⇨ AstridinSpace joined the party.

Astrid! Hi

Dream! Hello, it's nice to meet you!

You too!

You ready for some MCC training?

Are you ready to train me?

Who invited the women

As ready as ever

Oh

Tommy's here...

Oi! Bitch

Tommy be nice

Hello Astrid :)

Hello Wilbur :)

Why didn't I get a hello?

...

Tommy we're MCC training hurry

I don't need training

I'm a god B)

Can't wait for next MCC when I'm not in a team with Tommy

Ahhh happy times will come

Astrid giggled to herself as Tommy replied, full of swears and promises and cheeky comments.

It was nice having him and Wilbur on the team, a buffer of sorts in case things got awkward, both being friends with Dream and Astrid individually, both being able to hold a conversation between the two of them if the others dulled away from it.

It's not that Astrid didn't want to speak to Dream, on the contrary, he seemed like a perfectly lovely person that would guide her through the whole match with care, although fuelled by competitiveness. She was just scared to slip up, like the very mention of George would send her on a spiral of all the things she knew; his morning voice, the way his bones sounded when they cracked, the way his face looked when...

Well, she probably wouldn't go that far, but she'd go far enough that he'd know they were better friends than either of them let on. Know that they'd met more than the two times they'd alluded to, maybe even make a connection between the two and George's 'non bitchless' comment from a couple of weeks ago.

Thankfully, George explained, his friends had given up on that joke rather quickly. Whether it was from pure boredom of it or because they realised the mistake of mentioning it publicly.

Twitter, however, had not forgotten. Alternatively, they'd latched onto the very idea and had spoken about it frequently most days of the week. Each time George didn't join a stream, or in fact wouldn't stream himself there was always a tweet indicating it was her fault.

Not that it wasn't true, if he wasn't streaming or on somebody else's stream George would call her and she'd go over, but she wasn't the reason that he wasn't streaming. If anything he was the reason she wasn't, staring at her phone just in case there was a text, ending early if he told her he was watching.

A downpour of unaddressed emotions would start every time she opened the bird app, something that she did almost immediately every day - despite knowing how bad it was. Now she couldn't even scroll without seeing a tweet.

Slipping it would be bad...

For what George wanted.

He liked secrecy, liked his alone time and not talking about things that involved him, and Astrid had come to accept that about him, even if sometimes it was a bit much.

If he wanted a secret, one thing that he didn't need to talk to anybody - even his friends - about, one thing just for them, time spent outside the world he's created online, then who was she to deny that.

—————

Written: 22nd July 2022

Published: 24th July 2022

This updating everyday thing is not going well for me lol but i've got stuff happening so pls forgive me also I only have like 5 more chapters planned so I really need to do more of that lol