Stay Inside (by my Side) : Gream/DreamNotFound

20. Perfectly Timed

George opened his eyes, wincing at the bright light around him. He hissed in pain as his retinas stung from the exposure and shielded himself with his arm. Once he adjusted, he propped his head up and looked around, shaking away his sleepy disorientation.

The source of the brightness was the bedroom ceiling lamp, which was burning overhead like a neutron star. George realized he hadn't turned off the lights when he fell asleep. In fact, falling asleep in itself was an accident.

He reached for his phone, which was dangerously close to slipping off the edge of the bed. It had a miserable amount of charge left and died instantly. George managed to catch the time regardless; 4AM.

He groaned and got up to switch the lights off, but by the time he stepped onto the floor he realized he had no sleep left in him. Fully awake, he sat back down on the bed and pondered what to do. He plugged his phone in, waiting impatiently for it to turn on.

George relaxed back onto the mattress, playing with the blanket. Who knew how long it would be until he saw this room again. Beside him, his phone buzzed and unlocked, allowing him to finally occupy his time.

The Brit opened up Twitter and scrolled the home page, liking mutuals and checking his tagged posts. Some of them were drawings of the Dream Team, some video recommendations, and some were questions asking about when new videos would be coming out. George paused, trying to remember the most recent video either he or Clay had uploaded and realized it had been a while. He ignored the posts, switching to a different app.

As luck would have it, at that moment the WiFi started cutting out severely, making loading any app practically impossible. George clicked his tongue and turned on his data. It worked at the highest speed for a bit before slowing down and inevitably dying just like the internet. George rolled his eyes and groaned, shutting off his phone.

There were several hours left before the sun would come up, and George had absolutely nothing else to do. He had left his laptop in the living room and didn't feel ready enough to go out there and see Clay again, so the only thing he could do was attempt to go back to sleep. Regardless, his phone called him from the nightstand. He reluctantly unlocked it and opened up his camera roll.

Scrolling all the way to the top, George tapped on and analyzed each photo he had, relishing the sweet memories each image brought up. The majority of them were pictures of Cat, but sprinkled between them were occasional screenshots of text conversations and photos he took of pretty locations.

He came across a series of photos from VidCon, spying several selfies of him and Sapnap in front of the massive sign. At the bottom of the photo stream, he saw the image he was looking for.

It was a blurry and hastily-taken selfie of him, Sap, and Clay standing in front of a Minecraft ad banner. George was holding the camera high, his face barely in the frame and index finger pointed at Steve on the poster. Sapnap was directly behind him, winking at the camera and pointing both fingers in the same direction. Off to the left was Clay, looming over the two and laughing as he joined in pointing at Steve.

This was the first photo of all three of us, George remembered. It certainly wasn't the last, either, and he scrolled further down, skipping a good chunk of his camera roll. He came across pictures of him and Clay sitting in an outdoor cafe, accompanied by BadBoyHalo and Skeppy, then a long-forgotten picture of himself on Clay's couch and holding Patches, and then many more shots. He smiled at the screen, hovering his thumb over the pixels that made up Clay's visage.