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“You know what?” George says, voice so starkly different than it’s ever been before—angry, disappointed, defensive. “Fuck this.”
There’s a click and the harsh tone of someone leaving the Discord call.
“Did he really leave?” Sapnap asks, a touch incredulous. “Little pussy, he shouldn’t—”
“Sapnap,” Dream snaps, tired of this whole thing. “Just—shut up, will you?”
“Hey, man, I didn’t do anything.”
Dream lets his head fall into his hands and rubs at his brow bone. This Manhunt recording session hasn’t gone at all like he wanted it to.
“Are things always like this?” Sam asks, and fuck. Poor Sam. Dream added him as the fifth hunter, brought him up to speed on all their rules and stipulations, the gentleman’s agreement they all sign. There’s no one better suited for it than Sam, someone loyal and close to them. Someone who could use a boost with his own content, but who also comes with knowledge that the rest of the hunters don’t have—redstone, glitches—Sam’s almost a bigger Minecraft nerd than Dream is. In some ways, he is. He’s the perfect fit, and Dream was so excited for their first recording session, and it went—terribly.
“No, they’re not,” Bad answers when no one else speaks up.
“I didn’t think so,” Sam says nervously, and then jokes, “Was it something I said?”
That makes Dream laugh because Sam’s barely gotten two words out the entire recording session.
“No, man,” Ant says. He’s been especially quiet this entire time, mostly only speaking to Bad.
“George was in a fucking horrible mood,” Sapnap says loudly, not realizing that he’s that main point of contention. Dream can’t bring himself to respond, he’s so angry. Sapnap egged George to the edge of the cliff and then pushed him off just to pretend he slipped. “He really ruined everything being a little bitch.”
“Sapnap,” Dream says in warning.
But he doesn’t take it. “I was just about to kill you again, Dream, and get my money and he—he—”
“It was actually me who was about to kill him, man,” Sam points out, which is true. The recording session didn’t start out well. Dream died quickly in the first few attempts. He blames the seed for the first one and let Callahan hear all about it.
The second time, Bad got a lucky hit that he shouldn’t have landed and Dream fell in a ravine to his death.
George’s head hasn’t been in the game the entire time, that’s true. He’s been a bit off this week and Dream can’t figure out why, but it’s not like him to let Sapnap get to him to this extent.
“I’m going to go talk to George,” Dream says. “I’ll reach out to, like, re-schedule. And I’ll send everyone the money they’re owed.”
There are polite goodbyes, but Dream isn’t listening. He’s too angry to listen. His head is killing him with how much concentration he’s been using and the constant failures have gotten to him. It’s a good thing that he doesn’t win too easily. He has to keep reminding himself of that—easy wins don’t make good videos. But losing so often so quickly before he can even unleash the ideas he’s been practicing and researching, it just sucks.
He has no idea what happened in this last round, he had finally broken away and started mining to get iron and presumed by the VC noises that the hunters were doing the same. He zoned out for long enough to focus on his own resource gathering and then—chaos. Pure chaos. George and Sapnap were screaming at each other and not the good kind that make for funny videos, the kind where they call each other names and curse and Dream has to edit around all of it.
Bad had tried to reason with them, but it got nowhere. Normally, Dream would take advantage of their arguing to make a break for it, but the words started to get really heated and awful, and—and then he ran right into them and Sam was on his tail.
It got to the point where no one could get a word in edgewise, Sapnap and George were screaming over each other and Dream—Dream slipped.
He doesn’t often use his alpha voice, he doesn’t want to be that type of person, but it just came out and in a fit of pique, he ordered them to stop.
And that’s when George left the call.
Before he gets in the VC where he and George hang out in constant calls, Dream takes a quick break to use the bathroom and get more water, trying to give George a few minutes to calm down before he barrages him to figure out what happened.
Because the way Dream sees it, there’s some truth to what Sapnap said. George came into the recording session already in a bad mood, and it only escalated. Normally, George is the pulse of the video, the hype man, the one whose energy feeds the vibes of everything. Without that, things felt off.
Dream wonders briefly if he fucked up by adding Sam, but no. George agreed Sam would be a perfect fit.
He just—Dream knows George better than anyone else. He can read him across the Atlantic Ocean. He can tell his mood by the inflection of how he says hello. He can understand his thinking more than any of his other friends. This session though? Dream really has no idea what happened.
He doesn’t bother going back to his office. He sends a quick reminder to Callahan to total up what he owes everyone and then pick out ten or more seeds for the next time, and then he plops himself into bed.
Patches is asleep on his pillow and she meows at him when he jostles her awake as he sits.
This isn’t a conversation for his office.
George doesn’t answer the first time Dream calls. He tries again. Again. Again. He sends a DM that he’s going to keep calling until George gives in and talks, and then miracle of miracles, George picks up.
“What,” he says in greeting, flat and controlled like a wild horse in a bridle.
“Hi,” Dream says, trying to find his feet under him. “Are you—hi.”
“You already said that,” George points out. He’s not going to make this easy on Dream, that much is obvious.
So Dream skips past the pleasantries and gets right to the point. “What happened today? Where did—How did that even get to that point, George?”
A huffy breath, and then George says, “It was Sapnap’s fault. Why don’t you try asking that asshole?”
“I’m asking you first,” Dream says, trying to find his patience.
“You heard what he said,” George says. “How can you let him talk like that?”
“What do you mean?” Dream asks because, honestly, Sapnap didn’t really say anything that Dream hasn’t heard before. No slurs, nothing bad. Ever since they started gaining popularity and realized what impact their words have on people—that the slurs they’re throwing around affect the very people committed to watching them and supporting them—it’s made them very real in a way that the slurs were abstract before. It wasn’t hurting anyone before because it was just them hearing those words. Well, that’s what Dream used to tell himself, but he knows better now.
Sapnap was the hardest to convince, but even he’s come around. He doesn’t use the vulgar language from before, especially not when they’re recording a video that will get millions of views. Should this eventual video follow the trajectory of their other videos in the Manhunt series, it’ll definitely be getting millions of views in just the first day. There’s no way he’d say something terrible enough to upset George this much, even if Dream wasn’t paying close attention to their conversation until the end.
“George, I don’t think I heard what you’re, like, referencing. I was focused on mining and I wasn’t—what did he say?”
He hears the familiar sounds of George getting into bed, pulling his comforter over him. The sheets crinkle and his bed squeaks when he shifts his weight. These are all insane things to know about someone else’s bed, but Dream has carefully cataloged every sound he can.
“He stole my iron out of the furnace,” George says, changing the subject. It must be something really personal to George for him to be avoiding it like this.
“He always steals your iron. You steal his iron,” Dream says. “It’s a whole thing. What did he say, George?”
“It wasn’t just him,” George says, sounding very small. There’s a vulnerability in his voice that isn’t usually there. George doesn’t let it be there. Now, Dream’s more confused than anything else.
“Did—did someone else say something? What? What did they—” Fuck, Dream must have really missed something. He’s not usually bad about missing an entire conversation. He keeps one ear open on their comms in case he needs to make a run, so it’s not like he tunes them out entirely.
“Dream,” George says, world weary and annoyed. “It’s—this just isn’t a good week for me. I should go.”
“What?” Dream asks. “George what are you—you’re not making any sense.”
“I shouldn’t have agreed to record today anyway, that’s—that’s on me.” George’s blankets crinkle again.
“George,” he says, because Dream has no idea what else to say. His mind is scrambling to make sense of what’s happened and how they got here. “George, I need to know what happened so I can make sure it doesn’t happen again. If you were so mad you stormed out of the call, like—that’s not like you. That’s not—I don’t want us recording in an environment where you—and I have no idea what Sapnap did or said to make you so mad. It didn’t—I’m sorry, but it didn’t sound like things he doesn’t usually say.”
“Then maybe that’s a problem,” George says. He sounds tired now, like all the fight has left him.
“Okay,” Dream says, more of a transition than anything substantial. This whole conversation isn’t going the way he thought it would. “Okay, so we have a talk later about, like, what went wrong and we get Sapnap to agree not to—”
“And you can’t use your alpha voice,” George says.
A rock sinks in Dream’s stomach and he realizes that the thing that really put George over the edge, the thing that caused him to quit the recording—it was Dream.
“I’m so, so sorry,” Dream says. “I didn’t—I’m sorry.”
“You can’t just—you can’t,” George says.
“I know if affects you betas, and I try never to use it, but—”
“No,” George says, resolute, strong enough to cut Dream off. “You can’t ever. You can’t—it’s not fair.”
“At that point we weren’t even getting usable footage,” Dream argues, despite knowing he’s in the wrong. It’s in his DNA, he can’t help but defend himself even on a sinking ship. “But I certainly wouldn’t use it as, like, a tactic.”
“You’re not getting it,” George says, but now Dream’s too worked up.
“I know it’s not even in the rules, technically, but of course I wouldn’t use the voice to, like, force anyone not to hurt me. I mean, it wouldn’t do much, but it’d slow a hit, or—or be enough of a momentary pause to distract you guys, but—”
“Dream, you’re not—”
“—even then, it’s not like I’d use it on you guys for real. Like, that’s despicable. I only used it today to get you guys to take a second and stop arguing, but I’d never, like, actually use it—”
“I’m an omega, you fucking idiot,” George yells.
Well, that makes Dream stop short. The remaining arguments die on his lips and he—he can’t breathe for a moment.
George is an omega.
An omega.
Soft, small, those things George definitely is, just like an omega, but—what?
“What?” Dream’s words echo his thoughts and it’s like the line is on repeat in his brain playing over and over and over.
I’m an omega… I’m an omega… I’m an omega, you fucking idiot…
“Yeah,” George says. He sounds small.
“Since when are you—” Dream cuts himself off. It’s not his business. It really isn’t. He can’t contain the feeling of betrayal, like George should have told him. It’s not—secondary genders are extremely personal. “Sorry. Not—not what I meant to say.”
George snorts in derision and Dream hates that he’s earned that. “What did you mean to say, then?”
“I just—I’m surprised. You didn’t say anything.”
“Male omegas aren’t exactly—” George stops himself. Dream hates the underlying self hatred there. It starts to make sense to him. George clearly isn’t comfortable sharing something like this, and here Dream is making things worse.
“I’m glad you told me,” Dream says and he keeps his tone genuine because he really does mean it. He loves learning new things about George. He loves that even after all this time, there are still new things to learn, new backstories to unlock, new lore that can drop at any time.
“You didn’t give me much of a choice,” George says.
Dream freezes. They were talking about him using his alpha voice, and— “Oh, shit, George, I’m so sorry.”
“Dream,” George says, annoyed.
“I would never try to control you, or—or compel you to—I’m so sorry, man.”
“I know you wouldn’t, idiot, but you still did. You just need to really understand that you can’t—you can’t use that.”
“Do people know?” Dream asks, wondering why none of George’s uni friends or whatever weird British fucking high school is—why those people haven’t said anything now that he’s moderately famous.
“No,” George responds.
Surely, if he’s going around smelling like an omega and—what kind of omega scent would George have, Dream wonders. Probably something extremely good. Fuck, he’d smell so good. He’d be perfect. The more Dream thinks about it, the more it makes sense he’s an omega. Not in the general way omegas are supposed to be by society’s standards.
He’s not meek. He’s not quiet or subservient. George is loud, energetic, magnetic. He’s chaos personified, but he’s also extremely intelligent and not afraid to show it. But he’s central—there’s not a better way to put it. He draws people in, makes them feel comfortable and at home, albeit in a very non-traditional kind of way, but it works.
“No one knows?” Dream asks. “Not even, like—”
“My family knows,” George says. “My doctor. I haven’t, like, wanted to tell anyone else.” Dream can hear him rubbing his face, something he does often to soothe himself. Now Dream wonders if part of that is a self-grooming tactic. Omegas are tactile creatures and George has been so alone for so long.
“Your college friends?” Dream asks. If pressed, he could name George’s uni friends, the ones from the stories he’d hear while they fooled around on the Munchy server.
George takes a deep breath. “I presented right before uni.”
That’s… kind of late for an omega. Dream doesn’t say that, definitely doesn’t let out the ‘late bloomer, huh?’ that was his first thought. He recognizes George can’t take any teasing about this. Not now. Maybe not ever.
“Was it awful?” Dream asks, because he has no idea what else to ask. His family are mostly betas, with his alpha father being the only other alpha and lord knows the two of them butted heads too often to have many alpha to alpha talks when he was a teenager.
“Worse than awful,” George says. “I never wanted to—I never want to do that again.”
“What, heat?” Dream asks. Patches jumps onto his chest and curls up like she can sense he needs the comfort. He can’t pet George from across the ocean, so he’ll settle for his queen.
“Yeah,” George whispers. “It was—I hated it. That’s why I—I’ve been on suppressants.”
That makes sense to Dream. He’s heard the propaganda, that heats between omegas and alphas are a dream—like nirvana without the dying part. It’s the highest high you can reach without turning to illegal drugs. But an omega’s unaided heat is terrible, nature’s way of punishing them for not finding a partner and continuing the bloodline.
“I’m glad you have the suppressants, then,” Dream says. “How does it—I mean… how does it all work?”
George breathes down the line and says, “They don’t—take it all away. Just the, like, agony. It sucks still. It’s—that’s why I’ve been weird this week. I’m supposed to be—if I didn’t have the suppressants, I’d be… you know.”
Dream finishes the thought for him, “You’d be in heat this week.”
Oh, fuck. Just saying it makes his dick give a little twitch and then he freaks out. He can’t think that way about George just because he knows he’s an omega now. He can’t think about George being in heat, about Dream helping him through that heat. He can’t think about any of it because now that the knowledge is in his brain, it’s starting to sink in, become part of him.
He’s Dream, an alpha, and George is an omega, and there’s always been something special between them. Not just because of their designations, either. Dream knows other omegas and it’s not—it’s not an every alpha is attracted to every omega thing. His older sister has an omega friend who smells like sour trash to Dream and he can’t even be in the same room as her.
But a tingling in the back of his mind tells him it would be different with George. The caveman alpha inside him says that George is his, belongs to him, is supposed to be here with him. He tries to quiet that voice, but he finds that he can’t silence it all the way.
“I could fly out,” Dream says like that’s not an insane thing to say.
“You can’t,” George says, almost a whisper.
“I could,” he insists, because George didn’t say he didn’t want him to, he just said he can’t.
“You can’t, Dream,” George says.
“Because of the face reveal? Fuck the face reveal. If you need me—”
“Dream, shut up for a second with your stupid knot brain,” George says. “It’s not—think about it for a bit longer.”
And Dream does. He thinks it through, him leaving today and driving to the airport, flying to London with only his Covid mask and one bag. Maybe someone sees him and takes a picture, but whatever. If his omega needs him, then that trumps whatever stupid plan he had to do a master reveal when the time comes.
George—warm, special, soft, omega. He’d stick his nose into George’s neck and take a deep whiff. Despite knowing that the suppressants would take George’s natural smell away, somehow in this fantasy he can smell George and he smells perfect, and they’re—
Maybe he doesn’t smell good to George. Maybe George doesn’t want him.
“You don’t want to see if we’re compatible?” Dream asks, like ripping the bandaid off will make the hurt go away quicker. “That’s fine, that’s—I didn’t mean to presume. I just—you know how close we are and I never even considered that you were—and I know—”
“Shut up, that’s not it either,” George says. “Think about it.”
“I’m failing to see the problem here,” Dream says. “If you want—if you’re open to—then what’s…?”
“You’d have to go home,” George says and basically punches Dream directly in the stomach.
“Oh,” Dream says. “Oh, yeah.”
“If we—and you still had to go home, I’d—Dream, I can’t—I wouldn’t be able to say goodbye to you.”
“There aren’t any stipulations for… you know?” he asks because they’ve done the visa research together, but Dream hadn’t focused on those questions, skipping right over them because they didn’t apply to them at the time. Now he knows he’ll be going back over those questions on the reddit with a fine tooth comb.
Which is still presuming they’re compatible enough to bond, and that George wants to be bonded to him. That’s—it’s not a no, but it’s not a yes either.
“No, it’s discouraged, actually,” George says. At least one of them was paying attention to those questions. Part of Dream is proud that George looked those up, that he knew Dream would do anything to get him here, closer, even going so far as to know that Dream would bond with him. “They don’t want alphas, like, going over to foreign countries and taking their omegas away. Something stupid like that.”
“That’s—definitely stupid,” Dream agrees, though it makes sense from a conservative mindset. Fuck, like, true love or whatever. “So what do we do?”
George snorts. “What we’ve been doing. Wait for the visa to come through and then, like, I don’t know… see what happens.”
“I know what will happen,” Dream says.
“You can’t know,” George says. “Not really.”
“I know,” Dream repeats, coming from that same spot inside him that just knows George is his omega. But that’s okay, he can believe for both of them for now.
“Dream, I don’t—no one else can know. About me. Not yet,” George says. “Sapnap was saying some shit about me being slower than an omega or something today and I—I don’t want to tell him yet. I don’t want anyone to treat me differently.”
Dream makes a note to listen to the recording of their session earlier, isolate Sapnap’s vocals and then rake him over the coals later. He won’t tell George about it, but he’ll make it obvious that gendered language like that is not fucking okay.
“I won’t tell,” Dream says, and he means that promise, though half of his reasoning is entirely selfish.
“I don’t even want you to treat me differently,” George says.
“I won’t,” Dream promises.
“Of course you will, stupid,” George says. “You’re already doing it. You’re already—you’re making plans on assumptions. You can’t—you can’t rely on that, Dream. We have to go about this like nothing has changed.”
Everything has fucking changed.
“George—”
“Because if we’re not compatible, then—I can’t just turn around and go back to England. It’s—you guys are my best friends. This is my life and my career. You can’t just kick me out if I don’t want to—” George takes a breath but it’s clear he’s not done speaking these thoughts he’s been holding in for a long time. “You still have to be my friend, no matter what. You can’t—don’t take that away from me. Don’t be one more thing being an omega has taken from me.”
“George,” Dream says because, fuck, it sounds like there are a lot of things George hasn’t spoken about, that he’s been keeping inside.
“I want you to treat me like you don’t know. I don’t want to talk about it after this conversation. I don’t—I don’t want to talk about scents or have you send anything to me, or—it’s torture just thinking about it all the time. I want—let’s let that go. Until we can be in the same place for a long time, and—and then we can find out.”
Why does it feel like Dream’s heart is breaking?
“Why does it have to be so all or nothing?” Dream asks, a touch desperate.
“I can’t live in what ifs,” George says. “I can’t live in a fantasy world if it’s not going to come true.”
“It’ll come true.”
“You don’t know that!” George says, letting his frustration show.
And Dream realizes that, above everything else, George is scared. He’s scared, and he’s doing this to protect himself.
His alpha instinct is to protect the omega, just like his instinct and inclination as Dream has always been to protect George, look out for him, keep him happy and laughing and productive. The two of them transcend their biology and Dream can prove that. He’ll give George what he wants, but he won’t be happy about it.
It’s that much more riding on this visa coming through.
Maybe he should hire that lawyer to speed things up.
“Alright, George,” he says after a long moment. “We’ll do it your way. I won’t bring it up. I won’t ask questions. But you’re welcome to talk to me about, like, anything, okay? You can—if you need to talk, I’m here.”
October 2022
“Are you nervous?” Dream asks George before he gets on the plane.
“You’re the one showing your face off for the first time to the world,” George points out, deliberately misunderstanding Dream.
His heart beats wildly in his chest, the same as it always does when they dance around this topic.
“So, are you nervous?” Dream asks again.
This time, George answers honestly, “Yeah. Yeah, I’m—I’m nervous. But more excited than anything else.”
“Do you—” Dream doesn’t know how to finish the sentence he’s so desperate to ask. He’s been waiting so long to know what George smells like. Even when Sapnap came back from visiting, there was no omega scent sticking to him like there should be if they spent the amount of time together that they did. He’s been dying for over a year to know what George smells like, if they—if he’ll like how Dream smells.
“What?” George prompts. Dream can hear the overhead announcements at Heathrow speaking in the background. “Just say it, Dream. Whatever it is. Just—now’s the time.”
Dream takes a deep breath. It smells like his own alpha scent and a touch of Sapnap’s beta wood smell that he finds comforting after all this time living with it. “Are you wearing your suppressants?”
“Yes,” he says, a bit clipped. “I’m not traveling internationally smelling like an unbonded omega, you idiot.”
“That’s not what I’m really trying to ask,” Dream says, and takes a moment to try again.
“Ask me,” George says.
“Will you—will you stop while you’re here?” Dream doesn’t care how not cool he sounds, how desperate. He is desperate. He needs to know what George smells like more than he needs oxygen. “Will you—can you not take them for a few days and—let me smell you?”
George hums a low thing, something primal that Dream doesn’t want anyone around him to hear. That sound is for him alone. “Let’s take a few days to acclimate,” George says. “And then, we’ll—we’ll send Sapnap away for a bit, and—”
“Yeah?” Dream asks, because that sounds like—that sounds like George is hoping for the same thing Dream is hoping. That their scents are compatible, that they’ll want to bond. He’d lost so much hope after that only conversation they had about it and then not talking about it for so long. Even when he tried to touch on it, George would deliberately drop the call. He got the hint eventually.
If Dream’s alpha scents the omega and it feels right, they’ll—nature will take over from there. If George wasn’t interested in that, it wouldn’t be the end of the world, though Dream would be sad. But he would just have to keep taking his suppressants and then they’d never even get the chance to know. If he made it clear to Dream he didn’t want to bond, then they wouldn’t. Dream’s instincts aren’t so strong that he can’t fight them. And he’d never do anything to George that he didn’t want. He’d rather die.
“I’d like that,” Dream ends up saying while they breathe a touch too quickly into the line together. It hits him that this might be the last long phone call for a while. They’ll have each other in person now. There’ll be no need for long phone calls when they can hang out together.
“I think I’d like that, too,” George says. “You know, as long as you don’t stink.”
“I smell like campfires,” Dream offers, as easy as anything. He’s never told George what he smells like, much like he never told George what he looks like—the fear of rejection strong even before he knew of George’s secondary gender. Maybe part of him always knew and feared George not wanting him as more than a friend.
George’s muffled laughter takes him a bit by surprise. “What’s so funny?” He’s sensitive to the laughter after revealing something as personal as his alpha scent, but there’s no edge of cruelty to the laughter.
“I like campfires,” George says. “I have to go. We’re boarding.”
A few days later, when the suppressants have time to wash out of George’s system, and they successfully convince Sapnap to take a day or two to stay with Punz, Dream discovers the real reason George was laughing.
“You smell like marshmallows,” he whispers into George’s neck, sensitive from its new bond mark.