Chapter Text
“One more game.”
“Dream, I’m exhausted,” George whined. “Let me sleep.”
“I told you, we can sleep in the carriage tomorrow,” Dream responded quickly. “This is our last night; one more game.”
“You said that last game…” George grumbled, as he piled his knit blanket in his lap, and sat up for another game.
It was somewhere past midnight and the summer air had only just cooled enough to warrant a blanket. Dream’s bedroom had four tall windows, all of which had panes cracked, to let the breeze, the moonlight and the cricket song in. They’d been open since sunset, since the two boys on the furs had been ushered out of the sitting room where their card games had started and into the bedroom where they continued. The glare of the candles in their sconces made it hard to see out the glass, but Dream hadn’t really been aware of anything but George and the cards for some time now.
The cards, made from some stiff paper that came from overseas, were painted with flowers and numbers. Dream had been taught some games by his father, and invented a few with his sister. The one they currently played was one of the more basic ones. The deck was simply cut in two, and each player took turns playing a card. If the card played matched the one beneath it, one player could cover it with their hand and take all the cards underneath, with the objective being to acquire the whole deck.
Dream played his first card and George immediately brought his hand down over it.
Dream chuckled. Chrysanthemums could also be slapped and taken. George grinned cheekily at having stolen a single card. “You’re such an idiot.”
“My ‘mum,” George gloated. “I’ll take the rest too when you play them.”
Dream shook his head, still grinning at George’s sudden enthusiasm. “It’s your turn.”
The thing Dream loved and hated about this game was that the tides could change in an instant. He’d gotten George down to three cards in his hand, when George had taken a chrysanthemum, as promised, and gotten a pile of cards larger than Dream’s was. There wasn’t a lot of skill required, it was mostly a game of reflexes, the kind of game that Dream usually won but George had this almost supernatural ability to distract him whenever he started to properly pay attention.
It was something about the sleep-drunk giggles, and the competitiveness, and the way his whole face lit up when he managed to get even two or three cards.
“Dream!” George tried to dig his fingers under Dream’s to get at the stack of cards that Dream had clearly won. “Those are mine, give them here.”
Dream laughed and dragged them across the rug, closer to himself. “Going to have to be quicker than that, Georgie.”
George relented, and covered his mouth with a fist as he yawned. “Ugh, can you just let me win so we can go to bed?”
“Is that the stakes then?” Dream asked, with two thirds of the deck in his hand. “If you win, we go to bed?”
“I don’t know.” George started the stack off again with a single card. “It can be.”
Dream added one. “Yours or mine?”
George placed a yellow chrysanthemum and Dream slammed his hand down over it, then glanced up to find George’s hand half extended, and a strange look on his face. For a moment, Dream watched him process the words, then all at once he reacted. “That’s not what I meant!”
Dream chuckled. “What’s wrong? You slept with Sapnap, didn’t you?”
George’s cheeks reddened. “Don’t say it like that! We slept, that’s it.”
“So why wouldn't you share a bed with me?”
“That’s not…” George stuttered, and played a card, and Dream took another couple cards for the deck in his hand. “I meant if I win we go to bed, separately, to our own beds.”
“Alright,” Dream agreed, “and if I win you spend the night in mine.”
George’s eyes shot up to meet his, and Dream offered a sly grin. “No way.”
“Come on, George,” Dream teased, “I’m not going to do anything weird.”
George balked at the very idea. “We can’t, Dream. What would it look like if someone saw?”
Dream sighed, conceding the point. Dream knew Sapnap wouldn’t care about some rumor that his companion was sleeping around but George cared so Dream chewed his tongue and tried to come up with something else he could take from George if he won.
“Why do you want to anyway?” George asked, “Just because I did it with Sapnap?”
“Pretty much,” Dream said because it was a more reasonable explanation than not wanting to be away from George for a couple hours. “Did you and Sapnap ever kiss?”
“Not…” George trailed off as his cheeks flushed again. “Only on the cheek.”
Dream smiled. “Really? What about in front of his mom.”
“No,” George snipped, “we didn’t snog in front of his mum.”
Dream laughed then, harder than he anticipated laughing, and George stole a couple cards as Dream tried to rein in his wheezing.
“It’s not even that funny,” George muttered. “And it’s your turn.”
Dream played a card, and George added another. “If I win, you have to ‘snog’ me.” Dream giggled.
“Dream, do you even know what that means?”
Dream started laughing all over again, clutching at his stomach at George’s expression. “Please, George?”
George had started laughing as well, far too hard for how stupid Dream’s request was. “No.”
Dream slapped the top card, and George’s hand came down on top of his. “Ow, George!” They laughed even harder and Dream took the cards. “I’m going to win, so you have to kiss me at least.”
“You’re not going to win and I’m not going to kiss you,” George said. Dream slapped another card and added it to his deck as if it were his counter argument. “I hate you, you know that?”
“You don’t hate me, George, you love me.”
George shook his head, and played his next card carefully. He’d turned his entire focus to the game, and Dream, even with an almost full deck in his hand, started to take the game very seriously as well.
Somewhere in George’s hand was a chrysanthemum, the yellow one from earlier. Dream’s heart thudded, sluggish and tired yet somehow frantic at the same time. They went back and forth, with George growing more and more stressed as none of the cards matched up.
George paused at his last card and looked across the rug at Dream. They both knew what it was. George chewed his lip and Dream’s eyes were drawn to the spot. Was George trying to distract him or was he too thinking about the time that theirs had met? Dream looked down at the stack. George would have the advantage here, his hand would scarcely have to leave the placed card to claim the stack underneath. Dream was going to have to be fast.
George inhaled and he reached out to place the card. His hand should have stayed over it, should have easily beaten Dream’s to cover the face of it, yet somehow, Dream’s hand made it under George’s in time.
“Dream!” George panicked. “You knew! You knew I had that.” George jumped across the rug to take back the card.
“So did you,” Dream argued, as he leaned back raising the wrist that George had attached himself too, and holding the card high out of his reach.
“I didn’t!” George crawled even further into him, practically climbing into Dream’s half reclined lap in an attempt to reach the card. “Give it back! That wasn’t fair.”
Dream continued to keep it out of George’s reach and brought a hand up behind George’s back to brace his shoulder and prevent him from reaching high enough to take the card.
“You lost, George,” Dream said, voice strained with the effort of keeping the card out of George’s reach. He quickly dropped it behind him and shifted his hold on George, to drag his chest down into Dream’s. “You know what that means.”
George yelped as he realized just how close their faces had gotten, and his eyes flicked down to the smirk on Dream’s face. Dream watched his head fill with the thought of what his loss and his new position really meant and only just managed a slight shake of his head.
Dream softened immediately in the face of the weak protest. He loosened his grip and allowed George’s arm to straighten such that he was hovering over Dream on all fours of his own volition. “Relax, I won’t make you.”
Dream smiled up at George. He couldn’t help but find the new position amusing, having George on top of him, dark eyes so much blacker as they scanned the freckles on his face for indecent intentions. Dream found his thoughts flickered like the candle light, the kiss by the hearth, the curiosity, wondering how George’s mouth tasted while they danced in the moonlight, and between the flares becoming blissfully present, white hot and empty but for the brush of George’s thigh against his.
George looked just as lost, like his whole world had been flipped on its head. “You-” Dream watched his lungs working to catch up with a breath he must’ve missed in their playful grappling. “You’re not going to kiss me?”
“Don’t need to,” Dream replied. “Seeing how bad you want it is enough.”
George’s eyes darkened in annoyance. “How bad I want it?” he replied, tone losing it’s breathlessness as the sarcasm crept in. “Oh, that’s right. It was me, wasn’t it? I was the one wanting to sleep with you, the one begging to make out with you.”
Dream’s head whited out at the words as they fell from George’s lips. “George…”
“I’m the one that’s been flirting with you all week too, aren’t I? And now, I’ve drawn you into… this just to tease you, have I got that right?” George’s taunting was a shock. Dream wasn’t prepared for it. The sarcasm was laced with an exhausted sort of intoxication, a reckless confidence that had Dream nearly undone in the face of it. His fist closed in the fur of the rug as he struggled to find some answer that wasn’t crashing their mouths together.
Dream forced a breathy laugh from his lungs, it was all he could think to do to ease the tension that was rapidly forcing blood down from his head. “Let me up,” he whispered, almost hoping that George would refuse.
George pushed off and leaned back to sit on his heels so Dream was no longer pinned to the rug.
Dream came up to his elbows and threw George a look of reproach. “What was that? ”
George started to giggle as his cheeks reddened, then the giggles became a laugh that he had to clutch his stomach to contain.
“George!” Dream shouted, unable to keep the smile off his face. He was being laughed at, and he was smiling like an idiot about it. Getting to his feet, and held out a hand to George, who couldn’t even meet his eye without losing it all over again. “Oh come on, it was not that funny.”
George took the hand and pulled himself up with it, still giggling sleepily. “You’re blushing,” he teased, voice quiet and gloating. “It’s cute.”
The two words turned Dream’s core to honey. Thick and sweet in his chest, he struggled to catch a breath. George’s amusement didn’t help, nor did the warmth of his hand. “What has gotten into you tonight?”
George only giggled again, and dropped Dream’s hand to lean into his chest. The movement emptied Dream’s head, and when thought began to trickle back in, it was just sensations: veins burning with the heat of his pulse, George’s hand closed in his shirt.
“I’m tired,” George mumbled, as Dream struggled to determine whether he could get away with putting his arms around George.
On the one hand, Dream wanted to do it so badly that it almost hurt. On the other, what if it startled George? What if George just wanted to lean against something? What if Dream did the wrong thing, and they lost their tenuous grip on the joke? Because Dream had no idea what this was if it wasn’t a joke.
“You should get to bed.”
“Oh-kay,” George said, voice lilting on the syllables. He pulled back and looked up at Dream. His sleep-drunk grin slipped for a moment, and Dream caught a flicker of something that made his heart sink.
Did he mess up, somehow? He was being so careful. How?
George’s heat fell away, and his smile returned though not as wide as before. He yawned and rubbed his one eye. “G’night Clay.”
“Night,” Dream replied, still stuck to the floor where George had left him. “I- uh, I’m glad you came to Somerset.” George smiled genuinely, and Dream wondered if maybe he’d managed to save it.
And then George was gone and Dream tumbled into bed, lightheaded, burning hot, and confused as hell.
--
The next morning, they set out for Dantalion. They started at dawn on the first day of September and arrived close to noon on the third day. George spent the majority of the first day asleep on Dream’s shoulder, or curled up on the seat across. He’d woken here and there to chat with Dream, or eat something, but the clunking, jostling wheels of the carriage, somehow always managed to lull him back to sleep.
Dream didn’t sleep as much as George did, so when they reached their accommodations in the evening, George had been wide awake, while Dream had nearly passed out during dinner. They were both more awake on the second day, but quieter as the boredom of travel turned their heads to mush. On their second night, they stayed at an inn above a tavern and got to spend their last evening of freedom, listening to music and laughing over drinks at a couple rather portly old men trying to pick up women.
In this time, Dream had let pass every single opportunity to ask about what exactly had happened on their last night at Somerset. When he found the courage in a drink the words weren’t there, and when the words were there George stole away his courage.
The week George spent at Somerset had been… perfect. Well, perfect aside from that slight hiccup of the first night. But since then, they hadn’t fought once, something that had previously been unavoidable when they didn’t have Sapnap around.
After that first night, something had changed between them, and Dream had been unable to put a name to what exactly it was. George was more expressive, more competitive, more engaged than Dream had ever seen him. He talked about his mom, bragged to Daisy about shooting that phantom through the eye, and didn’t once bite back an insult when he found one on his tongue.
And it wasn’t just George, Dream kept admitting things, mistakes, things he’d done when he was angry that he knew he should have been ashamed about. One time, while they’d been out in the woods, Dream confessed to punching a tree and tearing his knuckles open, then lying to his mom when she asked about it. George laughed, called him an idiot, and made him apologize to the tree. And just like that, the memory transformed from this embarrassing secret to nothing but a dumb thing he did.
The card game, and whatever happened on the last night was the same. It had something to do with the change, but Dream didn’t know what, and he was too afraid to ask George lest asking led to spoiling it somehow.
He was nervous though, as their carriage bobbed along through the western sprawl of the Midsomer Wood. George’s arm was pressed into his, and his head was dipping, threatening to fall against Dream’s shoulder any moment. There was plenty of space in the carriage, but somehow George ended up right at his side. When they were reunited with Sapnap, would they lose this? Would they revert to how they’d been back at Rivers? Or would the return to Dantalion send them back even further?
Dream couldn’t bear the thought of going back to how things were before the summer. He hated the idea of losing this version of George. His hand went automatically for George’s as he was overrun with thoughts of George disappearing, being taken away, or being caged again by silence and fear and… Fontine.
“What are you thinking about?” George asked, noting the way Dream’s fingers tightened in his for a moment before letting go entirely.
“Nervous, I guess” Dream answered, “about going back.”
“Me too,” George whispered. Dream experienced a sharp jab of distress.
“But it’ll be okay,” George went on, yawning as his head fell to Dream’s shoulder, “you and Sapnap are going to be there.”
“Are you falling asleep?”
George nodded and mumbled something that sounded like ‘it’ll be okay’ again, and although Dream very much wanted to believe him, the worry remained.
--
“Sapnap.”
“Gogy!” Sapnap spun around with a wide grin on his face, as Dream and George piled into their old room.
“How come we don’t get a new room? We’re second years now, aren’t we?” George turned back to ask Dream, as he dropped his trunk near the cold stove.
“Guess it’s easier this way?” Dream replied, sighing at his bed, the one jammed in the weird alcove. The new first years would probably just take the floor above, the one vacated by the graduating third years.
Sapnap cleared his throat, arms hanging open expectantly.
George rolled his eyes, but Dream jumped on the offered hug. He knocked Sapnap back into the bed, and locked his arm around his friend's neck. “Nice hug...” Sapnap growled, struggling in Dream’s chokehold. “You-” The bed creaked as Sapnap hooked a leg around Dream’s and flipped them over. The maneuver nearly knocked the two boys to the floor, and the pair broke apart laughing, moments before tumbling to the floor.
“Is your mum still here?” George asked, when they finished roughhousing.
Sapnap shook his head. “Father’s back at Rivers, so she’s decided to stay with Lin till the fall tourney.”
“That isn’t for another month,” Dream said, surprised she could stay away from Rivers that long. “The tournament really is going to be a big deal this year, isn’t it?”
Sapnap gave him one last shove before sitting back up. “The king’s coming, so yeah, duh.”
“Think you stand a chance, Somerset?” A familiar throaty voice drifted in through their open door.
“Techno,” Dream said, too surprised by the third year’s appearance to come up with a proper comeback.
The new addition stepped into the patch of afternoon sun that was hitting the doorway and bowed his head as if Dream had actually greeted him. “At your service.”
“Are you guys still in your same room?” George asked, peering past Techno’s head to see if their other two friends, Bad and Skeppy, were somewhere behind him in the hall.
“We are but the love birds haven’t arrived yet,” Techno replied. “I got in a couple days ago.”
“Why so early?” Sapnap asked as he went back to his trunk and whatever he’d been doing before Dream and George had arrived.
“I er-” Techno chewed on the words like he wasn’t sure if he actually wanted to say them out loud. “I was made head boy, for some reason…”
“You?” Sapnap pulled a shorter-sleeved shirt from his trunk and casually stripped off the one he was wearing.
George averted his eyes. “I would have thought they’d pick Bad or-”
“That one kid with the nose,” Sapnap supplied.
“Mm… the one with the nose,” Techno deadpanned. “Yes, I know exactly who you’re talking about.” Sapnap, with the new shirt over his head, tried to argue the point further, but Techno was already moving the conversation along. “I was as surprised as you. Honestly, I kinda got the sense that Hardegin didn’t particularly care for me.”
Dream choked on a laugh, as he recalled the headmaster’s exasperation with Techno’s antics at the previous year’s spring tournament. “Maybe he changed his mind?”
Techno leaned into their doorway, and folded his arms. “Or Philza’s been interferin’.”
“Do him and Hardegin know each other?”
“Philza knows everyone.”
“How was the capital, by the way?” Dream asked, trying to keep his voice casual while something very competitive in him, begged to ask exactly what sort of training Techno had spent his summer on.
“Eh,” Techno replied. “Better than potato farming.” A door slamming down the hall caught Techno’s attention and he leaned back, then, with a quick ‘hey!’ at whoever made the sound, he disappeared to perform some head boy-type responsibility.
“George,” Sapnap pouted, “you still haven’t hugged me.”
“Are we... still doing that?”
“George!” Sapnap huffed in mock offense. “Are you breaking up with me?”
“Companions don’t ‘break up’,” George muttered, “they just start courting girls. And no? I don’t know. I just mean, like, what are we doing?”
“Do you want to keep doing this?” Sapnap asked, turning the whole thing back on George. “I don’t exactly have plans to court anyone.”
“Neither do I, obviously, but uh-... Dream?”
Dream met George’s eye, and blanked, surprised at his sudden entry into the conversation about his two best friends’ fake relationship.
“Yeah Dream, did you want me to step back so you could court George?”
“Sapnap! That’s not what I meant!”
“What did you mean then?” Sapnap teased.
“Well, it was his idea, wasn’t it? I just meant- er- wanted to know what he thought of-…?” George stumbled and stuttered over his words, but managed to get enough out that Dream could answer.
Something deep in Dream’s chest wanted to tell them they could stop, that the ruse had served its purpose, and that if they needed to do it again, then he would take over as George’s companion, but that was a very selfish part of him. He’d originally come up with the idea of playing companion to George out of necessity, as a way to get George away from Dantalion for the summer, and Dream recognized the importance of keeping that escape route open until they knew if the threat was still present.
“You guys should probably stay together-ish,” Dream said carefully, “at least till we know…” - what’s going on with Fontine - “about Christmas and stuff.”
“So hug me, George!” Sapnap said, wrapping his arms around the thinner boy’s neck from behind.
“Ew,” George whined as he turned to accept the hug properly, “gross.”
Sapnap’s arms lowered to George’s waist, and he hummed contentedly. “Aw George, I love you too.”