Mark My Words || DNF Soulmate AU

Chapter 45

George is pretty sure he's not hearing things correctly right now, but if he is then at least he has a reason to be short of breath all of a sudden.

He thinks he might have an idea of where Dream is about to go with this, but at the same time the ideal feels so ridiculous and incongruous with the lead-up George barely wants to spare it a second thought.

That doesn't stop his body temperature from rising to unhealthy levels, or the blush from coloring his cheeks like a gentle splash of watercolor. In his peripheral vision, George senses blurry video feedback of him stuck on an expression of shock.

He's been frozen since Dream admitted to using his ghoulmark on George's, George's soulmate, and even now his neurons lag behind his usual smoothly-ran circuit of evaluation and thought.

"I'll walk you through the whole backstory," Dream smiles mischievously like he isn't about to be the sole cause of death for George, "But first off I will tell you that currently, the ghoulmark on my face has practically replicated George's soulmark purely because I have held onto threads of romance that never should have been available to me in the first place."

Replicated George's soulmark?

The sudden urge to see what the mark on Dream's face looks like is overwhelming, and George sits up taller and closer to the screen as if that will help him see through the obstructive band-aid.

"I had always assumed falling in love was this drastic, dramatic, overwhelming thing," Dream continues smoothly, "It was how I saw it in the world around me. People match their marks, and their universes make sense. So I guarded myself against any form of immediate attraction, and cut off potential sources of trouble before they could come back and bite me in the ass."

George sets his chin on his palm and listens patiently, trying to divert his attention anywhere but where it actually wants to lead.

"What no one ever warned me about, however, were pretty gamer boys who screamed too loud and cursed too much and never ran out of mischief," the corner of Dream's lip tilts up as he smiles fondly down toward his desk, "Some troublesome idiot I couldn't get off my mind."

George almost physically jolts, and the zap of electricity that burns through his brain sets his entire face on fire in its wake.

"Of course, I was in denial at first. And I managed to get myself to believe that I was simply feeling a sudden wave of appreciation for my long-time companionship," Dream shakes his head like he's embarrassed for past-Dream, "That never really worked out."

George wishes he could shut down, restart, and perhaps bypass the overheating in his system to remember what Dream is referencing. To him, any time before they started to think about YouTube was antediluvian, rememberable but foggy. 

A maze, something of a labyrinth, rises from the ground and beckons an entrance. Hesitant fingers graze against the beige-colored walls fencing forward a path, and George steps into the darkness as the sound of Dream's voice accompanies his every movement.

His heart thumps louder than his footsteps.

"When we had first met each other, I was still in high school, doing my stupid little teenage things," Dream recounts, threads of yarn for George to follow through their labyrinth of moments, "You were a friend of a friend, and an adult no less. Three years made all the difference back then, and there was nothing that suggested we could get along that well."

The dark hallways of the maze tell nothing, and the concrete in the walls sting against his palm as he smoothes over them, trying to find his way through dead ends and wrong turns. George isn't scared, he has his yarn to follow and a voice to guide him, but something remains unknown, and he needs to find out.