where they were both – okay, and Sapnap, sometimes – caught up in visions of the future. George had never been good at anything psychic. His sister, who had taken after their uncle in both dramatics and clairvoyance, had teased him for it and attributed it to a supposed lack of emotional intelligence when they were teenagers. His mother, who like him had a knack for the practical skills, had brushed his overgrown bangs to the side and said that it had nothing to do with that, that it was just by chance. She had said that it didn’t make him any less sweet, and the way that he stuck his tongue out at his sister the second her back was turned on them had perhaps undermined that statement a little bit.
But George wasn’t good at the predicting the future part. When Dream talked about moving in together and George envisioned them laying next to one another in the dark, it was pure imagination. He dreamt, sometimes, that he told Dream everything. Told him what it was like stomping around in the cemetery. How most of the time, they gathered dirt from his great-grandmother’s grave, that she had died when he was a baby but his sister had said that she was the most powerful witch that their family had seen in generations. That she made the magic work for her in a way that it didn’t feel like she was half at its mercy too. Most of the time, they gathered dirt from her grave, but sometimes it was just Mary Wollstonecraft’s. Just Mary Wollstonecraft. George thought she might have been a relative, somewhere along the line, but he had never done the genealogical research to prove it. They should do it together, maybe. Him and Dream. He imagined telling him that.
He imagined telling him about the box of teeth that he kept tucked into the stand alongside his bed and the anxiety that came with it being a little lighter every time he picked it up. He thought about showing Dream the tiny pinpricks that lingered at the tip of his pointer finger on his right hand, hardly visible but still there. His mother had given him a ring with a needle that poked out of the top for his twentieth birthday, and he kept it tucked in a desk drawer. Dream would take his hand, right? He’d take his hand and he’d press his lips to George’s scarred finger pad even though it didn’t hurt, never hurt, and George would feel warm and safe and loved. Known, too.
It was silly fantasies, the fantasies of someone who was in love and trying badly not to be. He knew, though, if they did end up living together, he would have to tell him. Five years were a long time to keep any secret. And he knew Dream, and he knew what Dream would ask. Using it to further their careers when Dream had worked so hard to do it correctly felt like the sort of thing that was unforgivable.
Leaving was a scary thought. He would hear the bells of Saint Peter’s, sometimes, if too long passed since his last visit to the cemetery. They were huge bells, magnificent, and their ringing echoed around his apartment – because he moved out, eventually, and his mother made him promise to make sure he set up the same protective measures that she had at their home – like a haunting. He didn’t know what this thing that followed his family was, but he knew it had something to do with the church. Lurked around in the bell tower and occasionally climbed down to follow one of them around. What would happen, if he left? Left left, with no intention of ever coming back. Nobody had ever tried before, and the idea of being the first was a little bit daunting.
But like he had said. Things became harder, once he got to know Dream.
Blowing up like that came with consequences. That was the way George thought about it – the same way he did the magic. You get what you want, and you have to give something up. It made his stomach hurt bad when he saw Dream’s name trending and knew it was for something bad, but he understood it. A transaction. Dream and the internet, their relationship was transactional, and he had accepted it the same way that George had.
It wasn’t until things got worse, that he couldn’t pretend that he was helpless anymore.
The speedrunning thing, it was worse, in the sort of way that tasted like copper against George’s teeth. And it just didn’t end. Months and months of worrying on Discord calls and worrying even more when Dream abruptly said he had to go. Things between them, things between all of them, had always been easy, and it wasn’t that they weren’t easy now. There was just an extra thing there, one that sat heavy in Dream’s lungs and George’s heart and whatever organ Sapnap held his emotions in too. Everything was different, even when it was the same as they had always been. They posted videos, they streamed, the numbers grew. It just didn’t feel the same.
It was late, for both of them although more so for George, and Dream had been quiet for a while now. Just the click of his keyboard, his mouse, and the creak of his chair. It was a safe set of sounds, a familiar one, the sort of thing that could easily put George to sleep in his own desk chair. His legs were pulled up and his head was tilted to the side, lazy and comfortable. He knew that he had to hang up soon, or at least get into bed, but there was something about this moment that felt peaceful. A tiny part of him hoped that it was over. That their lives were going to stop falling apart and this all would feel like it was a good thing again.
The clacking of Dream’s keyboard felt like it was filling every part of George’s body, up to his ears and down to his toes. He dropped one of his legs and gently propelled his chair back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. It felt like the rocking chair, back at his grandparent’s house. Despite the unsettling atmosphere of those trips, that had always been enough to turn George’s body soft and pliable. To make him relax. “I was thinking,” George said, and his voice felt a bit heavier than usual. He rubbed his eyes; he really was sleepy. “Like, earlier. When I come to Florida, I’ll have to, like, totally change how I dress. It’ll be too warm out for hoodies and sweatpants. You’ll be sad about that, huh?”
The last part was a joke, or at least something that looked somewhat like a joke, and George waited for Dream’s laugh. The thing that everyone in the world got to hear and talk about but only he got to hear like this.
It didn’t come. Dream’s typing paused. “George.” He hesitated, and George didn’t know what it meant but it made his heart feel like it was curling up inside his chest.
“What?” George said, and he tried to sound casual, maybe dismissive even. He didn’t know. The next part sounded too panicked though, and maybe it was. Maybe that’s what he was feeling. His face was a little too hot. “You know I was joking, right?”
“What?” Suddenly, Dream sounded like himself again. “No – that’s not.” George closed his eyes. “I know. It was funny. It’s not that, it’s…” He trailed off, and it wasn’t like Dream – no, not Dream. It wasn’t like them for talking to be so hard.
George had never been one to make things – conversations, rather – that seemed like they were going to be difficult easier, but he’d do it for Dream. Of course he would. He’d hand the next line to him. “What is it, then?”
Dream’s voice was small, young. “I just don’t know how good of an idea it is for you to come to Florida anymore.”
You know what it feels like, when someone tells you something and it feels like your heart, like, inhales for a second? Like it does something it's not supposed to and gets caught up over itself before evening out, although on edge now because if it happened once, it could happen again. When you wake up and that’s the first thing you think about and you feel wrong before you’re really awake enough to feel anything. That was what George felt. His mouth was hollow and his ears felt like they were underwater and, suddenly, he was sweating, or he was going to start sweating, or he should be sweating because why the f*ck would Dream say that? Why the f*ck would Dream say that.
Everything felt too loud. George swallowed, once, twice, and he choked out a reply. “Why not?” He wondered if that sounded as much like stone scraping against metal to Dream as it did to him.
“It’s not, like, because of anything you did,” Dream explained haltingly, and it was probably supposed to be a kindness. It didn’t help much, but that wasn’t Dream’s fault. George’s heart was pounding out the rhythm of the church bells he grew up under. The sound, the music, really, was normally a comfort to him but now all he could think about was being buried in the dirt that had raised him. “It’s not, like, safe here right now. I think we should wait until everything has calmed down, you know?”
That second part wasn’t supposed to be the part that made George feel better, but it was the part that did. Because Dream was lying, and in a way that made George feel less like he was dying. He had always been one who seemed set for martyrdom, hadn’t he? Out of the two of them.
“Okay,” George said, and his mind was already snaking through his apartment, taking stock of the things he needed. “I understand. We’ll wait.”
-
George had done minor protective spells before, but this one was different. Everything was different, down to the way that electricity tingled over his skin as he counted out his baby teeth. Magic wasn’t an exact science, rather something holistic and – he couldn’t think of a better way to describe it, okay – vibes based. It was frustrating, to him, someone who was all science and math which, while hardly perfect and exact, at least wasn’t based fully on intuition. But he had learned to know what it felt like, how to just sort of know what to do.
It felt right, dumping the entire bag that held his baby teeth onto his kitchen counter. It felt right, when he grabbed two of the lavender candles his mother had carefully wrapped in cloth and tucked into one of his bags when he was still in the process of slowly moving out. The wax was smooth against his fingers as he positioned them on either side of the pile and struck a match. He hadn’t turned on the lights, but he hadn’t realized that they were off either until the light from the match bathed his face in an orange glow. It was easy to see without it, when he had someone else guiding him. Something else, rather, if he wanted to be what was probably more technically correct.
George knew he had one last storage container – meant for fruit, it had displayed across the front when he bought it – full of graveyard dirt from his last trip to the cemetery, but something propelled him out of his apartment, and onto the train, and he quickly found himself walking down the dimmed streets of Bournemouth, in the direction of Saint Peter’s.
He realized, quickly, that he didn’t have his phone, and that seemed like a poor idea for a number of reasons ranging from what if he was murdered to what if Dream needed something. But it suddenly seemed deeply impossible to turn back, not that he had really been thinking much of it before. It was an easy thought, slipped in among his seamlessly by someone else.
That, probably, should have been the moment when he realized the gravity of what he was doing. But, in the moment, he was too busy focusing on following his great grandmother back to her own grave.
It wasn’t until he was standing in front of it, staring at the letters that had seen the clumsy strokes of his fingers so many times in childhood, that the airy, drunken haze faded from around him fully. George blinked, and then shivered as he realized for the first time that he was freezing. Ill prepared, in numerous ways. He didn’t have anything to collect the dirt in. Because that was what he had been sent here for, of course. More dirt. Or fresh dirt? Most of his understanding of this process was based on guesswork, so he wasn’t sure which explanation for being guided here was more accurate. It seemed logical that perhaps the magic faded from the graveyard dirt the longer amount of time it spent out of the graveyard and sitting in the same closet that George used to store his merch hoodies or shoved under the sink in his bathroom if he was particularly cramped for space. But, then again, did logic dictate the properties of magic f*cking soil, or was he just trying to force the parameters of his reality on something that so obviously wasn’t truly part of it? A lot of existential questions, there were, involved with magic. That was probably George’s least favorite aspect to it. More so than the whole slow cannibalism thing or the middle of the night quests to a dark and closed to visitors, by the way, cemetery.
Something brushed against George’s hand, gentle, but with enough sternness to get him to do what it wanted. He bent down, crouched in the dirt and soaking the knees of his sweatpants, and he began to scoop up handfuls of it.
When he found himself back in his apartment and, more importantly, in front of a mirror, dirt cascaded down his entire front, staining a hoodie that he liked a lot, like he had gone sliding through the mud. He had carried the dirt that way, clutched against his chest frantically in a way that his grip rarely was. George was all soft touches, finger tips gripping to the edges like he was a gecko or something. That was Dream’s comparison, by the way. He had said it while helping George edit one of his own videos, pausing the footage so that he could laugh about it. Whatever was compelling George, it didn’t want him to hold it like that. It had left its own fingerprints against his back, too, streaked in dirt, and he could only see them when he strained to twist his back around in the mirror.
But that hadn’t come until later. When he found himself back in his own apartment, covered in mud, it hardly occurred to him to change, or to worry about the dirt he tracked in all over the floor. He just carried it to the table and dropped it over his teeth. The candles had mostly melted, while he was gone, leaving just a low glow and lots of purple wax that combined with the dirt to make some weird grainy sludge. It was probably the messiest spell George had ever done. Certainly the messiest, actually, and the only one that had him questioning as he gazed at it and the flames made his pupils go all weird if he was going to need to replace his kitchen table when it was all over. If a giant purple and brown stain in the middle of it and a weird earthy scent that would never quite wash out was going to be off putting for future visitors.
But there was something beautiful about it, too, in the type of way that made George feel weird the longer he looked at it. He had never seen a dead body. Well, he had, but he didn’t remember his great-grandmother’s funeral. He had been too young. But he imagined this was what it was like, when you peered into someone’s coffin and they looked beautiful, but not right. This was beautiful. But it wasn’t right. It was just candles and teeth and dirt, but he had an odd sense that he wasn’t supposed to see them like that.
A whisper twisted around his head. Do it. And he sat down at the table, and he let the dirt and wax envelope his hands.
George’s mother was a musician. She played the piano and she played the viola, and she had sung when she was in school still. There was a CD, tucked by the television at home, her college choir singing some Fauré piece with her on the lead solo. George’s dad had liked to play it, on cold winter mornings and days when things felt particularly sweet and nostalgic, and he’d tell George and his sister as they giggled that he had gone to the concert it was recorded at and the second he heard her start to sing “Clair de lune,” he had known that he had to marry her.
George’s mother had always flushed pink across her nose the same way that George did and said that the story was ridiculous, and not to mention untrue because they had known one another long before that concert, and he had in fact already asked her out once and she had turned him down because she was focused on her music. Besides, she didn’t even sing anymore. She played the piano at Saint Peter’s for the children’s choir, and she played the viola in the orchestra.
But it wasn’t true that she didn’t sing, because when she did magic, George’s mother sang it. Small rhymes and short melodies that she composed herself, asking for whatever it was that she wanted. George was a musician in his own right, sure. He had taken drumming lessons as a kid and could play the ukulele and the guitar a little too. But he didn’t sing, and that wasn’t how he asked. He just thought, so hard. George had always been good at caring a lot.
Electricity or static or fingertips ran their way up his arms, and he took a shaky breath as he tried to tune out the mushy texture that surrounded his hands. He tried not to think about his teeth lost inside of it. He tried not to think about how they were never there anymore when he cleaned up afterwards. He tried not to think about how, sometimes, he thought that he could feel the dirt pulsing, but he was never sure enough that it wasn’t just the blood running through his veins or his heart throbbing in his chest. This always felt like running a marathon. Rather, what he imagined running a marathon felt like. But he always got the best sleep afterwards.
George let the sensation flow up his arms and into his chest and neck. And he thought about Dream. The sound of his voice when they were recording and he was so happy to be in the place that he was supposed to be. The way he would laugh at every joke or dumb thing that George did, whistling like a tea kettle as he tried desperately to catch his breath but kept getting caught off guard by his own laughter over and over again. He thought about how, lately, that laughter was harder to prompt out and, when he did manage, because of course George could still make Dream laugh, it sounded a little different than it used to. A little heavier. He thought of the weight to Dream’s voice, these days. The way he was quieter over calls, and the way he didn’t sound the same when he talked about recording. There was an anxiety there that hadn’t been before. Dream had always been so sure of Dream. The concept, the person, the f*cking channel. That’s what George thought about. He thought of how much he wanted that back. How badly he wanted Dream to be safe again and to feel safe again. He thought about Florida, and he thought about freckled arms wrapped around his shoulders.
The dirt buzzed around George’s arms as the candles got even lower. They would go dark, soon, and the spell would be over. He took a shaky breath, and it caught.
The magic asked, in a way that it hadn’t before. A voice, accented in the same way that his mother’s was. Quiet, and strained.
More.
George would give a lot of things for Dream. Of course he would. He had been for years.
He curled up his fingers, wax and dirt clumping around them, and he let it take. Indiscriminately. Of course he would. It was Dream.
-
George woke up in the middle of the afternoon the next day to a dream about being buried. Trapped in a tight box that smelled of wood and mildew and something like cleaning chemicals, but not quite right. The dirt, the same feeling as that which he had gathered the night before, fell over top of him and filled his lungs until he was choking and there was nothing left for him to breathe. That was when he had woken up, wrapped in clean clothes and staring at his ceiling. Light from the windows flowed in even through his curtains, gently illuminating everything. Somewhere, a bird chirped. It reminded him of the songs that his mother used to sing, back when he was little and couldn’t yet deal with nightmares on his own.
Maybe he should feel bad, after all that. But he couldn’t. He felt better. The tides were changing.
The bird chirped again, and it sounded like bells. The winds, rather.
-
Four days after that night, Dream apologized over Discord.
Things had lightened up quite a bit, or at least Dream was feeling better about it. George hadn’t seen a hit tweet on his timeline sh*t talking his best friend in almost forty-eight hours, a record, and that seemed like as good of an indication as anything else that the spell was working.
Things had been weird, since the spell. For George at least. He didn’t really know what he was feeling. Some weird mix of relief that Dream was laughing again and waiting for the other shoe to fall. Letting it have whatever it wanted had felt like a good idea in the minute, when he was desperate and out of teeth, but now it made him nervous. It wasn’t like he understood what any of this was. He wanted to ask his mother. She’d be upset. He wanted to ask his sister. She’d call him stupid and then tell their mother.
He tried to push it out of his mind. When Dream asked if he wanted to test some mod with him, George had said yes.
“Dream!” he yelped as an angry looking spider lunged at him. “Help me! I’m going to die!” He was, in fact, on seven hearts. He hit it with a wooden stick and it bounced back before pouncing on him again.
“George.” Dream’s voice was undercut with laughter, and something like sunshine warmed George’s chest. “Get in the house! I haven’t even turned the mod on yet.”
George scrambled away from the spider – five hearts, now – and quickly closed himself in one of the village houses. A villager looked at him and he looked back. The two of them stared at one another for a while.
“You know,” Dream said after a few seconds of silence save the click clack of his keyboard as he tried to set up the mod. “I’ve been thinking.”
His pause was long enough that George had to interject. “Really? That’s new.”
“Shut up,” Dream said, but his voice was fond enough to make George wiggle in his seat. “I was thinking about what we talked about the other day. About you coming to Florida.”
George’s good mood died, fast and painful. The irrational urge to be mean rose up in his throat for a second, but it died as quickly as it had come. He wasn’t cruel, not like that. And, most of all, not to Dream, even if it had f*cking hurt him. It was hardly a new revelation, that he would let Dream yank his heart out of his chest without doing anything to fight back.
“Okay?” Maybe his voice was still a bit too strained, his tone not unbothered the way that he would like it to be. George ran the sleeve of his hoodie in between his fingers, the motion a little bit frantic. His heart was beating too fast.
“I was, like, freaking out a bit.” Dream sounded apologetic, but it was the for what that kept George’s anxiety high. “It was a bad week. But, like, it was an overreaction, you know? Things are getting better; they’ll be even more better, by the time that you get here.”
George’s fingers slowed, finding a place in the soft fabric. He was wearing the Dream hoodie. Dream’s hoodie. It felt like good luck. It felt a little bit like love.
Dream wouldn’t say it. But then again, neither would George. “So you’re not giving up my room to Sapnap?” he asked, and Dream laughed. A real laugh, the whistle kind that sounded the same as the kettle his mother used to brew tea. George smiled, an instinct.
Finally, he felt like he could breathe all the way. There wasn’t another shoe waiting to fall. It was a new year; it was spring. It was just them.
-
Summer and Autumn passed easy, or as easy as it could when you were in the wrong place.
Content, Discord calls, trips to the cemetery. Live on Twitch half wondering if anyone else can hear the bells constantly tolling in his ears. For his sister’s birthday – in the middle of summer – she flew into London from wherever she was performing that week and the two of them made the trip to Bournemouth and Saint Peter’s together. It always felt weird, attending service with everyone else, when George knew what the two of them worshiped – worshiped. The word made him feel sticky and unclean – had nothing to do with whatever everyone else prayed to. The church wasn’t built for it. It had just taken up residence within it. Like black f*cking mold. It was there, that George was the most aware that he was constantly breathing it in.
They listened to the choir sing some hymnal George didn’t know the words to but remembered hearing their mother practice when they were kids. His sister mouthed along with it. They both held their hands in their lap the same way, although his always somehow looked more awkward.
“Something’s off about you,” his sister said, later, standing at the base of Mary Wollstonecraft’s grave. While George preferred going to their great grandmother, his sister preferred the theatrics of calling upon the spirit of the mother of feminism. Someone had given her a biography of Mary Shelley much too young. “Different.”
“Your hair is literally a different color than it was the last time I saw you.” George pushed his own hair off of his forehead. He was sweaty, and it was much too hot out. He sort of wished he was at home, with the air conditioning and Dream’s voice and, you know, mostly the air conditioning but also quite a bit Dream.
“That’s not what I meant, freak.” She knocked her hand against his wrist, friendly. Comfortable. “It’s your, like, aura.” The elbow to his side at his huff over her word choice was considerably less friendly. “Don’t scoff; it’s true. There’s something weird, like, absorbing it. Or clinging onto it, I guess.”
Like a parasite, George thought, and he swallowed. “I did a spell. At the beginning of the year. Like, a big one. I don’t think I’ve paid it all the way off yet.”
There was a distance there, now, that made things different than they would have been if this had occurred six months previous. His sister gave him a look. She’d always been good at that, at making him feel young and dumb and wrong, and she had only gotten better at it as she got older. It was probably all that f*cking theatre training. Or the heavy eye makeup that she had donned in his dirty bathroom mirror that morning. When she had stepped back into the kitchen, he had asked if that was appropriate for church or not – a genuine question; it wasn’t like George was f*cking Anglican or the normal type of person who attended Sunday services at a historic church – and she had shrugged and said that too much eyeliner wouldn’t be the most blasphemous thing that they did while they were there.
“What could you possibly have asked for that you’re still paying off?” There was more curiosity in that question than there was judgment, but George just shrugged and didn’t say anything. His sister always asked a lot of questions. He didn’t think he knew how to answer all of them as they pertained to Dream. Besides, there was something deep in his chest – the thing that she had seen? He didn’t know where exactly on his body one would find his aura – that told him that he shouldn’t talk about it. It being that weird night, among other things. Being in the cemetery in the middle of an afternoon in August, it was hard to imagine his great-grandmother or anything else for that matter climbing from their graves.
“Whatever.” His sister sighed, and she pulled out two small knives from her purse. The ceremonial type, sharp and more beautiful than they were dangerous on any practical level. She handed one, the smaller one the stars and the moon carved into the handle, to George. He wrapped his hand around it, feeling the familiar grooves. Her own was all flowers, vines. The more detailed of the two. “Ready?” she asked, and he nodded.
The two of them pressed their knives to their palms and let the blood drip over the grave. George didn’t know what his sister wanted. It was hard, with the distance. They weren’t as close anymore. For him, he closed his eyes, and he hoped for soon.
-
“No, you aren’t listening to me. Hello? Stop laughing. There are, like, so many options. It’s a reasonable question to ask, especially if we’re going to be living together.
Dream – loud, happy, voice streaming like bright yellow light through George’s speakers as he slowly propelled his desk chair back and forth with his ankle.
George choked a little. “What? That makes it sound like you’re, like, plotting something.”
George had his camera on, but Dream didn’t. Obviously. He supposed that clarification was unnecessary. Still, knowing that Dream’s eyes were on him hardly prevented George from sitting slouched in his seat, curled up and comfortable.
“No it does not,” Dream said, his voice doing that thing it did sometimes where it sounded like he had pushed it up, scrunched against the top of his mouth and his nose. “It’s a perfectly normal question to ask after I was literally reading you a tweet about the topic.”
George rolled his eyes, making sure that he was looking directly into the camera as he did so. “You answer it first then, idiot. What would you want to be done with your body?”
Dream made a soft noise, thoughtful. Like he hadn’t already known his answer before he even posed the question to George. Asshole. George smiled so fondly that he had to force himself to tamper it down when he remembered that there was a camera honed in on his face. It was hard to remember, sometimes, that just because he couldn’t see Dream, that didn’t mean that Dream couldn’t see him. It was a miracle that – he thought at least – Dream hadn’t worked everything out already. Make everything mean whatever you want it to. It’s probably right.
“I think I like the space one,” Dream said, and his voice was careful like it had involved a lot of consideration. Like that just happened to be the subject matter of the tweet that he had read to George aloud. “I like the idea of, like, getting to do that. I know it’s so crazy and, let’s be real, never going to happen unless f*cking Mr. Beast builds his own spaceship and is like I strapped the biggest YouTubers onto what’s basically a missile; do you think they’ll make it back in one piece? Stick around until the end to find out! And I, like, die holding hands with f*cking Jake Paul and Markiplier burning up in the atmosphere. What was I talking about?”
“Having your ashes shot into space,” George said helpfully.
“Right. I don’t think it’s going to ever, like, happen, but if anyone ever approached me and was like hey, we wanna send you to space, I think I’d probably take them up on it.”
“You’re probably too tall,” George interrupted, and he swallowed down the urge to demand that Dream stop fantasizing about ways to get further away from him, partly because he didn’t need that part of himself to be let out where anyone else could see it and partially because that so obviously wasn’t what Dream was doing at all and accusing him of it would just upset him and George would feel like the worst person in the world. “They have height restrictions for astronauts, don't they?”
Dream scoffed. “What? You’re so dumb. Obviously they would have accounted for that. But, anyway, I like the idea of, like, becoming part of the universe. Like even if I never get to see space, tiny pieces of me are floating around up there forever, becoming dust on asteroids or whatever happens to random stuff floating around in the empty space between planets.”
George smiled, head tilted automatically to the side. f*cking Dream. “I read about this theory in school,” George told him. “That life on Earth started because of, like, an asteroid that had little bits of bacteria or whatever from another planet colliding with it. Maybe you’d make, like, a whole planet of little Dreams.”
That made Dream laugh, even though, always leaning towards punctiliousness, he had to point out the flaw. “I don’t think you can, like, reproduce from someone’s ashes. Can you?”
George shrugged, letting his shoulders linger up around his ears. “I don’t know. Can you?”
He could hear the tiny huff of Dream’s laughter, not loud and wheezy like it was sometimes, but soft and intimate and dear nonetheless. “You still haven’t answered my question, you know,” he said. “Do it. You have to.”
George thought about being old and wrinkly, his hair going white and Dream, like, balding. Everyone would think they were old retirees moving to Florida to escape the cold up north, and nobody would know that they were there first. That they belonged there. Unquestionably, forever. The logical answer: he’d follow Dream wherever he went. He’d let himself get shot up into space if Dream did it first. It would be a planet full of little Dreams and Georges.
But the bells. They’d been louder, recently. George thought it was because he’d been thinking about the visa so much. Thinking about leaving. Five generations of his family were buried in that cemetery, the last sacrifice to a force that sucked them dry their whole lives in exchange for being a source of power forever. He had known since he could walk that he was to follow. That someday somebody else's kid was going to be scooping up dirt from his grave and using it to make their own stupid decisions. But nobody had accounted for Dream, back then. A f*cking wall George was flying towards.
George imagined himself in the cold England dirt and Dream floating around space. It made his stomach twist a little, but thinking about anything else did too.
He shrugged, nonchalant for the camera. “I don’t know. I guess I’ve never, like, thought about it.” Lying was way too easy but, then again, was it a lie? He’d never thought about it in any way that mattered. He closed his eyes. The bells rang louder, and it made his head hurt. “Same, I guess. Space is cool.”
Dream called him such a liar. George didn’t fight back because, well. He was in ways that Dream couldn’t even imagine.
-
It was good, for a while. But it always came to collect.
The thing was, after that one big spell, George didn’t stop. He knew that Dream fancied himself as the protective one between the two of them. He had this idea in his head that George was small and fragile and breakable, and that it was his responsibility to make sure that he didn’t die to a zombie or burn himself cooking or get crushed too hard by the pressure of the internet. George liked it, sure. He liked making himself small and he liked screaming out for Dream every time a mob went after him and he liked the idea of Dream being able to wrap his entire body around him and shield him from everything in the world. But Dream had always needed protecting too, if differently. His heart was too big, or too soft, or too poorly shielded, and that was where George came in. It wasn’t anything crazy. Just basic protection spells. He didn’t think he was risking too much. He paid his way with a few drops of blood and Dream was safer. A million dark, oily flowers bloomed and died on his window sill. It was an easy risk to take.
So he guessed it was just that one night, that one misstep, that brought him to the visa denial.
He hadn’t realized that was what the email was, so he hadn’t called Dream up to open it together like they had been talking about. Maybe that was a relief. Maybe that was the magic offering him a small kindness. After all these years, didn’t he deserve one?
George didn’t think he could have handled Dream’s worry, when he saw the word denied in bold and ended up bent over the sink before he could even process that he was moving. It was obvious to him, immediately, what had caused this. The wet clumps of dirt he ended up coughing up until he thought he was going to die were simply redundant. The small white teeth that rested in his sink even after he cleaned it up were simply gross. Something cold and heavy swirled in his stomach, ate at his lungs. He couldn’t breathe. He had let it take. Take take take take take take. He thought it would take years off the end of his life or something. He’d lose his channel; Twitch would go under. This was so much worse. Dying sooner seemed more manageable than spending more time without Dream. More time in London. More time without the goddamn visa.
Bells. He pressed his hands to his ears, but they didn’t quiet. He had thought that they had been louder recently because he was leaving. He didn’t think that they were f*cking mocking him.
It wasn’t until much later – he had cried a little bit, and then he had called his mother, and then he had cried again for longer this time because oh my god, this was his fault – that it even occurred to him that he needed to tell Dream. How would he tell Dream? How would he tell him that it was George’s fault?
It was a stupid fear. He didn’t have to. Dream apologized to George, like there weren’t audible tears in his voice. He should have known better.
Maybe it was wishful thinking. Maybe George’s chest felt like it was going to explode because he needed to tell someone. He hated keeping secrets from Dream, and it felt like that was what he was always doing. It was tell him that, or tell him something worse.
He did tell him something worse, on an early morning in January.
It was cold, and George hadn’t made a trip to the cemetery in weeks. He had used the end of his graveyard dirt up just a little bit before, but he hadn’t been able to muster up the motivation to brave the outdoors. Hell, he’d barely been able to muster up the motivation to brave the threshold of his front door. He wondered if that was just the next thing it was taking from him. Take the visa; take his f*cking energy; take his ability to get out of bed and walk through the airport before he even had the option of leaving. He told himself he didn’t care; he got what he wanted, didn’t he? Things were better for Dream. Things were better for Dream. Things were better for Dream.
He didn’t know why he cracked when he did. And it felt silly, to call it cracking, when all it was was a whispered I don’t know; I think I’m, like, depressed or something. But it felt like something had broken, and the words came spilling out in the most pathetic stream imaginable. He felt like the leaky sink in his kitchen. Slow and small, but you couldn’t stop it. The water dripped regardless of the speed.
“Oh.” Dream’s voice was soft, but he sounded like he didn’t quite know how to find his footing. “Is it because of the visa?”
Dream knew him so well. “Yeah.” George’s hand tightened around the string from his hoodie, tugging it ever so slightly so that the fabric that shielded his skin crinkled and pulled. His camera wasn’t on. “There’s just, like, nothing for me here, you know? Nobody here. I don’t know; I feel, like, bad. All the time.”
A few seconds of silence. Well, not that, actually. George could hear himself breathing, a little too fast to be relaxed, but Dream’s microphone didn’t pick up the function of his lungs. Discord suddenly felt, shockingly, empty. Like being haunted. You know someone is there, but is anyone? George, alone in his apartment. George, alone in a city of 8.982 million, trying desperately to hear anyone breathing.
Dream spoke before he did, a ghostly sound through the silence. “I’m sorry. I – I wish I knew what to do. I wish you were here.”
George’s eyes fluttered shut. They were burning, but he didn’t know if that was because he was going to cry again or because he had gotten too much sleep. Not enough sleep. Those seemed to be the same thing, these days. “Me too.”
It felt like a failing, on both of their parts.
-
When Sapnap stepped foot in London, all George could think about was how his arms clung too tightly to his sides as they both stared at one another. Half of Sapnap’s face was blocked out by a mask, and George’s was too. He wondered if Sapnap was anxiously chewing on his lip under it like he was. It was awkward. George couldn’t help the feeling that this was wrong. Two sides of their triangle, meeting without the third. He wondered if Sapnap had felt the same way when he hung up that phone call. That he was breaking their sacred circle.
But then Sapnap smiled, the big one that you could see just as much up in his eyes as on his hidden mouth, and he pulled George into a tight hug. That didn’t feel like breaking their circle. It felt like healing.
“Oh my god” was the first thing out of George’s mouth. “You’re so short.” And when Sapnap called him a bitch, he found that he was smiling too. Wide and genuine and warm, and the heaviness on his heart lessened a tiny bit.
-
A lot of Sapnap’s time in London was spent, well, wasting time.
Sapnap lost an amount of money that was still big enough to make both of their eyes form round, wide circles, and they spent an equally shocking amount of money on takeout. They bickered a lot, and they streamed a little, but it was nice. George liked having someone else – someone flesh and blood and real – in his space. Maybe not forever, but the company was nice. He had known that he had been lonely, but he hadn’t realized how lonely until he wasn’t anymore. He had thought it was just the, like, supernatural debt he owed that weighed on his chest. It wasn’t as much that as he had expected.
It was the happiest that George had been in ages. Except for a few things.
George laid sprawled out on his couch, socked feet thrown up on the arm rest and his body curled at an awkward angle. His shirt had rode up his back and his hair was crushed in all sorts of odd directions, but it was comfortable, as he tapped out texts to Dream.
Dream had been really nice about all of this. All of this being George’s mess and the visa delays and Sapnap and everyone flying out without him. The reverse – not the reverse at all, but the most important part was the same – had made George want to die a little bit, and perhaps that was why he clung to his phone the way he did.
Dream, 7:15: patches is purring so loudly rn
George, 7:15: Show
Dream didn’t send a video but, then again, George didn’t expect him too. It wasn’t that he never did; George had seen plenty of videos of Patches in various places in their home, and the majority of them hadn’t been taken by Sapnap. But it was just a lot, you know? For both of them. The stress on Dream’s part, having to make sure you couldn’t see him in her eyes or a window across the room or his dark computer screen. The stress on George’s part, of knowing that one simple oversight could change everything. He wanted it so badly. He didn’t want it at all.
So Dream sent a voice recording. His own laughing voice saying listen! with the exclamation point stuck so firmly on the end that George could basically see it floating in the sound, and then the low rumble of Patches’ purr. It made George’s chest ache but, like, in a good way. You know how people get so sentimental if they’re, like, having a baby and the baby kicks? George’s sister was pregnant, by the way. She had told him a month or so earlier, and then she had cried and said that she didn’t know how their mother kept practicing – that was a word that she liked to use, like she was talking about the violin or something and not a parasite in a bell tower with a taste for their blood – when she had another life tied to hers. George had felt awkward, like he should be defending their mother or condemning her, but then he realized that it wasn’t anger at all that laced his sister’s voice. Just fear. And guilt, but not that she wanted to keep using the magic. That she couldn’t bring herself to.
But that was an aside, one that George felt weird about because they had never really talked about the way that their bullsh*t contaminated everyone else’s water, and they didn’t again after that. His mother had cried too when she first found out, and she and his sister had both cooed everytime the baby made the slightest movement, like this tiny person they had never met was the most incredible, endearing thing in the world. That was what George felt like every time he heard Patches purr. It felt a little crazy comparing his sister’s unborn child to his best friend’s cat that lived in Florida, but. Well.
George, 7:18: She’s so loud.
George, 7:18: She’s saying wow Dream is so stupid and he smells bad and I wish I were in London with Sapnap. I know bc I speak cat
A few seconds, and he blanched.
George, 7:19: Sapnap smells bad too
Dream didn’t react to that part, rather sending a picture in response. George’s WiFi had been being sh*tty all day – probably a technical defect rather than a magical one, but who could ever really say for sure – and it took a second to load in, but when it did, he sank deeper into the plush pillows of his couch, smile tugging up both corners of his mouth and bringing his eyes with them.
Patches, curled up in Dream’s lap with his hand on her back. Her pupils were blacked out, but George could tell that she was looking up at Dream with all the love in the world.
George’s fingers hovered over his keyboard, wanting to type something out like your hands are so f*cking big or I want her to look at me like that or please put a f*cking baby in me right now I don’t care that we’re on opposite sides of the ocean or something else crazy and absurd and so, so dumb. He would have. He wouldn’t have. He could have, if all of his other choices hadn’t picked that exact moment, as he smiled lovingly at a picture of the cat that would one day be his, to finally catch up with him.
“George?” Sapnap’s voice was loud, but George froze less because of that and more so because of his tone. It wasn’t mad, necessarily. Or solely upset. It was something that George had never heard on Sapnap before. “What the actual f*ck is in your bathroom?”
Bells, and blood rushing in his ears. George didn’t have to look to know what Sapnap was talking about. He could envision it; a plastic bag with a bag of dirt tucked under his sink, surrounded by half melted candles and herbs in old tupperware he stole when he moved out. Right next to the spare toilet paper and hand soap refills. f*ck; he didn’t even think to put them somewhere else. He was so used to being alone. Why was he so f*cking stupid?
Sapnap, when George did look up, was clutching one of the candles. A light green one, with a thin strand of wax dripping down one side. George had burned it briefly the other day. It was just over a dumb tweet. Maybe he had become too reliant on this, but it was so addictive, taking away Dream’s pain.
Sapnap’s fingers pressed into the side of the candle, and George knew what they were like – waxy, sticky, the type of thing that made your fingers feel greasy and gross. He’d have to wash his hands again. There was no keeping him out of that bathroom for the rest of the time he was in London. f*ck, why hadn’t George just taken all of it out? He could have, like, stuck it under his bed. Should have.
“George,” Sapnap said again, a little impatient. George’s entire body jolted, against his will. He didn’t think he was supposed to be doing this. That was what the rule had always been, right? Don’t let anyone in on it. Unless they’re forever. “There’s, like, dirt and sh*t under your sink. That’s f*cking weird. And gross. What the f*ck is it?”
Forever. What a concept. George remembered late night calls, hushed promises. He took a shaky breath, and he forced his resolve into something that felt like steadiness. “Oh my god; stop yelling. I’ll show you.”
-
George and Sapnap sat at George’s kitchen table, the third spot occupied by a plastic bag full of graveyard dirt. George remembered watching as a child as his mother carefully wrapped it up in cloth, heavy and solid. He had never been like that. He gathered his dirt in an old takeout bag. Recycling, or whatever. Although it always made him nervous actually recycling containers and stuff he used afterwards. Was magic, like, a contaminant? Was he slowly poisoning the people of London via irresponsible candle usage? This was the type of sh*t that normal f*cking people didn’t have to worry about.
Sapnap was looking at him expectantly, and George rearranged his equipment to make his hands look less awkward and distract from the way that he had let himself get lost in his own head. “Okay, so, like, it’s not even hard,” George said, and his hands only shook a little as he lit a match and brought it up to one of his candles. The flame swayed in an invisible wind, the precursor of what was to come. George hadn’t even, really, started the spell yet.
“If you’re f*cking with me, you’re dead,” Sapnap warned as George pulled a handful of dirt from the bag and settled it into a pile around the candle. f*ck, he should have done this in reverse. His resolve stuttered, and the flame blew harder like it was going to go out. Get it together, something whispered, and George wasn’t sure if it was him ordering to himself or not. He wasn’t used to doing any of this with an audience, and there was something about it that felt horrifically wrong. Wonderfully wrong. There was something about the notion of not being alone that tasted like citrus. Oranges that bled all over his fingers as he peeled them and left everything tasting sweet and sunny.
George rolled his eyes. The dirt stuck and the flame steadied. “Shut up, idiot. Watch.” He took a small ring, the one that his mother had gifted him, and popped open the dusty red stone to reveal a pointed tip. He poked his pointer finger, the one on his right hand, and a bright shock of red bubbled up. He held it over the dirt and let it drip, forming tiny dark spots on its surface. A real wind blew around George’s apartment, and the air felt suddenly heavier. Tangible, like you could reach out and grab a handful of it. It felt like a weight on his chest. It felt like a second presence. A third, he reminded himself, and George tore his eyes up to meet Sapnap’s. “Do you feel it?” he asked, and his voice felt different too.
Sapnap’s eyes were wide, and the disbelief from earlier was gone. George could imagine his great-grandmother leaning curiously over his shoulder. The thing in the belltower, counting Sapnap’s freckles and wondering if he would belong to it next. “Dude,” Sapnap said, and he sounded younger than he had in ages. It was hard to remember, even though George had known him then, that he once had been that young. “That’s f*cking freaky.”
Despite the heaviness around them, George’s chest lightened noticeably. He smiled, maybe a little shy and uncertain but genuine. “I know.” He let his hands slip into the dirt, the pile molding to welcome to familiar shapes of his fingers. “So, like, it takes my blood, or whatever. I used to, like, bury my baby teeth in the dirt,” he added, a little delighted when Sapnap’s face twisted up and he looked vaguely grossed out. “And then I just think really hard. And whatever I think about will happen then.”
This was just a normal spell, a routine one. Hi, please make sure that Dream’s pillow is super soft and he eats a lot of good fruit or whatever and cuddles with Patches a lot and doesn’t break any of his teeth chewing on ice cubes. You know, normal things. George let them run through his head as he studied Sapnap’s face, unabashedly.
“Dude,” Sapnap said. He looked at the candle, still burning, and then he looked up at George. “So, like, what do you normally think about then?”
Slowly, George pulled his hands back to himself, the spell ending and the room beginning to feel normal again. A small black leaf poked out of the dirt. It probably wouldn’t last the week.
Look, he didn’t know why he decided to be honest. The answer he probably should have given, one that Sapnap would have easily accepted because they weren’t like that, was your mom, or maybe your dad if he was feeling particularly brave at that specific moment in time. Maybe it was the lingering feeling of magic hovering over his skin, raising the thin dark hairs on his arm like little tentacles with littler minds of their own. “Like, Dream, I guess. Keeping him safe, you know?”
It felt like a huge confession, a confession of a lot of things that George had done his best to keep locked down for…well, for forever. God, what was what he was doing if not a giant blaring confession. I love him, or whatever. The only thing more mortifying than admitting that to Dream was admitting it to f*cking Sapnap, when he was already only here because he had found out way more about George than George would have liked.
Sapnap seemed to take it into stride though. He just nodded, like it was rational, and something like relief bloomed in George’s chest where it had previously been locked down tight. Even if Sapnap didn’t get it – f*ck, of course he didn’t; how could he, when the three of them were like that – it felt good to let the key start to turn. Ever so slightly.
-
“So like.” They were on the couch – watching Death Note – and Sapnap’s feet were pushed up against a pillow that George had shoved between the two of them after complaining dramatically about Sapnap’s feet touching his thigh. “You just give it blood or whatever? That’s weird. It’s, like, cannibalism.”
George tore his eyes from Ryuk on the screen, and shifted slightly in his seat. “No it isn’t. It’s not a person. It’s magic.”
“Well, it sounds more like a f*cking demon,” Sapnap said conversationally. George removed the pillow from between the two of them and used it to wack Sapnap in the shoulder and the head a few times. “Hey! It does. Don’t you think its weird that this thing has been, like, eating your family’s f*cking baby teeth for generations? That’s so gross, by the way. You’re gross.”
Talking about this was weird, full stop. It made George feel weird, a quick fluttering feeling in his hands. Sapnap talked about it in a way that was fully different from how George and his sister did, or their parents, aunts and uncles, grandparents, cousins did. It made something tug in George’s chest that made him want to defend it, fiercely. “It doesn’t just eat babyteeth. It’s not like that. It just needs a sacrifice. Magic is a transaction, and stuff like that is the easiest thing to offer it. It doesn’t have to be physical, though.”
Maybe George put too much emphasis on that last part. Or maybe it was that he hadn’t put enough, tiptoeing around it to try to make it seem casual, a hypothetical that he only had a vague connection to. Maybe he just used up all of his luck the last time he let slip something that Sapnap really didn’t need to know. Regardless, Sapnap chose that moment to pull his head out of his ass and stare at George. “What did you give it, then?”
On the TV, L made a breakthrough in the Kira case, and dramatic music drifted through the room and wrapped around George’s throat. Ropes of sheet music, his great grandmother’s old dead fingers, his sister’s dyed hair. Tightening, until his skin ached and he couldn’t breathe.
It was funny, in a gross and f*cked up way that made your stomach hurt even as it made you laugh. That was the part that was the hardest to admit. Not the magic itself, not that he was pathetically and horribly in love with a man he had never met. This part. George hadn’t felt guilty, not really. It was ruining his life. He would have done it again in a heartbeat. He knew he was selfish, because it was ruining Dream’s life too, but he wouldn’t question it. If asked to choose again, he would have sacrificed the first visa application a million times over. Even if it f*cking killed him in the end.
“The visa,” he said, and the noose tightened. “I think I gave it the visa.”
Sapnap was quiet, and for long enough that George thought that he wasn’t going to say anything. Sapnap wasn’t stupid; really, he wasn’t. They weren’t close like that and he annoyed the sh*t out of George every day of his life, but he wasn’t stupid. George wondered if he had hit the limit of what the magic would allow. Could it play with other people? George wasn’t afraid of it, not most of the time, but the idea of it controlling Sapnap made his heart pound and a freezing shudder run through his entire body.
On the screen, L and Light either tried to kill one another or stared deeply into one another’s eyes. George watched it and tried not to think about Sapnap next to him, or Dream in his pocket, or the plane tickets he was never going to be able to f*cking buy.
“Dude.” When Sapnap did finally speak, his voice was lower than it had been, more muted. He wasn’t looking at the screen this time, just at George. He looked sad, or maybe sympathetic. George’s skin prickled. He hated Sapnap looking at him like this, like he was some pathetic, broken thing. “You’ve gotta tell him. It’s not fair.”
Something in his tone was knowing, and George felt more transparent than he would have liked. You wanted this, he told himself. So bad it hurt.
He closed his eyes, just for a second. It didn’t relieve the feeling of an extra set resting on him. “I know. I will. I promise.”
-
When he did, when he told him, Dream was silent.
Okay, well, before he told him that part, he had to tell him all the other parts. The normal parts, the parts that had made up George’s typical everyday life for years. Dream knew him better than any person in the world, but there were too many parts that he didn’t. That he would, soon.
A smile caught George’s lips. Soon. It would be, he thought. He had felt lighter, recently. He heard Saint Peter’s bells in his head every time he thought about Florida and he thought about the future, and he wondered if that meant he was leaving. Maybe he had finally learned to talk to it.
“Dream?”
Dream was streaming the MCC practice server parkour – not to everyone, just to George in Discord. It was lazy, but Dream was skilled, and his motion hardly faltered when George spoke for the first time in a while. He had been dozing off, watching Dream bounce from block to block until his eyelids felt warm and heavy, but something about this had felt right. When were they more themselves, if not alone together with the familiar sounds of Minecraft forming a white noise behind whispered words? “What’s up?”
George’s fingers found his too-long sweater sleeve, the heavy fabric pressed between his fingertips as he rubbed it rhythmically. Round and round and round, until his skin went numb and the fabric started to wear imperceptibly thinner than it had been a few seconds before. Bells, dirt, breathe. “I need to tell you something. Don’t laugh.”
That made Dream falter slightly on a jump, and he paused, crouching as he skirted around the edge of an iron trapdoor. His skin was vibrant, and the way it crouched and looked at the screen – looked at George – made George feel like he was being deeply perceived, even with his camera off. “Is it like –” There was hesitation in Dream’s voice, and George could tell that he was thinking about the visa. Was not, these days, everything about the visa? “Is it serious?”
George flinched, automatically. “Yes? I mean, like, no. But yeah, kind of.” Such a non-answer. Dream laughed, quiet and barely audible, and some of the tension flowed out of his shoulders. George’s fingers still pressed into his sleeve. He wished he was wearing Dream’s sweatshirt. He wished that he could pull his legs up into it, wrapping his entire body into a cocoon. “It’s just – please don’t laugh. Or at least, like, don’t until I’m done explaining. It’s, like, really weird.”
Dream’s Minecraft figure jumped around on the screen, making a small circle without straying from the trap door. His own version, maybe, of George anxiously holding his sleeve. “Okay. Yeah, of course not. You know I wouldn’t laugh at you if it was, like, something important. Even if it’s weird.” The last word was half a scoff, like it was ridiculous to think that he could find anything George did weird. Dream was, George feared, underestimating him.
But he wasn’t lying. Of course he wouldn’t. George didn’t need the hoodie to feel fully wrapped in love.
“So there’s this church,” he said, voice low as his eyes glued themselves to Dream’s Minecraft face. Yellow, yellow, yellow, yellow. “A bit outside of London. Like, all of my family is buried there. And there’s this, like, thing that lives in the bell tower. And we’re all tied to it and tied to the church. And it lets us do magic. Like, use it to wish for things. Sapnap found out, when he was in London. And he thought – I thought – that you should know. Before I move to Florida. And because, like, you’re my best friend.” If his voice wavered on friend, well. That was probably the least remarkable aspect of what Dream had just heard.
Look, George wasn’t stupid. He knew that he and Dream were different from normal friends, and it wasn’t all different only on his side anymore. If it had been anyone else, Dream wouldn’t have believed him. If it had been them, a year or two ago, Dream wouldn’t have believed him. He was all, like, logical. They both were. Dream didn’t even f*cking believe in ghosts, and George probably wouldn’t have either if he hadn’t been being haunted by them for years. If his f*cking family hadn’t been for generations.
But they were different. Call it love. Call it trust. Call it whatever you want.
He heard Dream exhale, long and slow. “That’s, like, a lot to drop on someone.” There was a little bit of laughter in his voice, but not like that. Just like he was overwhelmed which, well, that was fair. George could feel his heart beating fast, and he wondered if Dream’s was too. He let himself fantasize, in a way that he hadn’t in awhile. In person, watching Dream play Minecraft. Pressing his hand to his chest and listening to their hearts beat alongside one another. He smiled, small and self indulgent.
“So like,” Dream started again, pulling George back from the image of himself scratching Patches behind her ears as Dream rested his arm around his shoulders. “This thing. What is it?”
“I don’t know.” George’s hand settled on his knee, searching for an invisible cat. “Sometimes, I see my great-grandmother’s ghost. Feel, rather. But I don’t think it's her, or anyone else for that matter. It’s just, like, there. I think it’s very old.”
Sapnap hadn’t asked questions about the specifics like this, but there was something about it that was nice. Of course Dream wanted to learn about it as much as possible. George just wished that he had the answers for him.
But it didn’t take long for him to get to the hard question. The thing that George was afraid was going to hurt him.
“So it just, like, gives you what you want? That’s, like, hacks. That’s so OP.”
George chewed on his lip, and he didn’t know if it was the bells or his heart pounding in his ears. “It’s, like, not like that. It’s like an exchange. My mother explained it to me as a kid – a transaction. It likes, like, taking from us. I used to give it my baby teeth, before I ran out. I don’t know how it works; it just, like, feeds on them I guess. Teeth, blood, like, stuff that’s part of you or important to you. We have to do this to keep it alive, so it, like, lets us have stuff in return. It’s, like, more complicated than that sometimes. I think a great-great relative tried to, like, ritualize it and that made it kind of weird. But that’s the, like, basics.” He shuffled in his seat, pulling a leg up and wrapping his arms around it. He didn’t want Dream to ask. He needed Dream to ask. He didn’t want him to. Oh, how he didn’t want him to.
“I see.” Dream moved on the screen, the most that he had in awhile. He jumped from one block to another, and then back. His space bar clacked loudly as he jumped. “So it’s, like, a curse.”
George’s mouth tasted like mildew. “It’s not a curse.”
“Well.” Dream said it in that way that he always did, and the familiarity made George’s chest ache. “It sounds like a curse.”
“Well, it’s not.”
Dream made another soft sound in the back of his throat, one that clearly said he disagreed, but he didn’t push it. George could hear his chair creak, and he could imagine him leaning back in it, hands finally pulled from his keyboard. “Still. It doesn’t sound, like, safe. I don’t know; I just don’t like thinking about some, like, mysterious force eating you.” The phrase mysterious force sounded wrong coming out of Dream’s mouth, and it was almost enough to make George giggle.
He wasn’t going to ask. Of course Dream was more worried about the ways that this could hypothetically have brought harm to George than any of the specific details. That made George feel better, even though the fact that he hadn’t asked had, surprisingly, made him feel worse.
Sapnap was right, wasn’t he? God, that was a sentiment that George had never experienced before and hoped that he never would again. Surely, Sapnap was correct by chance more so than by any effort on his part. But George was going to have to tell him. It was love. Whatever it was, this was love.
“I need to tell you something else,” George said, and he was surprised by the steadiness of his voice. “When I said that you could give other things important to you…I didn’t give it up. Like, intentionally. That’s kinda important, I think. But I was doing protection spells, for you. When bad things happened. And I didn’t give it the visa.” That was what finally got his voice to waver, pitched too high on the vowel and barely making the consonants. “But I let it take whatever it wanted. And…I think that’s what it took. I gave it Florida. I gave it –” another waver – “I gave it us, like, being together. I’m sorry.” The words felt unnatural on his mouth, but he didn’t know what else he was supposed to say here. He wasn’t sorry, as much as he was. “I don’t know what I thought it was going to take, but it wasn’t that. I thought it was going to take years off of my life, but I didn’t care. I guess that should have told me, that I cared more about you and that was what it would take. That was what it would consume.”
George felt horribly out of breath, and he honestly hardly knew what he had said. It had just flown, like wax down the candle or dirt between his fingers. Blood, on the spike of his old ring. Uncontrolled, but perhaps the way that it should be. George had never been one for the natural order of things, but he thought that he had found it. Something like that.
Dream was quiet, and his Minecraft figure was still, looking off to the side.
“Dream?” George said quietly. “I didn’t know. I promise.”
Dream laughed, a bit too high pitched. “The thing is, I want to be so mad at you. But I can’t, because I probably would have done the same thing. I just – you let it take whatever it wanted. I hate thinking about that. I hate not being there.”
A shaky breath. George’s fingers pressed tight to his palm, fabric wrapped up. “Me too.” A few seconds of quiet, and George made himself break it again. “I stopped doing it. After Sapnap visited. Like, if that matters. I’ve made sure; it’s not impacted the visa anymore. I’m not letting it touch, like, whatever.”
“Okay.” He could hear Dream breathing, slow and steady, like he was trying to make himself relax. “Okay.”
-
Two weeks later, the email came. Finally. George called, and he saw. He saw him.
–
George said goodbye to Saint Peter’s on a cool Thursday in September.
He had told Dream that he was going to when they had video called the night before, as he packed his clothes with his phone propped up on his bed so that Dream could see him. Dream wasn’t very good at video calls, not yet, and George had gotten used to shots of his hair and the freckles on his forehead or his neck and the collar of his shirt. But when George looked up from digging in his sock drawer, the camera was centered on Dream’s face, tilted back against the pillows on his bed back in Florida.
The thing was, nobody ever left. Even his sister, who traveled all over and had seen more cities in a few years than George probably would in his life, England was still her home. London was her home. She was auditioning for London based shows, these days, rather than touring productions. Her baby, George’s nephew, was going to be raised on the same streets that they were. Visiting the cemetery, just like they were.
It was weird, being the first one to really get out. London hadn’t held his heart for quite awhile, not really, and he didn’t think that it was going to again. He couldn’t see the future, but when he imagined his, it wasn’t having a kid and moving home and having dinner with his parents every weekend after a trip to gather up graveyard dirt again. It was a big backyard and a ridiculously painted house in the Orlando suburbs, days in the pool because it was too hot for much else and wearing t-shirts in December. Three pairs of shoes thrown clumsily inside the door and tesla keys hanging on a hook next to it. A cat, and maybe one day a tiny girl with green eyes and dark curls. Magic, sure. But not like that.
Maybe Dream was right when he called it a curse. Because, lately, George hadn’t been able to breathe.
It was as terrifying as it was liberating. It scared him as much as it made his nose and cheeks flush, warm with the self indulgence of it all. The thing in the bell tower, it had given his family power, sure. But it was heavy, being consumed like that. Was it a life? It was an impossible question to answer, when he held his nephew awkwardly in his arms and his mother made him promise to call every single week, and his father asked for the millionth time if he was sure that Dream and Sapnap were safe, a question that got him a dirty look from George’s sister who pointed out that they had literally met Sapnap and talked to Dream over video call just a few days ago.
He loved them a lot, and, in a weird, f*cked up way, he loved the absurdity of their lives.
But George was the one who was going to get out.
He had his backpack slung over his shoulders, and his knife and remaining bag of graveyard dirt bounced around in it as he made his way across the city. It felt a little bit heavier, as the familiar shape of the church came into view, and he swallowed. Funny, that this was the goodbye that felt the hardest.
A gust of wind caught his hair, the short strands fluttering against his forehead, and he shifted the weight of his backpack onto one shoulder as he reached up to brush it away. It felt like a caress, almost. The church saying hello. A million long dead hands, loving and a little pushy, but ultimately accepting. A nudge forward. He followed the familiar trail, worn by years and years of the same trek.
“Hi,” he said quietly, as his feet found steady the worn down grass in front of his great-grandmother’s grave. “It’s me. I’m, like, leaving, I guess. Nobody knows, like, what I’m supposed to do, but I thought saying goodbye would be, like, a good step.” He felt, absurdly, like he was being rude, and his nose flushed.
This all felt ridiculous, in a way that it didn’t normally. George shuffled his feet, dust kicking up onto his stark white sneakers. The grave stared at him. It had deteriorated over the years, rain wearing away at the stone and moss creeping steadily up it. The letters that he had once traced, when it still towered over the top of his head, were hardly deep enough to follow anymore. Certainly not deep enough for a toddler to trace.
George had been wanting to leave for years, and he didn’t think that he was the type to get homesick. But there was something about this that made a sob rise up in his throat. Not sad, just overwhelmed. Just a few days, and he’d be on a plane. Dream’s arms would be around him. He’d be fine. The stone would continue to deteriorate, and his great-grandmother’s name would pass over fewer people’s lips, and George wouldn’t be around to see it.
He took a shaky breath and he whipped his eyes with the back of his palm. He wished Dream were here. That had been a constant state, for two years now. It would be until he stepped foot in Florida.
“Um, I thought you might want this back.” George scrambled to twist his backpack around, clumsily unzipping it and pulling out his bag of graveyard dirt. He didn’t have a ton left, but it sagged in the plastic bag as he dropped his backpack to rest on the ground next to him. “Okay. Yeah.” He untied the top of it and turned the bag over. The dirt, still a little damp even after weeks hidden in his bathroom, fell to the ground in a heavy rain. The leaves rustling in the trees, the roar of the street. The patter patter patter of the dirt hitting the ground.
It wasn’t perfectly smooth, and George felt a little bad about not fixing it, but he wanted a clean goodbye. None of it clinging to him.
He took a step back, looking at it from a distance. This all – the bell tower was an important part, obviously. But he had spent twenty-five years talking to this long dead woman. She was the most important person to say goodbye to, right?
George’s best guess on what to do had been a recreation of the birthday ritual, an angry slash along his palm and holding it out to drip over her grave as he stared up into the trees and hoped for something. He was going to wish for freedom. Forgiveness, if that was the same thing.
But standing there, it didn’t seem right. Instead, he reached into his backpack, and he pulled out the knife. His mother had given it to him, you know. His, with the stars, and his sister’s, covered in flowers. He closed his eyes for a second, and he hoped that she wouldn’t be upset. It had served him well, for ten years. As gentle as a knife could be. He opened his eyes, and he steadied himself. Two steps forward. The knife, set on top of the grave. Two steps back.
George took a quick breath. The wind swirled around him, rustling his hair in a familiar stroke. “Okay. That’s it, I guess. Bye.” He’d never been good at quick goodbyes. But, then again, this one was a long time coming. George grabbed his backpack, he turned around, and he walked away from Saint Peter’s for one last time.
As he left, the bells began to ring. A goodbye. He was going home.
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