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For once, George is awake before the sun, and he can watch the way the first rays of light cut through the dusty air. It streams in in-between the gaps in the makeshift covering placed over the entrance of the cave he’s in.
When he manages to shoulder it out of his way, he reveals a ravine his cave is halfway down. Mobs shuffle in the shadows below his feet, but none have noticed him as of yet. He climbs his way to the surface, and manages to finally take a look at the state of himself.
He’s covered in cobwebs.
(Later, he thinks he can hear a voice calling out to him as he meanders his way back to a location he recognizes.
He’s stripped off most of the spider silk from his body, leaving a trail of it in his wake. It’s sticky though, and leaves a residue on the palms of his hands, the surface of his clothing. There’s sediment in his hair, coating his eyelashes. He feels grit between his teeth. All of his joints are stiff from lack of movement, but the extended nap on that stone floor apparently had no ill effects on him.
The voice calls again and… it’s probably Sapnap. George’s hearing is fuzzier than his vision at the moment, and he’s still getting starbursts in his eyes from the glint off the river that he’s following. The voice is coming from the direction that he’s already going, but only twenty metres on, the river takes a turn to the left. The voice calls once more, and it's definitely straight on in front of him. There's a forest up ahead, birch and oak foliage shading out the weak dregs of morning sunlight. The darkness is inviting to him, the voice on the other hand...
…If it isn’t Sapnap, then it’s someone from a random country that may or may not have a some imagined conflict with him, or someone he’s connected to. If it is Sapnap… if it is Sapnap, he’ll be concerned. Both because of George's disappearance, but also because of the way that he looks.
He continues following the river.)
He must have been out, what, days? (Weeks? Months?) by now, but George still stops at the entrance of the prison when the ache of missing Dream gets to be too much. (His Dream, not this new one. Not someone who won’t even come looking for him. Not someone who would leave him behind in the first place.)
He never liked the prison. Pandora's vault is too big, too square, too uniform, too technical to be on their server. On maps it looks like a burn scar, a hole charred through the paper, a mistake. In person it’s worse. You have to get way too far away from it before it stops swallowing up your entire field of view.
Still, George comes and he looks. He stares. It doesn't matter waking or sleeping, real or not real, occupied or empty. He will come to this place and he will look and look and look until the obsidian and the blackstone are burned into the backs of his retinas. Until he can draw the face of the prison out with his eyes closed. (But he never goes in. He probably can, can probably ask someone, Sam, maybe. He won’t, though. That is a threshold he just can’t bring himself to cross.)
George is out of place in this new version of the world. He supposes that's what happens when you sleep through most major events of a place. The server looks different. The SMP is fractured into even more factions than he can remember, and the people living in it now are nearly unrecognizable.
He has Sapnap, he guesses, but Sapnap is different too. (Obsessed with his self imposed mission. Clingy. Paranoid. Smothering.) They're unbalanced with just the two of them, fighting too much and not enough. They go too far. George is pretty sure Sapnap is lying to him, but he's not sure about what.
And he’s wearing the Nightmare armour. Won’t take it off for anything. It should belong to George, to be with him, to be squirreled away in his ender chest because wasn't that his right? If Dream wasn't going to wear it —and George doesn’t want to see him in netherite ever again— then shouldn't it go to him, as Dream's… what? Partner? Lover? Friend? It doesn’t matter what the label was in the end. He was Dream’s and Dream was his.
(But George let it go, mostly. Sapnap was Dream's as well, after all. Not in the same way, but they all belonged to each other. Still. He keeps spaces bare in his ender chest for when Sapnap finally gives it back, right beside his shield.)
Maybe that makes it pathetic, his dealings with XD. Latching onto the next closest substitute, except this one would give him the time of day.
George ignores the numerous red flags because he is showered with gifts, with attention and praise. Because this god will listen to him, takes his words into account and learns from him.
Because he'll actually look at him.
(George still counts days, as useless as the concept is to him. He counts days as the periods of time he is awake for. It’s day for him now, despite the fact that he’s travelling by moonlight.
The day ends when he realizes he’s suddenly somewhere new. It used to be when he fell asleep, but he stopped being able to trust that he’ll know when that is.
Yesterday, he’d paused by the river to wash off his face. He splashed it with cold, clear water and tried fruitlessly to rub the sleep out of his eyes. Crouching there in the frosty morning air, he was still on the river bank.
He pushed himself to his feet and his next step sank into hot desert sand. And it was today.)
When XD appeared to him after George had killed the god, he thought that was the end. The end of their relationship, the end of his life, the end of the world, the end of his dreams. Of course, George had never actually killed XD —he wasn’t even sure it was possible. He had only fantasized about destroying anything and everything that even remotely reminded him of Dream, which had been, well, everything.
So George had braced himself for impact. Closed his eyes against a blow he was certain would come for him. (He wasn’t exactly known for his ability to face his problems head-on)
It was the first time that George had seen XD in his more-godly form for more than the flash of a second when he lost control and his emotions overtook him. Almost completely inhuman, only vaguely resembling the species in basic silhouette, and even then just barely. Over eight feet tall, floating another several off the ground, winged, faceless, and still absolutely reeking of Dream. Considering the stories, perhaps the inhumanity helped add to their similarity.
(And wasn’t that just the thing? A cruel joke the universe decided to play, god crafting himself in the image of a man pursuing power above all else. The origin of life and creation, at its most removed from the trappings of mortals, could not separate itself from its association with someone willing to destroy everything to maintain control.)
But XD wasn’t there to kill him. He wanted to make a deal.
Because George isn’t the only one who’s lost someone.
“You look just like him.”
Hidden away in the cradle of a dark oak forest, nestled among roots and mycelium, laying on a bed of leaf litter, George curls into the cloaked side of a god and listens to his longing. (How can he not? It matches his own so perfectly you'd think it'd been crafted by the stars themselves.)
XD’s voice is quiet and low. It isn't the one he uses in the daylight, the one that echoes of Dream in a softer time, and in reverberations down to his very bones. It’s what George calls his godly voice. The one that calls down lightning, draws in the tides, chases the sun, dispels storms, summons objects from nothing.
It had scared George, when he first heard it. So different from what he expected, what he'd been hearing, as XD put on a charade for what —at the time— he'd thought was just his own benefit. (Force of nature that it was, it did not flow through him; it bowled him over and threatened to swallow him whole.)
But that was then, and this is now. Now, George knows what that voice truly is. Powerful, yes, but raw, vulnerable. Spoken in sonorous, subdued tones, the chest George’s ear is pressed against still and hollow beneath the rich folds of XD's cloak. The forest, once healthy and alive with the sounds of insects and animals, the rustle of leaves and the creaking of bark, hushed to noiselessness. Not even the air itself stirs.
“Or, he looked like you, I guess.”
(He guesses. The god of life and creation and he guesses.)
(Not that George should really judge. The people that own your heart are easy blind spots.)
George looks up to see XD’s mask already turned down towards him. It’s the full one, the one to match this voice, this mood. A pale circle of something between bone and quartz, faintly glowing even out of the moonlight. It covers the entirety of— well. It is XD’s face. The human elements, the exposed mouth and jaw that accompanies the smaller mask, the blond curls, the freckles that marked constellations, all of that is borrowed, adapted, polished, and presented. All of it is still real, or as close to, at least. How it had been explained to him was that a god's prime was their base, their starting point. It informed them, but isn't them.
(‘A part of Dream’ is what XD called himself. A piece. George didn’t understand what that was supposed to mean.)
What XD is, is this flawless carapace, cracked and gouged to form the letters of his name. One goes so deep George is certain he can see something hiding amongst the shadows. (It’s never there alongside the human features.)
One of XD’s hands, not gloved but segmented and insectoid, reaches towards him. George closes his eyes before they can do it for him, and the gesture becomes a caress. XD lets out a sigh, brushing his thumb across George's eyelashes, and the world around them comes to life with sound once again.
He keeps his eyes closed. (They’re his most distinguishing feature after all. He can’t shape shift, but he can do this, and just for a little bit, they can both pretend.)
His name was HD —or rather, GeorgeHD, the way that XD was really DreamXD— and he was death.
The godly panoply of the SMP has a plethora of divine and semi divine beings. Many of which have domains that overlap. The Lady of Death is the goddess of the dead. She oversees ghosts, limbo, and the passage through the veil. Foolish’s domain is that of cheating death. Escaping it before it can properly take root. HD was complete and utter annihilation.
A counterpoint to XD, the two gods have been intertwined since their very conception. Creation and destruction, life and death, chaos and, well… order.
A clean slate. A board wipe.
At least, that's what George could figure out. It’s hard to know for sure; history books on the SMP are a rarity and information about the gods is even more so.
(Unless it was about Prime. The rampant ideology of the Church of Prime spread throughout the server like a weed. Their scripture could be found just about everywhere, even in the bombed out craters that pockmarked the land. The followers were dogged in their beliefs, upholding the word as the only way to live, despite the complete lack of proof or evidence.
Did they know that their religion started as a joke between friends? That the very doctrine that they clutch to themselves destroyed those very founders in their pursuit of the paradise they made up themselves?)
HD was one of the founders of the world as they know it. An almost all powerful being, immortal and ageless. Capable of destroying anything that could even think about harming him or whatever he cared about. And now HD is gone.
So it goes.
Love is a human invention, so XD and HD were not lovers. They were a part of each other. Soulmates if they had souls, twin flames if fire had existed at their genesis, two sides of the same coin if they had any use for currency.
Creation and destruction were locked together, feeding into each other in a never-ending cycle. The way it should have been, the way it should be. Since HD’s disappearance, XD has been adrift. Unmoored and unable to move on because the world still turns. The sun rises, the rain falls, blood is spilled and fires burn. The systems they had created together still flowed, and there was nothing and nowhere he could go that did not scream of the part of himself that had been forcibly carved out.
(It’s a wonder he can stand to be around George at all. But perhaps leaving him would be worse for XD. Certainly would be for George.)
XD mentions him sometimes. When it’s dark enough outside that George shouldn’t be able to see, and the torches and lanterns are extinguished. He talks about the little things, the colour of his hair, his fascination with animals even when he couldn’t touch them, the sound of his laugh. He describes HD as starlight and poison, treasure and the creeping sense of dread that comes from being followed. A kind hand. Bones broken from blunt force trauma, growth from decay, the breaking of silence. Blindness. Joyfulness. The colour blue.
George doesn’t understand why he does it. Doesn’t it hurt more? Dredging up the past, the things that you can never return to? But he doesn't voice these doubts out loud because then XD might see sense.
One day, George tucks a poppy into the curls behind XD’s ear.
Mostly he wanted to get the flower out of his pocket. He isn’t sure where he got it from, maybe he’d idly picked it while walking through a field, maybe he’d accidentally stolen it from Kinoko. (It might have been a gift, at one point.) He also thought it would look nice. For being what is technically a god of nature, XD never really dresses the part.
He smooths down the blond hair until it holds the stem in place. When he steps back, XD’s hand goes up to stroke the petals delicately. His touch is so light George doubts he felt anything at all. George can’t read his expression, never really can because of the mask, but his lips are parted just slightly. Neither of them say anything about it, and after a moment they continue on their walk like it never happened.
That should be the end of it. A one off random interaction that doesn’t mean anything. But when George sees XD again, he still has that same poppy nestled beside his mask. He keeps it there through the poor thing wilting and drying, going brown and then nearly black. Longer than that even, probably. George isn’t too sure how long cut flowers are supposed to last. The next time he sees XD after the flower finally falls off, is the first time in a long while that the god wears his hood up.
(There are other things too; flowers trailing in his footsteps, severing their own stems when he reaches for them, their colours deeper and more intense than they’ve ever been. Patterns he’s never seen before. He wakes up with them tangled in his hair and the fabric of his clothing. One time, he accidentally crushed a bloom and it stained his hands for a week.)
George keeps threading flowers into XD’s hair, and starts working them into other aspects of the god’s clothing too. Slipped into his collar, through a button loop, weaved through the links in a chain, tucked up the cuffs of his sleeves. When they spend a day or afternoon lounging around in the same spot, George uses the ever-replenishing display of wildflowers that come up around him to craft flower crowns.
The flowers seem to fascinate XD. More than once, George has caught him staring as George coaxed new blossoms out of the dirt. His hands would hover, but never actually make contact with any of the plants still in the ground. When XD presses his fingers into the bare soil, the only thing that sprouts are blades of grass.
The time that George fashions a crown of cornflowers —the centres of which were such a deep blue colour that they appeared black— XD wouldn’t let George put it on his head. Instead, very gently, he settles it in George’s own dark locks.
Sapnap has a book. George doesn’t remember when he noticed it. During one of their visits, he becomes aware that he knows that it's there, and maybe that he’s always known.
It’s an old thing, the leather cover dusty and cracking. Sapnap has never shown George this book, but George has seen him idly stroking the spine of it on more than one occasion. Even if George didn’t personally know how incredibly rare books are post-wars, the sight would have still stuck in his mind. His best friend isn’t exactly a big, sentimental reader.
(It has an enchantment tinge to it, and it hums, sub audible. After the first time he saw it, there was no way to unsee it. The book's presence is a constant distraction during any time they spend together. He feels like he can see it even through a pocket, through a bag, through armour.)
George waits for the moment when Sapnap would eventually tell him what it is, but he never does.
“You don’t keep Sapnap away from me,” George says.
“Sapnap’s not going to hurt you.”
That isn’t true. Out of everyone on the server, Sapnap has pulled by far the most blood out of him. They fight —fought— constantly. He has the scars to prove it. They both do. George has a feeling that if he brings this fact up it won’t go anywhere.
He decides to pivot. “He’s started reading recently, did you know that?”
XD pretends not to hear him.
There is someone missing from the stories, both the written record and XD’s accounts. Someone that never gets named or even referenced, but is there all the same. Or not there. A shadow of a being, where ideas get started, objects get held, actions get done. A third companion to life and death, creation and destruction.
(There is more to a story than the beginning and the ending of it. Where is all the stuff in between?)
“You have to be standing on the ground for this to work, XD.”
George tugs at a wrist (human skin, freckled) until XD stops floating, landing without a sound in the grass.
Today is a blessing of a day, bright blue skies and fluffy white clouds, the gently rolling hills of the meadow dotted with flowers, birds and bees. It’s nowhere near where George remembers falling asleep, but the grass had been soft, and the hand brushing through his hair had been gentle. He had been laying with his head in XD's lap, the god more human than he's looked in possibly weeks. XD’s head was tilted back as if to enjoy the sunlight. His hair was frizzy. There were shadows under the lip of the mask implying features he never claimed as his own.
(And he'd been breathing. The faint shhhh of muscle-pushed air was like music to George's ears.)
“What won't work, George?”
Instead of answering, George arranges them until they are standing facing one another, pulling XD’s arms around his waist and putting his own around the back of the god's neck. Then, despite their positioning, he begins to lead them in a simple, slightly shuffling box step.
They loop in lazy circles across the ground, the melody of a summer's day serenading them. George lays the side of his face against XD’s chest and taps until a heartbeat starts. He uses it to keep tempo. Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum. Ba-dum
“Are we dancing?” XD asks. His hands shifted, no longer just resting but actually holding. His hands are warm, heat soaking through the fabric of George's shirt and into his skin. XD squeezes, just a little, pressure increasing in a wave from pinky to thumb, before relaxing.
(It’s— it was the exact same thing that Dream always did, whenever he asked to dance.)
A wave of loneliness surges up inside George's chest and he feels his breath quicken. It’s grief, grief threatening to drown him as he thinks of all the years —the years— of history and potential future that had been stolen from him. He had lost so much and for what? For power, control? For Dream to play the villain in someone else’s story?
What about them? What about him? (He was always being kept out of the loop. Always being left behind. But Dream doesn’t hate him. But everything Dream does is for him, for them. But every time Dream ignores him, shirks him, pushes him aside for someone else it is always in service of the bigger picture.)
“George?”
They had slowed to a stop. His grip is tight on the back of XD’s neck, fingers stiff, nails digging in. XD barely seems to notice. He’s looking at George. (The measure of his own heart is fast, too fast to dance comfortably to.)
George shakes his head, burying his face into the god’s shoulder. After a moment, XD starts to sway them in place again. He hums, and George thinks that it might be an old nursery rhyme.
XD thinks about killing him. It’s not malicious or even retributive, and he never says it like that, ‘I want to kill you.’
But HD was lost, somehow. Even XD doesn’t know the specifics of it, just remembers turning away, getting distracted for a moment, a second (a century, a millennia) to see that HD was no longer there.
It didn’t worry him at first because HD had had a habit of wandering off occasionally. But as time passed, as animals died and forests grew old, as wind and river carved hollows into cliff sides and civilizations prospered and imploded under the influences of new gods, HD didn’t come back. XD looked for him, of course, but HD had always been the one thing in all the universe that didn’t fall under his domain. His distraction had taken his other half fro him, and his obsession with getting him back had left him alone.
And then his prime, Dream, had come here. His life had been like a beacon to XD. Dream playing in the very domain of the god that wears his likeness was stronger than any summoning ritual that could be performed, by moral or the divine. And his prime had his constants, the things that made him who and what he was. Green eyes, smiley mask, ambition, pride, a compulsion to make things right, Sapnap… and George.
XD watched as the SMP started up. He waited and he waited, and he would have stayed hidden had circumstances not forced his hand. His inactivity was draining his powers, and his inaction was breaking his heart. So he introduced himself to George.
And he is still waiting.
This is where XD paused while telling his story. Paused, hesitated, and then moved onto another topic. It didn’t matter though, George could read between the lines, had become something of an expert at it.
He’s waiting for George to die. If Dream playing at life and creation was what called XD here, then what would call HD would be death and destruction. And it isn’t as if the server lacked either thing, not by a long shot. The only difference is the involvement of each god’s primes.
But George had a habit of missing important events, and Dream had a habit of keeping him out of it. Even then, even if George had been central to all the bloodiest, most violent events in the server’s history, Dream is living —or at least, alive— and George is not dead.
George knows that XD considers killing him because patience is not one of XD’s virtues, not when there is a straightforward, action based shortcut to his desired outcome. He can see it, in the line of his shoulders, in the way XD lets the semblance of humanity slough off him sometimes. When George frustrates him, tests his tolerance, unkindly reminds XD that this isn’t what he wants it to be, makes him mad. George knows that XD considers killing him, because if the roles were reversed, XD would already be dead.
(Instead, George wakes up, and they both go about pretending that they don’t wish he didn’t.)
(He has a dream that at first he thinks is a memory. In it, he is picking flowers for a bouquet. He must have been at it for a while, as his hands and forearms were caked in dirt.
He plucks a rose from a bush with no pain, and for good measure plucks a second. He grabs a handful of wheat next, and then a spike of grass seeds. Finally, he pulls a carrot out of his pocket and ties the lot together. Looking more closely as his fingers work on the know, his hands aren’t filthy. Halfway down his forearm, his skin starts to turn as dark and grey as deep slate.
The next day, he’s walking through a field, a train of animals following in his wake. He walks them all the way to the mouth of a cave, one that immediately drops down into gloomy darkness below. He tosses his bouquet into the depths and turns to watch as all of the animals, one by one, drop in after it.
Down below, there is a roar that he’s never heard before, and something in the dark flashes blue.)
Obviously, XD knows that George has wanted to kill him too. There’s a part of George that suspects that XD finds this fact endearing.
It’s easier to conceptualize when the god isn’t holding up his end of their deal. When he’s gone, or acting wrong, or when anger and despair grow thorns, wrap adventitious vines around George's heart and lungs. Easier still when XD looks the least like Dream, when he is asleep.
(He loses all the humanizing features, the baby face, the pliable skin, the mammalian warmth. His body form almost melts, the regal green cloak becoming chrysaline wrapped around him. He could be anyone. He could be anything.)
XD rarely actually sleeps. But when he does, George knows beyond sense and reason that Dream has curled up somewhere and has slipped into that place beyond pain. Not hurt, but somewhere new horrors can’t reach him.
If George was a better person, he’d want to kill XD for this reason alone. To keep Dream away from the pain he will undoubtedly endure, the pain George knows is hunting him. But he’s not, so he doesn’t. He just wants Dream back. Hurt and pain and suffering and all. If George was convinced that Sapnap would take Dream in alive —and if he was convinced that who he was talking to was actually Sapnap, the real, living Sapnap, and not just a happier memory pulled from his subconscious— he might actually help him track down their prodigal leader. He was always the better tracker between the two of them.
But he can’t kill XD, not in real life, and not even in his dreams anymore, so there was little point in even fantasizing about doing so.
(If there was a way to bind him, though. A spell to tether his powers. If George could make him reset everything, turn back the clock, go back to before anything ever fell apart. Or even just to make Dream stop. To relent his relentless ambition, to scrape the stars from his eyes. If George could use XD’s power to make Dream simply give up on a better world. Let everyone else burn each other to the ground, let them paint the server in each other’s blood.
If only all the power in the universe was enough to make Dream come home.)
Most of George’s days don’t have sunsets. He isn’t sure if it’s a coincidence, luck, manipulation, or if he genuinely can’t remember how long days are supposed to be at this point. Whatever it is, it makes each one he can catch that much more special.
He likes them, even if he can’t appreciate all the different colours the sun paints the sky. The world goes warm under the fading light, shadows growing, everyone winding down to get ready for bed. In the summers, dusk can last for hours, harsh daylight gentling, cooling. The night creatures start to wake, the insistent drone of the insects evolving at the shift change. The stars blink on, the sky darkens, the moon comes out of hiding. It’s peaceful. It reminds him of other sunsets.
Today, he has found a cliff edge that faces out over the sea, looking due west. He sits on the lip, legs dangling over the water. He swings them a little, as if he were a kid. The sun is just kissing the horizon, the liquid gold of its reflection dancing over the ocean waves. It looks so close he could touch it, if he leaned forward, if he reached, if he wanted it. He keeps his hands planted on the grass underneath him.
There’s that sudden heaviness of presence behind him, the appearance of a super-dense object changing gravity slightly that always signals XD’s arrival. George doesn’t turn around, just kicks his feet a little
XD comes up beside him silently and sinks to the ground. He doesn’t dangle his legs over the edge, but then George doesn’t know if he even has real legs at the moment. Out of the corner of his eye he can see a pool of dark green fabric, and that's about it.
They don’t speak, but George shifts closer until they’re almost touching. Dream was a furnace, and his heat would be reaching George at this distance. In similar style, XD’s should be noticeable.
George holds his hand out, palm facing up, and the smooth, sclerite surface of XD’s hand slides over it and he intertwines their fingers. He’s cool, a couple degrees below the air temperature and pretty quickly George can feel the heat from his skin leeching into XD, endothermic.
His thumb rubs along the back of George’s hand, and George shivers. The sun dips further out of sight.