Chapter Text
2021
George has done this whole saying goodbye thing before.
He and Dream have been together for almost two years, and this is their second time standing in the middle of Dream’s studio apartment with their arms around each other. A muted stream of gold falls across their shoulders, whispers of a May afternoon caught on the wrong side of the glass.
Something about it is familiar. Even if this is a different room than it was last year, it’s the same lovestruck farewell, whether or not they’re doing it on a college campus or in a too-small living room.
It’s still them.
And Dream squeezes just a little bit tighter, knocking the breath right out of George. He laughs, the sound distilled over a cotton-clad shoulder blade, being pulled up onto his toes by the grasp his boyfriend has on him.
“I’ll miss you,” Dream admits, obvious but still appreciated in the way sentiment strokes past pink-flushed ears.
In turn, George squeezes Dream just a little bit tighter. “I’ll miss you, too, idiot.”
This is a college relationship. This is going home for the summer, this is turning to text messages and phone calls when the gas is too expensive to drive to each other every other weekend. George makes a promise with himself when he doesn’t even know how to drive, and it’s a promise to call every day when he has time so they don’t both go crazy.
It’s the same promise he made last year. Maybe it’s the same one he’ll make next year, too. And he makes it every December, and every March, and for every moment they spend away from each other.
Dream promises to answer.
So he leaves Dream’s apartment with a kiss and a final, redundant farewell. And his mother’s car waits for him on the road, all the stuff from his campus apartment packed in the backseat, waiting to be pulled out and dumped in the corner of a far more familiar bedroom.
The air in the car is stale and smells of home. George sits, and he stares out the window at the way his college town disappears, and he wonders if the sound of gaudy pop music would be enough to drown all his thoughts away; he doesn’t bother trying. His mother doesn’t say a word to him, for she knows when he wants to be left in silence, no matter how solemn it makes him look.
As the world passes by outside a cracked-open window, George wonders why it still has to tick with such bitter difficulty. This is the second time he’s been pulled away from Dream for the summer–and they’ve been apart for plenty of other breaks, too–so, in theory, he should be used to this by now.
Right?
This was not permanent. This was not forever. This was only a see you later, something temporary to last them through the moments they’d spend miles away from each other enjoying the sun of another place. This was only until their next semester, only until they came back for their senior year, and only after life’s second graduation would this all hold more weight.
Even still, George feels where his heart weighs heavy in his chest. As if it might drop down to the floor between his feet, bloody and unstable in a tear against the floor. He could watch it pulse before he shut his eyes forever, he could watch his own life draw to a bitter end right where open eyes can see.
But this is not permanent. This is not forever. This is a placeholder, a goodbye without finality, hearts drawn into shoulders that will wash off with the help of warm soapy water. This is doors shutting on rooms George will come back to, doors shutting to cars he doesn’t want to be in.
There is no music playing, and George thinks the silence makes it worse. He sits in the passenger seat of a car with his mother, silence blistering between them with the same raucous temperature as the sun outside the windows. Calm, predictable, and just a little too much.
He closes his eyes, darkness distilled by golden light. With a sigh he hopes is quiet enough to only reach his own ears, George falls away, and he sleeps for a little while when the scent of his mother’s car grows too intense to wake through.
Alertness only comes back to him when he feels his phone buzz against his thigh. A quick three pulses, a pattern of intention that tells him just who’s on the other side–Dream.
Blinking the haze from his tired eyes, George picks his phone up. And he tries to ignore the way his skin pricks strange with sleep, the way the sun feels brighter despite being lower in the sky, the way his neck aches on an awkward angle and his eyelids sting dry.
There is music playing softly through the speakers now. Something ‘70s, something unmatched to George’s taste, something quiet with the courtesy of someone sleeping in the car. He doesn’t say anything about it, doesn’t say anything when he thinks his mother asks how he’s feeling, only checks his phone with lazy eyes and lethargic tendons clicking in his wrists.
dream
| home yet?
A tired smile tugs at the corner of George’s lips, not quite showing itself all the way. He unlocks his phone in a haste that still runs heavy with exhaustion, rushing mind halted by his own slow fingers; it’s not quite enough to frustrate him yet, but he can feel the way it pulls strings behind his eyes.
george
| not yet. almost
He taps his fingers gently against the side of his phone, soft sounds of fingertips against plastic finding a way to his ears through all the songs he doesn’t like. A typing bubble stares back up at him through the quiet, slipping away far quicker than George can only assume his did.
Dream has always been faster at typing, anyway.
dream
| let me know when you are
| i miss you already :(
The sleepy smile on George’s face manages itself to completion. Though a part of it still aches, heartbeat rapid with the shatter of broken ties. And his fingers are still too slow and the road is not quite smooth enough, all the spinning colors muddling to gray before words can fit themselves together.
george
| miss you too dreamie :(
And he turns his phone off, letting it fall back into his lap unceremoniously. His heavy head turns back out towards the window, watching trees and sandy edges flash by him in a speed he can’t keep up with. The world slowly grows more and more familiar, images outside his rolled-up window turning into things ringing more like home.
Arguably, George was leaving home, too. But his mind is still too tired for semantics, and there always has been a piece of him that misses the comfort of his own bed, sheets pulled too tight at the corners and pillow flattened with use. There has always been a piece of him that can’t quite make his bed in a new apartment the same, especially when the mattress changes every year and he buys himself new sheets.
There has always been something a little different about home. Something a little more permanent, a little harder to let go of. Something that calls people back again, and again, and again–even long after they left; otherwise, why would anyone ever move back to their hometown?
Maybe, Dream and George will fight one day over whose hometown they’ll move back to. Maybe, Dream will give in easier–he always does–and George will come back to this place where the swings sit too low and the sand gets stuck beneath his nails in permanence, and he’ll buy a house too close to the one he grew up in and put a hyphenated last name up above the front door.
Maybe he’s still too young to be thinking of the future. But when he holds a buzzing phone against his leg and wears a tired look in his eyes, he’s not sure what else to do with himself. For he never thinks about this when he’s anything but tired or less than sober, and perhaps that says something about what he’s making of himself.
He shuts his eyes when the thoughts grow too loud. In the back of his mind, everything left within him disappears, and breathing grows easy again in a way that’s not so full of sand. A final I miss you sits on his tongue, but there’s no one around to say it to, so he keeps it soaked in saliva.
George has done this whole saying goodbye thing before. It never gets easier.
2018
The heat of the August sun is blazing. George sits in the passenger seat of a car with a broken air conditioner, elbows on his knees and head in his hands.
The sound of breath echoes from the driver’s seat beside him. Black-painted nails rap against the steering wheel, quiet. Wordless tension stills quiet across the center console.
“Do you disagree?” Punz asks, and he whispers, the quiet of a secret barely louder than the car’s running engine.
George picks his head up. The sun blinds his eyes to a narrow, poised just above the horizon he watches through a dust-riddled windshield. As the world turns slow on the wrong side of tight-shut doors, George learns how to breathe again, though his lungs still weigh heavy with sorrow.
“No,” he settles, and it’s honest. “You’re right, I just don’t want you to be.”
The tapping of blunt-filed nails stops. George bites his lip in the silence, and he wishes for anything with enough bother to cut it—the static from a broken radio, the pitter-patter of summer rain, anything.
Nothing comes. He listens to Punz breathe, ribs locked like a bird cage around fluttering hearts. He listens to his own pulse thunder, echoed through the space between his ears in a narrow reminder of vivacity.
He shifts. The scrape of cuffed jean shorts against torn upholstery is deafening.
“I’m sorry,” George mutters, though he’s not sure what for. “I just—” nothing comes to him, “I’m sorry.”
Punz sighs, and George hears it. There’s a tug at the muscles in his throat, and he wants to look at him. George swallows, and he shuts his eyes, and the sun bleeds through with shades of red and gold.
He takes a deep breath of his own, tipping his head back against the creaking seat. George knows the ceiling behind the lids of his eyes better than he knows his own being, better than he knows the space between his collarbones and the gaps along his ribs. The light between the front seats was traded out for a blue LED, and Punz wrote their names beneath the driver’s side hand grip on a warm summer night three days after he got the car, when they were a little younger and blinder to the reality of this.
The reality of college. Of graduating high school, of sitting on the side of the road six minutes from George’s childhood home, six minutes from the backyard they had their first kiss in and the bed that made their first time. The reality of moving away, of being apart, of things becoming too difficult to balance even just thinking about it.
“This is harder than I thought it would be,” Punz admits, the stitching to his own car seat whining when he moves.
Resigned, George opens his eyes. And he turns his head, looking to where Punz sits in a similar position to himself: head tipped back against the headrest, blue eyes hazy and disbelieving where they stare up at the ceiling.
“Did you think it would be easy?” he asks, though he’s not sure he wants to know the truth.
“No.”
He thinks that’s it.
“It makes sense,” George says. “You’re right,” he repeats. He thinks something is supposed to come after it, but he falls silent in spite of himself.
Punz turns as well. And their eyes meet, a world of something still caught between their gazes, a slow nod tipping at Punz’s stubbled chin. It says, with a deathly cry and shadowed agony, that this is not over yet.
There is still something there—a feeling, a thought, a truth—but it stops moving. As if Punz held up his hand and pressed pause on George’s throat, as if he’s caught his breath and left him higher and drier than they ever were, even when they sat at the top of a sand-dusted mountain just watching the day flit by.
An apricot sunset paints the angles of Punz’s face to saccharine sugar. George can’t keep himself from looking at every last sliver of it, rails of sweet peach pie hitting in cross-hatches across the highs of pale cheeks and the edges of sandy hair. There is something golden—always golden—and the gaudy glimmer of it all threatens sick and temporary.
“High school relationships,” Punz mutters, and it’s all he needs to say.
George understands, of course, he does. The unspoken inevitability of it, of falling in love when you’re close enough to leave through the same set of doors and stare at each other over lab tables and graffitied desks. Of the threat of distance, always closing in, always growing nearer; it catches up, and George feels caught, and he’s three days away from moving into his first dormitory and Punz is four days from his.
This is distance. This is the summer after graduation. This is growing up, and with it, growing apart.
He leaves a bond with a pretty blond boy from down the road sitting on the car’s dirty floor. And it festers, and it rots, and it turns to blood between rubber mats when the rain can’t come quick enough to wash it all away.
When Punz sells this car, he will sell the little piece of George left between the seats. He will sell their names inked in juvenile laughter on the ceiling, and he will sell the broken air conditioner and the cracks in all the windows that whisper with grains of sand. He will sell this moment, and their right to this moment, and their right to link hands between the seats when the roads are flat and wide enough to fall a little in love.
George will sell his beating heart back to himself the moment he moves away. And he will put posters on the walls, and he will see Punz in every single one of them, and he will wonder if all his favorite bands are still his favorites when Punz was the one to show him their music. And he will wonder how much of himself is his own and how much of himself was stolen over the course of four long years, how much of high school belongs to him and how much of it belongs to the boy across the car.
He wonders if Punz will feel the same. He wonders if that’s even a question he was ever taught how to ask.
“I think I’m afraid of being alone,” George admits, and it’s a whisper, pink vulnerability scarring the corners of his lips raw and bitten.
It is not even the half of it.
It is not the fear of not having himself, the fear of lacking identity, the fear of songs he can’t listen to pasted up on the walls. But it is cold hands and shaking fingers, it is why-don’t-we’s, it is the lonesome of being apart and not together when names typed in with phone numbers still sit there without the heart.
George stares, open, and Punz stares back. His lips twist, and it is neither a smile nor a frown, and it is a look George has never seen on the blond even when he’s known him almost as long as he’s been alive. It’s not unsettling, or strange, or unsteady or out of place.
Just different. New, unseen, different.
“You’ll meet someone new,” Punz reassures, and nothing about the way he says it makes it seem easy. In all honesty, George doesn’t really want it to be. “Someone closer.”
He blinks slow, lethargic. George’s lips twist in a way he thinks might slip similar, and he wonders if it looks just as different on his face as it does on Punz’s. The silence around them buzzes heavy, a mellow stick to George’s skin that is not just the fault of summer air alone.
“I know,” he admits, a hush to burn the cracks along his lips. “I’ll miss you, though.”
The strange look on his boyfriend’s ex-boyfriend’s face shifts into a more recognizable smile; though it’s sad, sorrowful, and holding a weight more akin to a frown. George thinks it’s worse like this–disguising itself as happiness, as something not quite as torn apart as George feels beneath sweat-sticky skin–and he almost wishes this was the different kind of breakup, the one that rips harsher and feels more like a flame.
He wants their love to die, even if he has to cry into his pillow for a hundred days after he finally snuffs out the blaze. He wants their love to die, even if a piece of himself has to die with it, and he wants the past four years to fade into a stroke of flashing colors rather than something worth holding onto.
But their love does not die. And it’s life grants reminder when Punz opens his mouth, the same raw admittance George had just worn on his tongue curling free from his own. “I’ll miss you, too.”
There’s something in George that wishes he could regret saying it. Because he shouldn’t miss Punz, and he shouldn’t move away to someplace far away where he can meet a thousand new people and make a hundred new friends, still thinking too much about the boy from back home.
Especially not when there are pinpricks along the edges of his eyes, a brimming salt that sticks his bottom lashes to each other at a pace far too much like molasses.
As if he needs anything more to regret, George reaches an unsteady hand out across the center console. With his same sad smile, Punz reaches to take it, shaky fingers curling around each other with the pale of silenced love. In their final fleeting moments, George shuts his eyes, and the sun sinks too low beneath the horizon for it to seep red through shut eyelids.
Loose grips and slipping fingers sting with finality. And George wishes, with his head hanging down and his lip between his teeth, that life could be easier than this. For there was a time when he thought there was a forever written on the ceiling of this dilapidated car, when he thought hometown boys meant everything, when he thought there was nothing else for him on the other side of a winding road.
He thinks now is when the rain is supposed to start tearing at the windows. It never comes, moonlight peeking out from the dusk of another August night.
On the same day he lost his first boyfriend, George lost his longest best friend, too. And there was no harder goodbye than that.