a/n: lovely fanart of chapter 5 by Vic!!! https://dontrollthedicesideblog.tumblr.com/post/621782706874875904/i-think-this-is-how-tumblr-works-never-used-it

Sapnap sent 36 attachments

Sapnap: figured you might want this

Dream: you figured correctly

Dream: thank you

Sapnap: np dude

Sapnap: and tell george hes a stinky poopoo head

Sapnap: youre one too, just to a lesser extent

Dream: no u

"Hey, George," Dream called as he waited for the bacon on the pan to cook. George was seated on the counter next to him, idly picking at his nails. "Sapnap says you're a stinky poopoo head."

George rolled his eyes, then they widened before he pulled Dream to the side right as hot grease popped off the pan. "Dream!"

Dream chuckled, his heart warming at the disproportionate amount of concern in his shout. "It's just a little bacon grease, George."

George only groaned and crossed his arms. "Whatever. Tell him he's a stinkier poopoo head."

Dream: he says youre a stinkier poopoo head

Sapnap: WHAT

Sapnap: be there in 5 minutes to kick both of your asses be ready to catch these hands

Dream relayed the text to George, both laughing.

Nothing much had changed, it seemed. Dream was thankful for that much.

*

Office politics sucked for people who took days off. It sucked even more for people who took multiple days off.

Dream rolled his eyes as he deleted another passive-aggressive email from somebody on his team. He would just claim the email hadn't arrived, as he would for the other four people who sent him similarly passive-aggressive emails. It's not like any of this came as a surprise anyway; He had never been on the receiving end of it since he had never missed out on any days before, but he had witnessed it from afar enough times to know the drill.

"Today's workplace atmosphere is... interesting," George said, his voice detached as he inspected his fingernails. "Don't worry about it. Ignore them like you always did."

Dream stilled, then pulled up the designated word document and typed. You didn't even read the emails. How did you know?

George snorted. "Dream, you look like you're gonna strangle someone right now. You always look like this at work."

Wow, thanks.

"It's not an insult, it's a concern. I can't protect you from your own body sabotaging itself."

Dream paused. What do you mean by that?

"I've been watching over you for a couple of months now, you know. Every time you go to work, your coworkers make it hell for you," George huffed. "It's quite frustrating to watch, actually."

Aw, you care about me <3

George raised an eyebrow. "Why would I not?"

Oh. He said that so casually as if Dream hadn't just been trying to tease him. But it felt nice having their friendship validated so nonchalantly with no hesitation. It was... nice. Really nice, actually.

"I can see you smiling, you idiot," George chuckled. When Dream hazarded a glance back, George's lips were curled up into an amused smile. "Get back to work. Or, you know, keep looking at picture frames on Amazon. You scrolled past a pretty good deal earlier today."

You're such a bad influence.

"They're your actions, not mine. I don't have to worry about consequences."

Bold of you to assume I care about consequences.

George shook his head, and Dream continued scrolling through deals on picture frames.

But he had missed a few days. He should probably catch up on his work and more.

Dream exited out of the website and opened the tab containing a work email, ignoring the pair of eyes burning into his back.

*

"Back to coding right after work?" George scoffed and flopped down on Dream's bed. "Nerd."

Dream shrugged. "It's a grind."

"You weren't doing this before."

That was true. But then again, he hadn't ever seen the fragility of life before and how quickly everything he knew could be swept away.

Dream figured that was more of a drunken late-night Saturday discussion than a Monday afternoon discussion, so he hummed in response and turned up the music playing on his computer.

George sighed. "Dream, you're gonna get a noise complaint about that. Could you at least switch to a song that doesn't say 'I wanna see some ass' every two seconds?"

Dream only cackled in response.

*

Different day, same bullshit.

I hate everyone, Dream typed into a document. He waited for George to look up from whatever obscure previous assignments he had spread out on Dream's desk to read.

Thankfully, George had glanced up almost immediately and read the message on the document. He frowned. "Oh. What happened?"

Higher-ups reprimanded me for making a client's website less ugly. Told me to just follow instructions next time.

"Dream, I hate to say it, but that's standard procedure in a corporate setting. I did the same thing, except I did it one too many times and got sacked." He laughed when Dream's shoulders tensed. "Don't worry about it, that was more than a couple years ago. It turned out for the best, too."

Ah, right. George had told him he was a freelance programmer when he was alive. And Dream had wondered if...

It was still as null of a possibility as it was before. But something had changed—something within him. While he didn't particularly enjoy working where he did, it paid well and was relatively stable. Nothing about his workplace had changed, so why was everything so intensely grating now?

Well, he had bigger things to worry about now. He heard his boss in the distance asking his coworkers about progress.

Dream scooped up the papers spread out over his desk and stacked them neatly before deleting the word document and opening his coding program.

George pouted but leaned back against the wall as far as he could in preparation for another person entering the cubicle.

*

Eleven o'clock. Dream had gotten home half an hour past five, hopped onto his computer, and started typing away into Eclipse with nothing but a vision. Had he been coding for a straight five and a half hours?

Dream shut his eyes and scooted away from the desk, giving his legs enough room to stretch as he stretched his arms above his head. Relief.

Once the high from stretching after sitting in the same position for several hours faded, he opened his eyes and reached for his mouse.

Huh.

When had a plate of sliced fruit ever been on his desk?

Normally, there was nobody to watch him transform into a gremlin later in the night. He ate apples by biting into them, bananas straight out of the peel, strawberries with the green tops still on. There hasn't been a single time in his life he actually expended the effort of slicing fruit since he had moved out. Even if he had sliced it for himself, he doubted getting up to cut up fruit was something that could slip from his memory without a trace.

So who?

God, he was oblivious. Obvious answer would probably be the man sprawled over the bed with a book on SEO in hand. When had Dream bought that again?

"Hey," Dream called.

"You dog-ear the pages. You're dead to me."

"I was gonna thank you for the fruit, but okay. But really, thanks."

George hummed and turned a page. "No problem. You skipped dinner, so I wasn't sure if you were super focused or just not hungry. Fed the cat while I was at it."

Dream blinked. So he had.

"I didn't know you had so many books on stuff like this either. SEO, YouTube algorithm, algorithms in general. I remember reading some of these in my university classes. Great books. Boring, but informative." Then George frowned and turned another page. "I understand the SEO and algorithm books, but what's up with the YouTube ones? I don't think they'd be relevant to a platform that isn't..."

George gasped. That was never a good sign.

"Sapnap told me!" George said, sitting up with wide eyes. "Well, he didn't tell me, but he said something about you wanting to be a YouTuber, right? I can't have just imagined that."

Sapnap. Fucking Sapnap.

"Well, it's not like it matters," Dream said with a shrug. "I'm never gonna be a YouTuber, so..."

George leveled an annoyed look at him. "Dream, you can't be serious."

"'Dream, you can't be serious,'" Dream repeated in a mocking, nasally voice. "I'm serious."

"Have you even tried?"

"Yeah, when I was... thirteen? Fourteen?"

"And you're twenty now. I don't see what the problem is here."

Dream sighed.

There were a lot of problems, actually. He had studied the YouTube algorithm and how to make videos more clickable, that much was true. But actually executing his plans? He wasn't ready. It wasn't the right time. Not yet.

"Don't worry about it," Dream said, saving his work before shutting his computer off.

George gave him one last questioning glance before picking up the book and flipping the page.

*

"Used to write a lot."

George looked up from the book in his lap from where he was curled up on one side of the couch. In between him and Dream, Patches had dozed off in the middle seat. The lighting was dim and the blinds closed, the only source of light being the lights from the kitchen that neither had bothered to shut off from dinner. The night was silent.

"You did?" George asked.

Dream nodded, then froze. Maybe saying that out of nowhere at midnight was a bad idea. Where did that come from anyway? He had been sifting through his plug-in for errors, not anything even remotely related to literature, yet he had somehow found his way to the series of files containing writing he hadn't looked back on in over three years.

"Did you like writing?"

That was an understatement of a question. He couldn't recall the sheer number of times he had forwent homework to write the next chapter of the new story idea of the week, how many late nights he had spent fiddling with the exact wording of a passage. He picked up new vocabulary from his classes and weaved them into his own writing, tinkering with the sentence until it fit perfectly. It was funny how such a small thing brought him so much joy.

"I guess I did," Dream said. "A lot more than I thought I did."

"So why did you stop?" George, who had returned his gaze to the text of the book in his hands, continued speaking. "I mean, your job doesn't give you very much work to do outside of office hours. You've only started to really grind coding plug-ins after Sapnap left, so that should've left you plenty of time to work on things like that."

God.

Dream's fingers stopped, hovering above the keyboard of the laptop in his lap. Everything clicked into place.

Why did he have to say that?

George's gaze moved back up to Dream, and he frowned. "Dream. You okay?"

Dream gave him a dismissive wave. "Yeah, I'm fine. It just made me realize something."

Why had he stopped writing? Because his interests had drifted from the written word to coding. That was simple enough to answer.

But he had started grinding after Sapnap had left, more than he ever had in his life. A certain fear fueled every key he tapped, every line he read about search engines, every run he tested of his code. The fear had always been present, but everything that had happened poured more gasoline into the fire.

God, Sapnap hadn't even finished one year of college yet. Nineteen years were barely enough to do anything, and Dream was only one year older than him.

Dream could die at any time. So could everyone else in his life. He at least wanted to say he did everything he could before he died.

Still, making Minecraft plug-ins alone in his room wasn't his full potential. Having his creativity stifled by a corporate structure was the bare minimum he could reach. Even if his coworkers were content with the stability that gave, shutting his brain off for eight hours a day while not being valued by the people around him wasn't something he could tolerate for much more. That was what he became painfully aware of over the past couple of days.

Even so, there was a mental block he had struggled with for years. He needed to find the right time, but nothing ever felt like the right time.

How much of that was Dream willing to tell? Vulnerability was scary, but trusting someone with such a visceral, human fear was even scarier.

"Hey, can I ask something?" Dream said, careful to keep his tone nonchalant.

George chuckled with a shrug. "You didn't answer my question, but okay."

"Do you ever... I don't know, feel like you didn't do enough but can't get yourself to do what you want to do?"

George stilled, and Dream regretted every decision that led him to that moment. Why had he asked that? George died young! That was such a stupid question, and now the smile on George's face was gone. God, he was such an idiot.

"I suppose so, yes," George finally said slowly, as if he were choosing his words carefully. "Why do you ask?"

Dream fell silent. All his courage had evaporated.

George sighed. "Okay, bullshit. I know exactly why you asked, and I'd be damned if I'm letting you go down the same road I did."

"The same road?"

His question went ignored. Fucking hypocrite. George shut the book and set it down on the table, focusing all his attention on Dream. "You have nothing to lose, Dream. Absolutely nothing."

"My pride."

"That's worth less than you think it is. Your sense of accomplishment is worth a lot more than whatever ego you want to maintain." George's eyebrows furrowed, and he frowned. "What is this in context of? What do you feel like you can't do? Publish a book?"

Dream frowned with him, avoiding eye contact. Eye contact was too vulnerable. "No, not that. Maybe in the future, but that's not what my main focus is on."

"Then your plug-ins?"

"Kind of."

"Minecraft as a whole?"

"What does that even mean?"

"Your YouTube channel." George rolled his eyes. "God, Dream, I'm not stupid. I wanted to give you a chance to say it out loud yourself, but I guess not. And I still stand by what I said. You have nothing to lose."

Well, he supposed it had been obvious enough. But that wasn't the full picture.

"That, but there's something else, too," Dream said.

George leveled a blank stare at him.

Dream shook his head. "Yeah, fine, I get it. But... you know how much I hate my job."

"So are you saying you want to freelance?"

"Essentially, yeah."

George huffed and leaned forward, locking eyes with Dream whether he wanted to or not. There was something ominous in his gaze, something Dream couldn't quite place but felt uncomfortable looking away from. Or maybe Dream was just shitty at eye contact. Could go either way. "Quite frankly, I'm surprised you haven't ditched your job for freelancing already. You're a very creative person, Dream. You don't do well working under other people."

Huh. That was accurate.

Dream blinked, and finally managed to tear his gaze away from George's. "I guess you're right. But freelancing takes a lot of time. I would have to quit my job or—"

"No! No." George said, reaching forward and waking up Patches with the sudden movement. He gave Patches an apologetic look, then glanced back up to Dream. "Don't quit your day job. Seriously. Not until you have a good client base. You don't have to choose either. It's not something you have to devote all your time to."

Dream had to laugh at that. He offered him a smile in the face of all the solemnness this night had provided. "I know, don't worry. I'm not gonna do something stupid like that. I'm just..."

The block was still as present as ever, but George was right. He had nothing but his pride to lose, and he wasn't doing much with his time anyway.

"I'm not really ready," Dream finished.

George raised an eyebrow. "Then when will you be?"

There was no way of answering that. But testing the waters couldn't hurt, could it?

Dream picked up his phone, unlocked it, and tapped on a conversation with a contact.

Dream: hey Sapnap

Dream: make a youtube channel with me

*

"Why the hell should I make a YouTube channel with you?"

Dream turned away upon seeing George shoo him away from the doorframe to his bedroom. There was no limit to what George and Sapnap would do to annoy each other. "Sapnap, just do it."

"Um, no. I'm literally in college. It's my second semester, and I'm already kind of dying inside. Adding a YouTube channel to that isn't a good idea."

It was seven in the morning when Sapnap had called Dream a whopping thirty-seven times, Dream only waking up when George unplugged his phone and threw it on top of him without warning. Granted, George had also saved him when his head had stayed under the blankets for a bit too long, but that was besides the point.

"Just because you have a channel doesn't mean you have to post to it," Dream said.

"Why else would I have a channel? Hold on, let me put on a new shirt." There was rustling on the other end before Sapnap spoke again. "Did you have to talk to me about this today? I have an eight AM class."

"You're the one who called me thirty-seven times!"

"And you're the one who texted me last night about it. So who's really the most annoying?"

Dream sighed.

Sapnap paused for an answer but spoke again upon realizing he won't get one. "Trick question, the answer is George."

"Wow, what a thing to hear from someone named Simpnip," George said, walking forward to stand by Dream's side. He set his elbow on Dream's shoulder, but the elbow felt awfully... real. Had he taken on his human form just to annoy Sapnap?

"You're the simp here, not me," Sapnap said. "I'm not the one jumping to save Dream every two seconds. You're more of a simp than Mario is for Peach."

"How could you disrespect Mario like that?"

Dream rolled his eyes in spite of the smile on his face. "Yeah, yeah, enough of that. Sapnap, make a channel with me. No posting, no commitment. Consider it pay for staying at my place for a week. I already PayPaled you the money you tried sending to me. Did you think I wouldn't notice?"

"Yeah, I just thought it was so obvious you wouldn't think anything of it," Sapnap said, a hint of embarrassment in his voice.

"Idiot," George scoffed before moving behind Dream. When he stepped back into Dream's field of view, he had reverted back into his guardian angel form.

"I didn't call you to get bullied by George."

"Not my fault you didn't read the fine print." Dream smiled down at Patches, who had bumped its head into his leg and purred. "Just make it, okay?"

Sapnap sighed. "I mean... fine. Whatever. What do you want me to name it?"

"Why're you asking me? Name it whatever you want."

"You sprung this on me out of nowhere."

"Well, I'm naming mine Dream."

"Very creative, I see."

"I don't see you coming up with a name."

Sapnap paused, and the familiar sound of someone hauling a backpack up played over the phone speaker. "Well, I don't know what you're gonna do for another hour, but I have to get to class. I'll link you to my channel when I make it, okay?"

"Alright, have fun."

"Thanks. See you." With that, Sapnap ended the call.

Dream shut off his phone, then turned his head towards George, who was chewing on a slice of bread. "What do you think Sapnap's gonna name his channel?"

George shrugged. "I don't know. Probably something stupid. Right?"

"I mean... yeah. Probably."

*

George was partially right, if Sapnap counted as a stupid name for a channel. And according to George, it did.

"The idiot called his channel Sapnap. What even is that? What's a Sapnap?" George said, pacing around Dream's office. "That's so stupid! What the hell?"

Dream bit into his arm to stifle the laughter that threatened to spill out. With his other hand, he managed to type out a message letter-by-letter. George, please, I'm at work.

Thankfully, George had stopped pacing long enough to read what he had typed on the document. "It's true though. Even my YouTube username was better than that."

Dream's laughter stopped. Wait, you had a channel???

George stopped.

The silent laughter began again, and Dream wrote out another message. Oh my god, you had a channel. What did you name yours?

"That's not important."

Geoooooorge.

"Not important!"

Even as George pointedly ignored any other message Dream typed into the document, Dream's heart felt lighter, so, so much lighter. Even just the knowledge that he had a channel, that Sapnap had a channel—that was liberating. When was the last time he had felt this free at work?

The answer to that didn't matter. What did matter was the bright smile that sprang on George's face when he thought Dream had returned to work.

That was worth more than anything.