Chapter Text
The wine is cold like the shoulder I gave u in the street
Cat and mouse for a month or two or three
Now I wake up in the night and watch you breathe
George started streaming because he likes playing Minecraft, likes giggling when he dies to a blaze for the fifth time in one night, likes the extra bit of money it brings him every month.
“I just think it’s a little silly,” his boyfriend says when George tries to explain it to him over tea and biscuits. The flat is quiet around them, except for the wind whistling against the living room window. “Don’t you think it’s silly? It’s not exactly a normal job.”
“Well, it’s not like I’ve ever really worked a normal job in the past,” George replies. He sips his tea and wrinkles his nose at the way it burns his tongue.
“I suppose. I mean, as long as you know what you’re doing,” his boyfriend says, and his tone seems genuine—sincere—so George decides not to turn it into an argument for once. Instead, he props his feet up on the older’s lap and melts into him.
They break up a month later. George isn’t all that bothered about it; they weren’t particularly compatible, after all, and they certainly weren’t anywhere close to becoming serious. “It was just for fun,” he finds himself telling his mum, after she asks what had happened, “he was just for fun.”
The next day, he misses his usual Friday night stream because he’s in heat. When he goes live again a week afterwards, the chat complains and nags him about where he’d disappeared to. “I needed to take care of something,” George says into his camera, as patiently as possible, “not all of us can sit behind a screen 24/7, you guys.”
Wait you have a life????? types one user.
RUDE!! complains another.
George rolls his eyes and then returns his focus to the new Minecraft world in front of him. “Guys, guys, stop spamming. Should I look for diamonds or go to the Nether? Let’s do a poll.”
That evening he falls asleep with only one thing on his mind. If he still had an alpha around to help him, he could’ve wrapped up the heat a whole lot quicker and gotten back to his channel. He guesses it’s the only thing he’ll miss about having a boyfriend—convenient dick.
Maybe it’s that train of thought that gives him the idea. It’s like a lightbulb; one afternoon he’s staring at his messy nest, wondering if he cares enough to straighten it up—even though it’ll just get wrecked again when he goes to bed tonight—and in the next moment, it comes to him. Throughout the months they spent together, his boyfriend had made several comments about how George probably would’ve fared better in life if he’d been born a beta. “You’re just kind of lazy for an omega,” he had justified, in that backhanded, I’m just joking so don’t get mad! sort of way. “You can’t cook, you don’t clean…”
It was technically true, so George wasn’t too offended. At the time he’d even joked back—“But I still give good head, don’t I?”—before moving on.
Now though. Now, George is starting to question if it’s something he should be working at, if he ever wants to find another alpha to look after him. That’s what people did when they got dumped, isn’t it? Go out of their way to improve themselves, in time for the next person to come along? George has never tried, deliberately, to do such a thing before. Any changes within himself had happened naturally, gradually, as he grew up.
Maybe he could try, though. It might even be fun to work on himself—especially if he could farm content out of it. His chat likes that he’s an omega in the same way they like it when he has his facecam on so, logically, George is pretty sure they’d freak out if he actually did some omega things on-camera for once.
The next afternoon he heads to the Tesco near his flat and spends an hour picking out things he thinks (or rather, hopes) he might be able to turn into an actual meal.
*
Teaching Myself To Bake (Without Google or Help!) - Day One, he titles the stream, and then waits for the viewcount to go up.
“Hi, guys! Hi, hi, hi. Yes, hello everyone,” he says, grinning. The camera is set up against the kitchen counter, fridge and microwave behind him. To his right, his monitor shows him his own face—what the thousands of strangers on their phones could see as they pressed play.
“This is the start of a new series,” he tells them, as the chat fills up with the same question: What’s going on?! “Yes, that’s right. It’s a cooking stream. Baking stream. What’s the difference? I don’t know! We’re gonna learn together, today, right now! Why? You guys wanna know why? Because why not? I just felt like doing something different, guys. It’s gonna be epic.” He pauses and reads the dono coming through. “‘Will you still be playing Minecraft on Fridays?’ Yes, duh, I’m not gonna stop playing Minecraft. Don’t be stupid, guys.”
He knows, as he gets all the bowls and utensils ready, that he must look like a total noob. “I don’t go here very often,” he admits, while turning the oven on to preheat. “And by here I mean the kitchen because why would I cook when I can just order McDonalds right to my door? It’s basically like having creative mode in real life.”
The chat makes fun of him for that, but George just pushes the hair out of his face and begins the process of making banana bread from scratch. “Why banana bread?” he says. “Because I was craving banana bread. It’s gonna be good, I swear.”
CU TTHE BANANAS BEFORE U MASH THEM!
L he stirred egg shell into the mix
Who uses a cake tin for banana bread lol
George ignores the people trying to help him, and mainly focuses on the messages calling him an idiot and a freak for using a teaspoon to stir such a big bowl of batter.
“It’s all I had, okay?” he grumbles, sweating a little. His elbow hurts. Apparently spending hours at a time refining his slightly above average Minecraft parkour skills didn’t translate to any useful upper arm strength. “Maybe I’ll invest in some proper tools if this goes well, okay? Is that a good idea? Oh, it is? Guys, you should all sub and then I’ll be able to afford the most expensive electric mixer in the world. Seriously, do it, and I’ll become the number one chef on the entire, like, the entire earth. I swear.”
It’s past noon by the time he finishes. The bread comes out of the oven too crispy on top and too raw in the middle. George cuts himself a slice anyway, and then cuts a second slice that he pretends is for the chat to eat. “Mmmh,” he says after his first bite, forcing it down. “It’s so delicious. Mmmmh.”
Gogy moaning clip thqt clip that
He looks like he’s in pain ahahhahaha
“I’m not lying! It’s so good. I’m a freaking god at baking already. I’m like, I’m like the greatest omega of all time. I could get any alpha I wanted with this banana bread.”
WHAT
OMG
HE WANTS AN ALPHA
“No— no,” George says, choking. “That’s not—I didn’t mean—ugh.” He throws his head back and groans, annoyed. “I’m not looking for—just stop!”
He finishes the stream not long later. His Twitter is full of fans asking if he was actually on the hunt for an alpha, if he was trying to impress anyone in particular, and George feels his face burn as he scrolls through his mentions. Which is dumb, he thinks, because none of what they’re saying is even true, so why did it make him so embarrassed? Sure, the idea had technically come from being left alone in his heat. And yes, he didn’t want to repeat those miserable few days by spending his next heat alone, as well. But that didn’t mean he was looking for an alpha, like, actively or anything. It was basically… Well, it was sort of like an inside meme, just with himself. Like, he made for such a bad omega he should at least try and profit off of his own shortcomings. It was funny, the entire premise of it.
George streams again on the weekend, this time in a cleaner kitchen—the dust in the cabinets has finally been wiped away, after months of build up—with the intention of cooking a beef burger for the first time in his life.
“Erugh,” he says as he uses his fist to flatten the meat patty. “I don’t even wanna touch it. It’s, like, slimy. Wait, should I have gotten a fork to do this? Would a fork even be strong enough to do it? Am I stronger than a fork?”
There’s a few clips from the three-hour stream that go semi-viral, which in turn brings in more viewers for George’s third cooking stream that takes place two days later. By the time a month has passed, George has successfully made pancakes from scratch, less successfully decorated a dozen cupcakes with bright blue icing that dyes his tongue for the rest of the afternoon, and put together a baked potato that resembles dog vomit.
He’s also gained way more subscribers on his Youtube channel, which is just… George doesn’t know how to feel about that. His paychecks are getting bigger, sure, but his audience seems to be changing. The newcomers think the Minecraft streams he still does every Friday night are just a sideshow to the cooking videos, rather than the main act.
“I have an idea,” he informs chat one evening. On his screen, his player crouches and begins to bridge its way across a large pool of lava in the cave he’s spent the last half an hour exploring. “My birthday’s coming up—no, I’m not that old, are you guys crazy?—anyway, my birthday’s coming up and I thought I’d bake a cake to celebrate. What kind of cake, you’re wondering? A Minecraft cake. Like, I’m gonna—I’m gonna decorate it and everything. I even bought a square cake tin specially. It’ll be awesome.”
ur so cute gogy
Will you actually follow a real recipe for once tho?
This is boring get back to the kitchen
I can’t wait to see him eat eggshells again
“I didn’t eat eggshells! Stop spreading lies about me.” George is so busy defending his honour he ends up falling into the lava by accident, and he spends the next five minutes pretending to cry over it. Then he gets right back to gathering iron for a new set of armour and doesn’t mention the cake thing again.
*
“It’s sweet, what you’re doing,” his mum says as she pushes the trolley behind George. He reaches for the sugar and only struggles a little bit to stretch his arm far enough. “I know it’s not in your nature, and perhaps that’s my fault, but it’s nice that you’re trying. Your dad and I—”
“Dad and you what?”
“We worry sometimes.”
George rolls his eyes and plops the bag of white sugar in the trolley, beside the two blocks of butter he had already grabbed from the dairy section.
“You don’t have to,” he says. “I’m getting by pretty alright. I’m rich now, you know?”
“Yes. Miracles do happen, I suppose.”
“What miracle is that?”
“You making a career out of cooking,” she says with a laugh, shaking her head. “I never thought I’d see the day. I still remember when you were a kid, god, you must’ve been ten or eleven, and you and your sister burned those crepes you were trying to make me for Mother’s Day—”
“Yeah, it traumatised me,” George cuts in, smiling. “Why d’you think I never stepped foot in the kitchen again?”
She laughs a second time and that’s the end of it. Thank God—George didn’t want to hear anymore about how proud she was of him for acting like a normal omega for the first time in his life.
That night they celebrate his birthday at an Indian restaurant near his flat, and he ignores every absentminded comment his dad makes about how this time next year George would hopefully have a mate to introduce them to. “You’re not getting any younger, son,” he says, all fond and gross. George proceeds to blow out the candles of his cake (a chocolate one—store bought) and makes a wish for his parents to shut up about him settling down someday soon. It’s just not gonna happen, he thinks, and wonders why the realisation fills him with so much bitterness.
*
His chat is more alive than ever when he goes live the next day. Teaching Myself To Bake (Without Google or Help) - BIRTHDAY EDITION!, exclaims the stream’s title, much to the excitement of the viewers.
“Yes, my birthday was technically yesterday,” George greets them with. “But let’s pretend, okay? Feel free to give me all your money as a birthday gift, guys! That’s a joke. Don’t—don’t give me all your money, maybe just some of it.” He grins and scans the chat. “Oh, you guys like my new chef hat? Thank you. No, there’s not a rat underneath it. ‘What are you making today?’ A minecraft cake. You didn’t already know that? Fake fan, you clearly don’t watch my streams, do you? Fake fan, fake fan, fake fan.”
He gets by alright until the halfway point, when he has to slide the cake into the oven for half an hour, and ends up burning his hand on the hot rack. He flinches backwards in surprise, a shiver of pain pounding through his finger, while at the same time he accidentally bangs into the kitchen counter. More pain blossoms—but it’s a different pain, less of a sting and more of a distant ache in his hipbone.
“Ouch,” he whines at the camera, trying to exaggerate it to hide how much it’s actually hurting him. “Guys, what do I dooo?”
The chat is moving even faster than usual. George blinks at it, confused. He tries to read through the messages, but he literally can’t—it’s like everyone’s gone crazy.
“Stop, stop, slow down,” he says, till finally his eyes manage to catch on the same words being repeated over and over:
What is Dream doing here
Dream’s watching
Do they know each other???
DREAM’S HERE!
Dream!!!!!
“Huh?” George says, brows furrowing. He grabs his phone with his right hand—the one without the burn—and swipes onto the Twitch app, typing ‘Dream’ into the search bar. Then he clicks onto the profile’s yellow icon and feels surprised when he sees his own stream appear on the screen.
It’s slightly delayed, by about thirty seconds maybe, so the moment George accidentally burns himself has only just happened. Dream doesn’t have any face cam on, but he does have his mic set loud enough to play over top of George’s own audio. “What—what is wrong with this guy?” he’s asking. “Why hasn’t he got an oven mitt? This, this is who everyone’s been obsessing over the last few weeks?”
Now the screen shows George banging into the counter.
“Oh, my God,” Dream exclaims, and he sounds kind of delighted, like George is a dumb dog chasing its own tail. “Is he okay? Oh, he’s—he realised we’re watching. Hi, GeorgeNotFound.”
George flushes and, without thinking, replies, “Hi, Dream.”
The phone speakers echo him a second later. Hi, Dream. God.
“Are you alright?” Dream asks.
“I think it might bruise,” George says, rubbing the spot on his hip that he’d hurt. Then he realises what he’s doing and turns his phone off, turning back to his own camera. “Sorry, guys. Sorry. That’s—who does that guy think he is, right? There’s nothing wrong with me. I’m a god in the kitchen. I’m amazing.”
dream’s ACTUALLY a god at minecraft
Best crossover ever
He’s jealous u stole all his viewers
“Is that true?” George says, laughing. “Did I steal you guys away from him? Aww. I totally see why. I make for a much nicer view, right?”
Yessss ur so pretty gogy
Bro has a chat full of simps
George laughs again before turning around to the fridge, where the ingredients for the icing are waiting. “Alright,” he says, “enough shenanigans. Let’s get the piping bags ready. I’ve never used them before but I’m sure I’ll be great at them.”
*
The next time he does a Minecraft stream, he gets this petty urge to pay Dream back. It’s stupid, and totally unnecessary, and Dream probably won’t even care because he has, like, ten times the amount of subscribers as George—George is just the internet’s latest viral trend but Dream is actually popular, like, consistently—but he does it, anyway. He pulls up Dream’s stream on his own and starts up a running commentary on it. His chat responds by acting like it’s the funniest thing in the entire world.
“Oooh, I’m Dream and I go to the Nether without any armour on,” he mimics, watching as Dream trades with a group of piglins. “Ooh, I’m Dream and I’m sooo good at speedrunning.”
“No, guys, this doesn’t count as bullying,” George adds a moment later, eyes sliding sideways. “I’m not a bully. How could I bully anyone? I’m literally so innocent. I’ve never done anything wrong, ever, in my whole life. I’m basically an angel, if you think about it. In fact, I’m actually just giving Dream a little bit of a shout out, because I’m a much larger creator than him and I think he needs the boost. He’s been falling off lately. He hit his peak and I’m just trying to help him out a bit. Oh, thank you, Becca, for the subs, thank you, thank you.”
“I hit my peak?” a voice says in his headphones.
George jumps and glances back at his computer screen, where Dream has, unbelievely, paused his speedrun in favour of speaking incredulously to—to, well, George, apparently. He’s addressing George.
“Um,” George says. “Something like that.”
“You are such an idiot, GeorgeNotFound,” Dream mutters, and then he’s clicking around on his game, leaving the world he’d been in, and joining some sort of multiplayer server. George watches all this with a blank expression. “Come on, then, if we’re gonna beef, let’s do it face to face.”
“I do not beef. I am not a beefer.”
“I just sent you my discord on Twitter. Add me, GeorgeNotFound. Add me.”
“What, so you can leak all my information?”
“I promise I have no interest in leaking any of your information.”
George grumbles but does as he’s been told, logging into his Twitter account on his second monitor and clicking the link Dream had DM’d him.
Immediately, Dream calls him. George clicks out of the Twitch tab, so there won’t be any overlapping audios, and accepts the call.
“Hi, GeorgeNotFound,” Dream greets.
“It’s just George.”
“Yeah, okay.” On Dream’s end, there’s some more typing, some more mouse clicking. George returns his hand to his own keyboard and starts to play Minecraft again, except he can’t even remember what he’d been doing before he decided to stalk Dream’s stream and make fun of him.
“You’re playing Minecraft, right?” asks Dream after a second.
George crouches his player, hiding from a skeleton. “Yep.”
“Wanna fight?”
“What?”
“I mean on bed wars,” Dream amends, and George can practically hear him smiling. It annoys him more than he wants to admit, because now his chat is betraying him and screaming about how Kind and Funny and Cool and Outgoing Dream was, for offering to play with a Stupid Nobody like George. “So… d’you want to?”
“Yeah, I guess,” George agrees. Then, “So long as you’re prepared to get absolutely destroyed. You’ve got no idea what you just signed up for.”
George gets absolutely destroyed, in the end. But Dream’s sort of nice about it, and suggests that they swap modes to play as a duo, which George approves of. They’re halfway through the game when their tenuous banter derails into full-blown screaming at each other, because Dream had told him to target the green team and George had run off to the yellow island instead, which causes them to both get ganged up on and die in an embarrassingly short length of time.
“Okay,” Dream says afterwards, in a half amused, half exasperated tone. On George’s computer screen, their players punch at each other. “You’re about as good at bed wars as you are at cooking. I should’ve expected it.”
“Hey!” George says back, “I’m colourblind. That’s a—that’s a disability. You’re discriminating against me right now.”
“You were literally begging for it. You were begging for it, George, you could’ve just followed me—”
“I couldn’t find you! And maybe you should’ve followed me!”
“I said to go to the green team!”
“—well, you should’ve defended me anyway, since you’re supposed to be this OP player and all. Seriously, think about it, if you’d just protected me, we would’ve won!”
They keep arguing with each other even as Dream’s frustration devolves into giggles and George catches himself smiling so hard his jaw hurts. He gets so into it, in fact, he doesn’t notice the chat freaking out over the fact that George’s cheeks have flushed red as a rose. He hardly even seems to be aware of the blush himself.
*
The thing is, George has never really made collab content before. Since he started, it was always just him and his camera and his fans. He’d preferred it like that, preferred doing his own thing, and not having to worry about making friends with other streamers. It’s not like at a normal job, he’d reasoned, where you had to get all buddy-buddy with your co-workers so you weren’t seen as the asshole stinking up the lunch room.
But then Dream starts messaging him, and George’s stance on this changes. At first it’s just simple things—Dream sends him memes that are so dumb and unfunny they somehow circle back to being hilarious. He spams cake and fire and laughing emojis at George, and George will retaliate by spamming as many middle-fingers as he can back. Morning, Dream will type, even though George’s morning ended hours ago.
Eventually, it becomes more. Eventually, Dream calls him, over and over till George finally answers:
“Let’s play bed wars again,” he says instead of ‘hey’ or, god forbid, ‘how are you?’
“On stream?” George asks.
“No. Just us. I’ll help you get better.”
George rolls his eyes and very deliberately ignores the strange feeling clogging his throat, the shyness building in his belly. Dream seems quieter like this, when there aren’t thousands of people watching them—more reserved, almost. George finds he doesn’t mind it, so he agrees: “Alright,” and then adds, “You gonna turn me into a massive sweat at the game like you, huh?”
“Pft, you wish,” Dream says. “Come on, get on your computer.”
Over the next few weeks, bed wars morphs into a shared survival world, which then turns into sitting in a private call together after midnight, no game on to act as a buffer between them. They get to know each other on these calls; Dream rambles about how he’d started his channel, about the hours he spent studying the algorithm, about how he’d taught himself to code. In return, George laughs and makes fun of Dream for being a tryhard at everything, even content creation. “I didn’t do any of that,” he says, “I just had to sit there and look pretty and the whole world came running.”
“The world?” Dream says, snorting into his microphone. “Really?”
“Uh-huh. The world and you.”
“Yeah, only ‘cause my chat’s obsessed with you. I had to check out what made you so special.”
“You’re obsessed with me.”
Dream snorts again, but doesn’t deny it, and George feels himself go warm inside, like a chocolate lava cake.
“Why did you start streaming?” Dream soon asks.
“Thought it’d be fun,” George answers, which isn’t the whole truth, but it’s close enough. It’s the same thing he’d told his ex, anyway, ages ago. “Wouldn’t everyone wanna make money off of playing a video game?”
“Fair enough.”
A month later he’s at the shops again with his mum when his phone rings out, the screen flashing on to show an incoming call from Dream. Awkwardly, George disappears to another aisle—leaving his mum to pick out their sweets for film night—so he can answer it in private.
“Hello?”
“George!” Dream exclaims, and it’s such a stark difference from the way he had spoken to George at first, with so much derision in his tone. Now it’s all fondness. “Are you busy? Hop on Minecraft, I’m in the mood to finish our house.”
“Can’t,” George says.
“Oh, come on.”
“I can’t, really, I can’t,” he insists. “Tonight, okay? Tonight.”
“My tonight or your tonight?”
“Yours.”
Dream grumbles. “Alright, fine.”
“See you then—”
“What’s so important you can’t play, though?” Dream says, needling, like some kind of clingy baby.
George rolls his eyes. “I’m grocery shopping.”
“Oh. For- for like, a stream, or something?”
“No, not for a stream. Not everything’s for a stream, idiot.”
“Not with that attitude.” There’s a pause, and then Dream says, “It’s kind of a good idea, though, if you think about it. You could do more IRL content—like, live grocery shopping. That’d be epic.”
“That wouldn’t be epic. That’d be bor-ing,” George corrects. He thinks he can hear his mum looking for him, calling his name, so he starts walking back over to her. “Look, Dream. I’ll talk to you tonight. I have to go.”
“Why?”
“I’m with my mum.”
“Why?”
“We’re gonna watch a movie. Hey, do you think I should get Maltesers or M&Ms? Or sour straps?”
“Why?”
“Dream!” George says, annoyed now. “Stop it. You’re being weird.”
“You’re being weird.”
“Oh, yeah? Why?”
“Wow, turning it back on me. Nice.”
“Why?”
“Shut up.”
“Why?”
“You’re stupid.”
“Why?”
“I’d get the M&Ms,” Dream says.
George goes to reply— why?— but his mum appears in front of him and he doesn’t get the chance.
“Is that…?” she asks, one eyebrow raised, suspicion making her mouth go taut. It’s obvious she thinks it’s his ex-boyfriend, because his ex-boyfriend is the only person he used to ever get regular calls from.
George goes red. “No. I told you he — nevermind. It’s just my friend. Um, bye, Dream. Gotta go.”
“Oh, okay. Bye?”
George hangs up. Then he reaches over to the basket his mum is holding and pulls out the choice of crisps she’s placed in it. “Ugh, quavers? Overrated, Mum. Let’s get Pringles.”
“Don’t change the subject, hun,” she replies, “who were you talking to?“
“My friend.”
“An important friend?”
George wants to say yes, but the reality of the situation is he doesn’t know if Dream is going to become an important person to him or not. He’s never seen Dream’s face, not been told his real name and, like the rest of the internet, has no clue what Dream’s secondary gender is. There are theories, of course, with most believing he was an alpha— based on the way he conducted himself in his manhunt videos— but he hadn’t confirmed any of those rumours. Sometimes George feels envious—so much of his own fanbase had developed because they were endeared by him being an omega. He’d certainly not have become as popular as he was if he’d kept his status hidden.
“I’m not sure,” George finally admits, a little embarrassed.
His mum looks sympathetic. “Alright, well, let me know when you figure it out, and you can have this ‘friend’ over for one of our film nights.”
Jesus. That was how she vetted all his potential boyfriends. Or rather, how she scared them all off.
“I don’t think so,” he says, and hates when her expression goes from sympathetic to pitiful as he explains that Dream that lives in America, and wouldn’t be coming to London anytime soon, even if George asked him to. They just weren’t like that, he thinks, and immediately gets angry at himself for wishing they were.
*
The movie is fine. George barely pays attention to it though, because as the hours go on he finds himself getting antsier and antsier. Eventually it hits about nine PM, and he grabs a spare blanket from the cabinet for his mum to use on the sofa. She falls asleep within minutes, her snores bouncing around the living room, and George jumps on the chance to slip away to hop on his computer.
“Finally,” Dream says by way of greeting. He’s already logged into their survival world, busy collecting wood for the house they were building.
“Give me diamonds,” George demands in turn, going up to Dream’s character and hitting him with his fist.
“I don’t have any.”
“Liar. Liar. I need diamond boots, Dream. Come on.”
“Okay, fine.” Dream walks over to his Ender Chest and, while he’s getting the diamonds for George, he asks, “How was the movie? What’d you, uh, end up watching?”
“Jaws. It was terrible,” George says. “I don’t even like movies, you know. I’m not a movie watcher. It’s just, like, the easiest way for me to hang out with my mum. She’s—she’s still here, actually, so don’t make me scream, ‘cause then I’ll wake her up and she’ll get mad.”
“Make you scream?” Dream repeats, amused.
Embarrassment floods George, and he makes his voice go slightly flatter to hide it. “You know what I meant. Don’t kill me in game.”
Dream throws four diamonds at him. “I make no promises.”
They play all night. George has no regrets in the morning as he’s showing his mum to the door, not even when she makes fun of him for the puffy bags under his eyes.
*
During his next stream, Dream private messages him, because that’s apparently a thing they do now. They talk constantly; whenever and wherever.
b careful with the oil
George frowns. He’d just been about to turn the stovetop on and get the pan ready for the steak.
Are you watching?
yes. me and patches thjnk ur gonna burn yourself so BE CAREFUL
The frown turns to a grin, which he tries to hide from the camera by shifting his body slightly, so that the only thing the viewers can see is his side profile.
Fineee
What will u do if I DO burn myself tho?
He hesitates before triple texting, Maybe u could kiss it better???
nah i’ll probs report u for breaking TOS
George laughs and shoves his phone into his pocket. Back to cooking, then.
*
Plans come slowly, naturally, to stream together again sometime. Ideas are thrown back and forth—they could play Geoguessr; speedrun Minecraft; just talk—but none of them stick. Eventually things fall through anyway, when George wakes up one late morning and becomes aware of the sickly sweet stench coming off of his neck and wrists.
He calls Dream immediately to let him know:
“I’m in heat,” he says, half his face smushed into his pillow. God, he’s so sweaty. “Or, like, I’m on the cusp of it, I guess. Ugh. I feel like shit.”
“Oh,” Dream replies, which George has no idea how to interpret. Dream could be such an enigma sometimes. “You’ll be okay? Do you have, like, a…”
“I’m spending it alone.”
“Right. Sure.”
“So,” George says, drawing out the word. “Raincheck?”
“Of course. Keep me updated.”
“On my heat?” George says, laughing. In his head he pictures it—messaging Dream during the brief bouts of respite he’ll get between orgasms, letting Dream know that he was horny but still functional. That’s just. That’s ridiculous. Who would do that? Why would someone do that?
“Not on your heat, obviously,” Dream mutters. “I just meant when it’s over, DM me, so that we can pick a different day to go live. That’s—that’s fine, right? We’re still doing that?”
“Yeah, duh. Um, okay. I’ll let you know. Bye, Dream.”
“Byeee.”
The next couple of hours are miserable, as the start of his heats always are. George rolls around in his nest for a while, blankets getting caught between his legs. Then he deliberates on whether the grumbling in his stomach should be prioritised over the growing wetness between his inner thighs. Eventually he decides yes, yes it should, and promptly crawls out of his room on unsteady feet.
George manages to eat half a toasted cheese sandwich before the frenzy takes over him and he reaches into his pants, fingering himself right there at the counter, where only yesterday he had livestreamed the process of making brownies. Half an hour later finds him coming down from it again, left hand still curled around his cock, the other leaning against the kitchen bench for support.
He hadn’t—he hadn’t been thinking about anything as he came. He never does. That’s just not how his brain works. It doesn’t bring up specific images of people as he touches himself; it doesn’t focus on anything except that fleeting pleasure he’s always chasing during his heats. Even when he was with his ex boyfriend, it’d been the same—sure, George liked having company, but he’s sure he would take any company when he gets like this. He doesn’t… He doesn’t need anyone, or anything, specific. Not really.
Over the next few days this doesn’t change. George gets off about a million times, his fantasies in a constant state of evolution. One hour, he’s biting his lip and humping into his mattress, imagining there’s some sort of primitive caveman fucking into him from behind; the next, he finds himself in the bath, using the showerhead against his arse and wishing he had his old best friend from primary school—another omega—there to hold it for him.
Eventually the heat runs its course. George shoots a text to his mum to let her know things had gone over okay, because she always gets worried when he goes through these things without an alpha, and then switches over to the Discord app to message Dream.
It’s done
Dream replies with a fire emoji. A second later, he adds, u ok?
George is in the middle of stripping his filthy bedsheets, so he decides to press call instead of typing anything back.
“George? Are you good?”
“Ya-huh,” he says, distractedly. “Thank god. Let’s gooo.”
Through the phone comes a soft snort. “Sure. Let’s gooo,” Dream echoes, and George feels the ghost of a smile grow on his face. “Was it really that bad?”
“What do you mean?”
“Just, the way you talk about it…”
“It’s not bad, it’s just not good,” George explains, as if he’s talking to a child who has no prior knowledge of heats. “I mean, it can be good, if I’ve got someone helping me, but I didn’t, so it wasn’t good. And when it’s not good it just feels like a total waste of time. I mean, imagine how much I could’ve got done in our Minecraft world if I wasn’t, like, trapped in my bed for a week.”
The word vomit leaves him a bit breathless. George cringes and continues on his way to the washing machine.
“Right,” Dream replies, sounding a little breathless as well, which makes no sense whatsoever. “I never really thought about it like that.”
So he’s not an omega, George thinks by accident. He immediately feels bad for it—for speculating—when Dream has made it perfectly clear that he doesn’t want people to know his secondary gender. Sure, he’s never told his audience outright to mind their business, but George has gotten to know him pretty well in the last few months, and he just gets that feeling sometimes. The feeling that Dream would rather keep it private, the same way he keeps his face and home and family private.
“Anyway,” George says to change the subject, hoping nothing in his voice betrays him. “I gotta clean my flat real quick and then I’ll hop on Minecraft.”
“No rush,” says Dream. “You should just, like, rest.”
George scoffs. “I’ve been resting all week. I wanna play. C’mon, play with me, Dream.”
“Okay, okay. I’m logging on…”
*
They stay on call together for fourteen hours. Afterwards, George is exhausted, and insists he should at least try to get a few hours of sleep.
“Just stay up,” Dream says, whiny.
“I can’t,” George replies, already snug in bed.
“Just do it. It’s easy. Just keep your eyes open.”
George’s jaw aches from smiling. “I can’t,” he repeats.
“Okay,” Dream concedes, soft and gentle. “Okay, fine. Go to sleep, then. Little baby.”
“You should, too,” George says, the idea lighting up in his head as his eyes become heavy and a yawn slips from his mouth. “Then our sleep schedules can be, like, synced…”
He’s asleep before he hears Dream’s response.
*
As spring turns to autumn, George meets Dream’s other friends. There’s Sapnap and BadBoyHalo and a whole host of other streamers George has only ever heard of in passing. They’re nice enough, he supposes, and plenty funny, but they’re not Dream. They’re not who George sits with on call for hours and hours, asking dumb questions to and getting dumb answers back. They’re not who George thinks about as he goes to bed; they’re not the first thing George thinks about when he wakes up again in the morning.
The rest of the internet eats it up. Well, perhaps not the whole internet, but certainly their little corner of it. Dream shows up on his cooking streams sometimes, not to participate or anything, but just to be there in the background and keep George company. Then George gets in the habit of joining Dream while he’s training for his speedruns, and suddenly their chats have combined and declared DNF the new ship of the month.
It eggs on George’s steadily developing crush in the worst ways. He finds himself laughing a little too hard when somebody tweets him asking if it’s real, if George’s shitty baking videos had actually managed to snag him a mate. He scrolls through TikTok and finds edits of the two of them, comment sections full of ravings about how gently Dream treated George—how Dream didn’t interact like that with anybody else. George isn’t sure if that’s even true, but god, it makes his stomach hurt to think it might be.
It gives him hope, too. If the fans had managed to correctly pick up on his crush, and notice how stupidly fond his voice became when Dream’s Minecraft character was doing something dumb, then maybe they were right about Dream, too. Maybe George wasn’t alone in what he was feeling.
Which is why, one night, George murmurs, “Would you ever wanna meet, like, in real life?” while they’re screen sharing the same episode of Breaking Bad together.
“Huh?” Dream says.
George tries to imagine what expression Dream might be making.
“Like,” George explains, only to struggle to find the words. “Ugh.”
“What? George, what?”
He pauses the show.
“I just, like,” George says, “I want—”
“Go on.”
“I could come to America. And see you.”
“That’s…”
“Forget it.”
“No, no,” Dream says quickly, urgently, “I’m not saying no, I’m just. I’m surprised. I didn’t know that was something you wanted. It’s- it’s a lot. Isn’t it?”
“I guess,” George mutters, grumpy. He hates how offended he is, at the idea that while George had been daydreaming about giving Dream an IRL hug, it hadn’t even occurred to Dream that the only thing separating them was a ten-hour plane ride.
“Don’t sulk.” Dream’s tone has gone hard, serious, and George’s instincts instantly demand that he roll over and apologise. It’s moments like that, where George feels more omega than man, that make him think the internet’s theories about Dream being an alpha might actually have some truth to them.
“Sorry.”
“I’ll have to think about it,” Dream says after another beat of silence. On George’s computer screen, Walter White stares emotionlessly at him. “I mean, how long would you even stay for? Would you, like… Would you be making content? ‘Cause I don’t—I’m not ready to face reveal, George.”
“I don’t wanna visit for content, idiot, I’d be visiting for- for you. That’s all.”
A pause. Then Dream’s voice comes through his phone’s speakers, all fond and sweet, “Yeah? Just for me?”
“Mmh.”
“Okay, then.” George listens to Dream clear his throat, cheeks flushing. “Okay, I guess you can come over. For me. You, uh, do you have a passport already?”
*
After he digs his passport out of his blanket cabinet, where it must’ve ended up when he first moved into his flat, Dream transfers the money over for a plane ticket. The flight isn’t for another month, luckily, meaning George still has plenty of time to get things together on his end. Mainly he wants to record a few Youtube videos in advance, so that when he arrives in Florida he won’t have to worry about work at all. Dream says it’s a good idea, and even helps him brainstorm what sort of things he could film before leaving.
Soon, the plan is steady enough for George to feel confident about telling people. Although, perhaps bragging about it is a more accurate way to put it. His mum finds out first—on one of their movie nights—because George accidentally blurts out that he can’t commit to rewatching Stranger Things with her since he’ll be in America in a few weeks time.
“America?” she says, agog.
George smiles, a private little thing. “America,” he confirms.
His sister hears about it a few days later, when she Facetimes him while he’s browsing a website full of expensive suitcases that Dream had recommended to him.
“So, you’re going on holiday?” she asks.
“Uh, yeah. I guess.”
She laughs. “You guess?”
George shrugs, and ignores the strange, suspicious look on her face. “Yeah, I guess. I mean, it might…”
“What? Might what, Georgie?”
“I don’t know.” He trails off, full of nerves and hope. “I like him, you know.”
“You mean Dream?”
“Yeah.”
“Wow. My baby bro like-likes someone. I didn’t know it was possible.”
“Oh, shut up.”
“I’m serious. You’re kind of—you can be so shut off sometimes. Mum and I never really know what’s going on with you. So for you to be open like this about something… someone… it has to be pretty big. Of course I’m surprised.”
George ducks his head, embarrassed. “We get along really well. I don’t know, I think it might become, uh, more, or something. So maybe this holiday—”
“You want it to become ‘more’ as well?”
“We’ll see.”
“Aww,” she coos. “Look at you. You really do like-like him.”
“Shut up!” he repeats, and a second later they’re back to fighting about stupid things like normal.
His viewers learn about it next, although they don’t know what George’s real reason for going is. They just think he’s in the mood to go on holiday, which isn’t exactly wrong, it’s just missing a key part of the situation. Yes, of course he wanted to travel, but mostly so he could meet Dream and figure out if they’re as compatible in real life as they are online.
“Will I be streaming when I’m in the U.S.?” he reads from the chat, biting his lip. “Probably not, guys. I don’t want to make any promises.”
Its ok gogy take a break!!!!
Noooo u should do a disney world stream
A comment from Dream comes through a moment later—won’t u miss us georgie???—which makes George laugh, and the rest of the chat to go even faster.
“No, I won’t miss you guys,” he says. “In fact, I hate you all. I’m gonna have the time of my life and not think about you guys for even a second. Unless…?”
UNLESS?
UNLESS WHAT GOGY???
he’s teasing usss
“Unless we reach my sub goal. Come on, guys, you’re funding my trip for me. Come on, come on!”
After the stream ends, it’s still early afternoon. George has barely clicked his camera off when a call lights up his phone, Dream’s contact photo (a neon yellow/green heart) appearing on the screen.
He answers it already grinning. “Hello?”
“Hey,” Dream says. “Good stream.”
“Eh.”
“Eh?”
“Uh-huh. It was just eh.”
“Well,” says Dream, the smile obvious in his voice. “I think it was more than just eh, so there.”
George pushes away from his desk chair and treks down the hall to the kitchen. His flat is small, so it’s easy to navigate with most of his attention glued to his phone.
“What’re you doing now?” Dream asks.
“It’s lunch time, idiot,” George says. He pulls open his fridge, only to scowl at the lack of things inside it. “Oh, shit. I’ve got no food.”
“Order something.”
“I ordered something yesterday. For lunch and dinner.”
“So what? It’s not like you can cook. Everyone knows that. You’re, you know. Famous for it.”
“Shut up. I just,” George stops, shaking his head. He likes Dream, likes him a lot, but not enough to admit to any of the recent insecurities that have been plaguing him. He can’t help wondering if Dream will approve of George when he sees him—after all, being together in real life will be different than it is through a screen. What if Dream thinks he’s ugly? Or annoying? What if Dream thinks he smells bad?
“What’s wrong, George?” Dream murmurs, concerned.
“Sometimes I don’t wanna eat fast food,” he lies, quickly. “McDonalds can get old after a while.”
“Probably because you always get the chicken nuggets. If you branched out—”
“Nuh-uh. Sometimes I get a burger.”
“With a side of nuggets.”
“Well…”
“So are you gonna go grocery shopping?” Dream says, changing the topic. He’s good at that, at letting things flow between them.
George hums and heads to the front door, stepping into the set of shoes he had left at the bottom of the stairs. “I suppose. But only ‘cause I absolutely have to.”
He stays on the phone with Dream as he walks to the Tesco Express closest to him. It’s not that busy inside, thanks to it being a weekday, but there’s still a fair few shoppers around. George pulls his hoodie up over his head and starts browsing the meal deal section, Dream’s voice a steady stream of background noise in his ear:
“It’s just, like, kind of stressful because everyone’s begging for me to go against four hunters but it’s difficult enough to find three people that mesh well and can work together and won’t mess up the video’s, like, general vibes, so it’ll be a miracle to get a fourth person that could—”
George picks up the cheap sushi and stares at it. Then, with a grimace, he puts it back and grabs a sausage roll instead. Its plastic front claims it needs to be microwaved for one minute-thirty before being eaten.
“—and Sapnap wants to do another mod video, except that one we’ve been working on with the, uh, with the players getting shrunk, it’s all buggy and I don’t know how to fix it and I don’t even have the time because I’m so behind on editing, it’s like it never ends—”
George is in the middle of deliberating between a coke or a fanta when a new voice interrupts Dream’s ranting:
“George, hey?”
He flinches, turning. At the other end of the aisle stands his ex boyfriend, a basket full of loaf bread and margarine in his hand.
“Oh, shit,” George says, and before he can think it through properly he’s hanging up on Dream mid-sentence. He doesn’t know why he does it, except that’s a lie, he kind of does. It’s just embarrassing; he doesn’t want Dream to know about how George had gotten dumped, how George was a terrible and lazy omega, how George couldn’t hold down even the dumbest of alphas.
“I guess I should’ve known we’d run into each other here,” his ex is saying when George tunes back in. He’s got an oblivious smile on his face, which reminds George of the beginning of their relationship, when things were still going okay and there was no weird bitterness between them. “Might have to start going to a different Tesco.”
“You don’t have to,” George replies. His fingers are still curled loosely around the sides of his phone. He feels cornered, trapped, frozen in ice.
“If you say so.” A pause. “So how have you been?”
“Fine. And, er, you?”
“Good, good. Although, I think you’ve been a little better than fine,” he teases, and for a flash second George is filled with rage. “I watch your streams, you know.”
“That’s kind of weird.”
“Only sometimes. You’re- they’re cool, George. You’re cool.”
“Sure. Thank you.”
“Would’ve been nice,” his ex continues, a little wistfully. “I mean, if you’d started on all that cooking stuff when we were still together. You wouldn’t even step foot in the kitchen when I used to come over.”
“That’s different. I make money off of it now. I’m, like, I’m super rich. I could’ve been your sugar daddy but you blew the chance. Bad luck.”
They both laugh, but it’s full of awkwardness. Once upon a time they used to lie in bed together and spend hours giggling over George’s dumb jokes. Now they run into each other at the supermarket and can’t even make eye contact.
“We should catch up sometime,” his ex says, more confidently, as if George teasing him had served as a greenlight to push past the awkwardness and — what? What was his goal here? “For coffee or… something.”
“Or something?”
“We could grab a drink.”
“I’m busy,” George says, holding up his meal deal. He still needs to go pick something to have for dinner later.
“I didn’t mean right now.”
“Oh, well. I’m, like, always busy these days. Sorry.” Not.
“Right, sure. No worries. It was only an idea. Maybe you could text me if you change your mind?”
George shrugs. He has no intention of doing that. “Maybe. See you around?”
“Definitely. Bye, George.”
After he’s gone, George tries to call Dream back. When Dream declines it, George tries again and again and again, until eventually he has to concede that Dream isn’t gonna answer… which is kind of strange, since Dream always answers. George frowns and distracts himself from his worry by thinking about what he should make for dinner.
*
George is chewing on his thumbnail, struggling to decide whether to have an early night or not, when Dream finally calls back. He accepts it, obviously, and refuses to be embarrassed about how quickly he does so.
“Dream, there you are, you idiot,” he greets. “Where’d you go?”
“Where’d I go?” Dream says, laughing, but it sounds forced.
George pulls his legs up to his chest, chin resting in the crook between his bent knees. “Yeah. You were totally ignoring me. I could feel it, telepathically. It was so rude, Dream. So rude.”
“You hung up on me first.”
“Yeah, ‘cause I—it was an accident.”
It’s clear Dream doesn’t believe him. “An accident?”
“Yes.”
“Sure it was, George.”
“It was! You calling me a liar?”
“I’m certainly calling you something,” Dream says, sounding almost—almost wistful.
George doesn’t understand. He doesn’t understand anything.
“I ended up getting pizza for dinner,” he says, for lack of anything else. “Ask me what kind, Dream.”
“What kind?”
“It had mushrooms on it.”
“Nice.”
“I picked them off.”
“If you don’t like mushrooms, why’d you get that one?”
“I do like mushrooms,” George says, “they just get a bit much sometimes. There was too many on the pizza. I left, like, a few.”
“Was it good, George?” Dream murmurs. “Was the pizza good?”
George closes his eyes and wishes he had Dream next to him, talking to him in this soft, tender tone. He wishes he could reach across the ocean separating them and touch Dream; scent him; love him.
“You’re right,” he says eventually.
“I am? What- what d’you mean?”
“I was lying,” George admits. He unfolds his legs again so they’re stretched downwards, feet on the floor. “When I was at Tesco, I ran into this, uh, guy I used to date. Like, before I met you.”
“Oh.”
“I’m sorry.”
Dream doesn’t speak for a moment. “Why are you sorry?”
“Because—” George hesitates. What if he’s been reading this all wrong? What if he says because I wanna wait for you, and I wish I had never been with any other alpha so you could’ve been my first and shown me what’s really so great about being with the person who was made for you, and Dream reacts badly? What if Dream laughs at him and says he doesn’t care if George goes out to ‘have a drink’ with his ex? Whatever that even means.
“Because…?” Dream says, leaving it unfinished.
“Because it was rude to hang up on you,” George finally mutters. It’s not what he wanted to say, not even close, but his heart hurts too much to confess to anything else.
Dream sighs. George can feel it in his chest.
“This guy,” he says, like he’s tasting the words in his mouth, turning them over with his tongue. George tenses up, waiting. Dream then goes on, “Were you and him like… Ugh. I don’t know.”
They both huff.
“It wasn’t serious,” George says. “I mean, he’s an alpha, I’m an omega, it’s just- that’s just the way of things, right? We got on well… I mean, not that well. He, like. He dumped me.”
“He broke it off?”
“Yeah.” George bites his lip. “The thing is, though, I got the feeling that he wanted to, like, try again. Isn’t that weird?”
No response comes.
George’s stomach drops. “Dream?”
“It’s not that weird,” Dream whispers. “I can’t blame him. You’re a total catch, Georgie. Handsome, funny…”
Suddenly, things seem a little lighter between them. George smiles and says, “Shut up, shut up.”
“It’s trueee. Don’t be shy.”
“Well, it’s not fair for you to say things like that when I’ve never even seen your face and can’t compliment you back,” George rambles, quickly, as his cheeks go aflame.
“You’ll see me soon,” Dream promises, taking George’s word vomit in stride. “Two weeks left, and then you’ll be on a plane, and I’ll have an Uber pick you up from the airport, and then we’ll- we’ll be together.”
Together. George hardens his resolve and says, “Yeah. And maybe, uh, maybe when I get there you could…”
“What?”
“Like, you could, you know.”
“I don’t. I don’t know.”
“Dream.”
“What!”
“My ex,” George says, “the only reason I’d ever go back to him is so he could give me a hand during my heats. ‘Cause- cause alphas help a lot. They’re good to have around.”
“Uh, okay, what’s that got to do with—”
“But when I’m in America,” George continues, nervously, “maybe I wouldn’t need him like that ‘cause you could… you know. I’d let you, if that’s what you wanted. If you wanted to look after me.”
Silence. George squeezes his eyes shut, heart in his throat. Never before had he tried doing something like this. It was always the alpha leading him, the alpha pursuing him. He wasn’t used to doing things the other way around.
“George,” Dream says, all careful, and George immediately knows he’s being rejected.
“Oh.”
“It’s not as if I don’t want… Look, I just don’t think it’s a good idea,” Dream explains.
George’s eyes sting. “No, yeah, sure. Don’t worry about it.”
“We wouldn’t—I don’t think we’d be compatible.”
“Oh, my god.”
“I’m not trying to hurt your feelings—”
“Feelings? I don’t—it’s not about feelings, Dream, don’t be gross. Obviously I don’t like you like that,” George fibs quickly, to try and get some of his dignity back. “It would’ve just been sex. What, you’ve never—you’ve never just had a hook-up before? Wow. Are you a virgin, Dream?”
“No, I just don’t really like casual sex.”
You don’t like me either, George thinks, with a flash of despair.
“Whatever.”
“Don’t be mad,” Dream begs. “You’ll- you’ll thank me when you get here, and realise that I’m right about this. I swear.”
“You still want me to come?”
“Do I still—? Of course, George. You’re my friend. Of course I wanna meet you and see you.”
The call doesn’t last long after that. George decides to go to sleep, still too sensitive from what had just happened to stay awake and risk overthinking it. While he’s getting ready for bed, he receives the usual gn text Dream sends around this time. What he doesn’t normally send is the follow up—im rly sorry—which reawakens George’s fury, and he barely manages to resist the urge to block Dream’s number.