#i wanted so badly to write this from dre's pov but im saving that for tmr

[subwalls]

WHUMPTOBER 2021 - 6/30

No. 6 - TOUCH AND GO bruises | touch starved | hunger

Also available on AO3!

The first time George crosses the void, it’s to attend his best friend’s funeral.

Mostly for the purposes of rejecting it altogether. 

“You know he’s not dead, right?” George says. He adjusts his goggles, pressing tenderly at the indents the frame leaves on his face. “Let’s just get out of here. He doesn’t die that easily.”

“I know,” Sapnap says, frustrated. “I know he’s not dead. He’s just gone .” 

George can’t argue that. Neither of them remember their friend’s name—that’s damning enough, even without the week Sapnap spent nearly scalding the inside of his skull, scouring the city with the All-Seeing Eyes of the Gods without care for how much heat they generated, only for the search to turn out without so much as a grain of evidence that their friend even existed at all.

That’s the problem, George is pretty sure. The All-Seeing Eyes peel back the bells and whistles of lies and magic, exposing nothing but the raw truth of the world around them.

And the truth is that invisible werewolves can disappear themselves so thoroughly they can make the world be as though they never existed to begin with.

The Eyes can’t see them because there is nothing to see. 

Allegedly.

George is well aware that he shouldn’t know this. If their friend truly diluted his existence so thinly that nobody could find him, then neither he nor Sapnap should even remember that he existed. But they do; they remember his pronouns, even—and, if George strains for the faintest edges of his memory, the sound of his laughter.

So there are traces. It’s not a perfect vanishing act, which means there has to be a way to reverse it.

George tells Sapnap as much, when they leave the… gathering of people forgetting that they’re mourning even as they do it. Sapnap nods in agreement.

“Phil said most of the invisible werewolves have a token of some kind,” Sapnap says. “Like, a cypher that can bring them back. They tried to do it with this person, but it didn’t work.”

“What was it?”

“I think it had something to do with the Eyes? He didn’t tell me the details. It’s private.”

A part of George wants to snipe that they must not have been good friends then, if such a key detail couldn’t be shared with them. 

Logically, he’s certain that they did know, at some point. It just faded along with the rest of their memories of him.

“Okay,” says George. “We don’t need a cypher of whatever anyway.” He brings his hands up to his goggles, but the moment his fingers brush the cool, pitch-black glass, he hesitates.

It’s funny. The memory of that event—the figure leaning out of the sky with unending wings and crossed halos and an unmarked sphere of pale light that spoke so softly, choose who will see this through to the End —it’s glitchy, like a trying to straighten out a crumpled-up photo. The lines of wear and tear are there.

George knows that people have opinions about his friends jumping into SMP City without him, about his blacked-out goggles and their unnaturally glowing blue eyes. Most of them assume they left him behind, sacrificed his flawed sight to split the rewards between them both—Sapnap has whined about it before, most recently in the context of that Blood Breed conflict that roped him into the Syndicate.

In reality, George never gave up anything.

Or, better phrased: George was the only one who didn’t give something up.

He shoves the goggles up, and the All-Seeing Eyes of the Gods spring open with the near-musical string of notes that aren’t unlike the chimes of a computer’s start-up sequence.

Immediately, a headache of information slams into him with all the force of a ten-inch steel wall, WALL WALL BRICK BACKROOM DOOR AND STAIRWAYS DOWN A HUNDRED SOULS IN A CONCRETE ARENA ENDER FLESH BREAKING NETHER BLOOD DRIPPING HUMA CROWDS WATCHING WATCH WATCH—

George shudders in a breath, the blue-tinted view of his surroundings fizzling too-bright too-much, and he can almost hear someone in the back of his head, chiding, “If you’d just practiced instead of shutting it down and pretending like you don’t have it, George, you could easily handle that neural load by now. I’m telling you, you can’t keep pretending it isn’t there!”

George says, “I hate this part.”

Sapnap laughs at him. George turns towards him on instinct and sees the star-riddled void under that cloth eyepatch, a dead eye in form but a vacuum in function, A DEBT INCURRED A DEBT REPAID SIGHT FOR SIGHT AN EYE FOR AN EYE AND THE HOLE LEFT BEHIND AS THE HIGHER HAND TAKES AND THE HIGHER HAND GIVES AND THE CONTRACT REMAINS THE CONTRACT REMAINS—

—and oh, oh, he knows how to do it, he knows what to look for. 

If you could back out of a divine contract by just dissipating, then it wouldn’t be much of a divine contract, would it? Here stands George and Sapnap, two-thirds or maybe two-fourths of a contract etched in song and history and the pupils of their eyes. The other parties must exist.

They already do; the Eyes hum, blitzing through reams upon reams of information, lighting up not just George’s face but Sapnap’s as well, and because they exist, so must be the one who paid for their existence.

( Choose who will see this through to the End. )

(“If you have to take something, take it from me!”)

(We forgive your transgression. But we do not revoke the payment we have taken.)

(“Fine by me. This is better than what it was gonna be, anyway.”)

George’s eyes burn, escalating to an awful, awful heat that feels like it’s going to boil the blood in his veins, but still he sees, still he looks for those hairline fractures in reality, A SHADOW WAS HERE AND A FOOTSTEP THERE SEE IT SEE IT IT IS TRUE SO MAKE IT TRUE—

The gears of light twist, shrieking out some incomprehensible song, crackling with power in front of his eyes, and he can taste blood in the back of his throat and on his lips and it’s dripping to the floor now but still he looks.

A pressure on his wrist, tight enough to bruise.

“Okay,” rasps a SHADOW SILHOUETTE FIGMENT OF PRESENCE DRAWN BACK TOGETHER figure that flickers, wavering. “Stop, stop it, that’s enough, I’m here, I’m here—”

George slams his other hand over that pressure at his wrist and feels at first only the rough fabric of his own jacket, but then, abruptly, the softer cotton of a warm jumper.

“Turn them off, oh my god,” says—says—says Dream, waving his free hand through the light of the Eyes like he’s trying to dismiss them, just barely shuttering back into some normal level of existence. His grip on George tightens, desperate; his good eye meets George’s gaze pleadingly, while his other, an identical match to Sapnap’s, remains a featureless expanse of stars. “You’re going to roast the one brain cell you have left, you idiot, turn them off—”

George shuts his Eyes, and the stream of information dies abruptly. The silence in his head leaves him reeling, for a second, which gives Sapnap just enough time to scream in fury and tackle Dream to the ground, dragging George down with them.

“Don’t do that!” Sapnap shrills, making an aborted movement like he wants to strangle the life out of Dream but isn’t sure he won’t just give way under his touch. “You’re the worst, you’re the actual worst—”

“ What? How? I didn’t—”

“—and you suck, and the next time you get cornered by a Blood Breed you gotta call for help before you get muffined—”

The two of them fall into bickering so easily it’s comforting, like a backdrop of rain, just a wash of noise so smooth out the ruffled edges the Eyes left behind.

George reaches up, catching Dream’s arm before he can elbow Sapnap into oblivion. “You’re so annoying,” he tells him. “You said you specifically came here so you I didn’t have to use these things.”

“Well,” Dream says, “that’s not the only reason.”

“Still! You broke your promise!”

“I didn’t promise anything,” Dream complains, warm and alive and more present than ever. “You’re just being a baby. Both of you are.”

Sapnap shifts, and George pulls his goggles back over his eyes just in time to see Dream go still as Sapnap practically cradles his head between his hands.

“Remember what we said about us being your token?” Sapnap asks.

“Mhm.”

“I’m taking it back.” And then, as Dream’s face crumples, “I mean! I know you can’t like, change it, because it’s what makes you want to go come back no matter what and that stuff. But you can’t do this again, Dream. You were gone.” His voice lowers. “We barely knew you.”

Something in Dream’s gaze cracks, and he’s pushing himself up, clipping distractedly through them. Sapnap and George scramble upright as he sits primly a clean inch away from them both and says, “I know, but it’s not like I wanted to. I got snuck up on, okay? It’s not like I like being—being less, and untouchable, and spreading myself so thin I can’t feel anything at all.” 

He shudders, then, and some of the color bleeds from his clothes.

“It doesn’t feel great for me, either, Pandas,” Dream says, and Sapnap makes a wounded noise and lurches forward to wrap him in a hug.

George watches them, for a moment, and nearly envisions a void yawning wide between them before he realizes that Sapnap is pulling him into it too, and now they’re all wrapped around each other and stifling laughter about it, and it’s warm, and oh, George has been alone—on the other side of the void, reluctant to step past the dragon’s den—for so long now.

He’s missed this. The bracing tightness of Sapnap squeezing them like he’s got something to prove, the low hum in Dream’s chest as he relaxes, George’s own skin feeling almost too tight for the nostalgia that wells up in his throat, almost too warm to lean into it, but also offended at the very thought of trying to extract himself from it.

“How’s this,” Dream says, cautiously, muffled against Sapnap’s shoulder, “we let George move in with you, you Sap, and I—”

“Stop sleeping in the Syndicate’s offices and join us?” Sapnap says, poking fun.

“It’s comfortable,” Dream grumbles. “And there’s free food. And no biased landlord.”

George squints at him. “Is this about the Huma-only thing?” he says, and Sapnap nods quickly. “Isn’t your whole thing about avoiding that kind of stuff, Dream? How does a landlord affect you at all?”

Dream opens his mouth, stops, and then shuts it. And then, “Shut up.”

“Wow,” Sapnap says. “I think you left a few brain cells behind when you came back.”

Dream shoves his head away, messing up Sapnap’s hair. “The only thing I left behind was my breakfast,” he declares. “I’m hungry. Can we go get something to eat now, instead of sitting in a… random alley in the middle of nowhere?” He looks around, only just now noticing that they are, in fact, sitting in a random alley in the middle of nowhere. “Is this—where are we?”

Sapnap perks up. “Oh, yeah,” he says, “while we were looking for you, I—George—we saw what looked like one of those underground fighting rings. The entrance is kinda close to here. D’you think it’s that Las Nevadas crew Phil and Tech have been looking for?”

“Only one way to find out,” Dream says cheerfully, and looks at George.

George sputters. “I-I can’t believe you. I set my eyeballs on fire for you,” he says, indignant, “and this is how you repay me? By asking for more?”

Sapnap laughs, knocking their heads together, and something in George’s chest settles with a burst of rightness. “Maybe later,” he says. “Dream’s right, I’m starving. And tired. Your Eyes suck, George.”

“Thanks, you bought them for me,” George says, at the same time that Dream says, “I’m always right.”