Work Text:
The executive manager of Punch Media, the social media management team for Clay, Nick and George’s Youtube channel, The Dream Team, sits in front of him and George. They’ve been in this meeting for over thirty minutes, and she is still rattling on about how this will affect channel growth rates and view counts. “As I was explaining earlier, your channel used to be the highest-grossing channel we have. And after you released the George moving to America video, we had some specialists go… let's just say… undercover on Twitter to see what our most monetarily favorable next move would be.”
She paused her rant, whipped around, and reached into the file cabinet behind her desk. She pulled out two thick stacks of paper with binder clips on them. She dropped them with a large smack on her desk.
She paused, fixing George and Clay with a look. “And they’ve all concurred: the internet wants DreamNotFound.”
Clay can’t see or hear anything over the ringing in his ears. He just can’t believe this is happening. It’s so utterly ridiculous that Clay thinks he might actually be dream -ing. Like, somebody pinch him right now, this is a walking nightmare.
“I can tell by the looks on your faces this isn’t what you expected from this meeting. But, what the fans want, the fans get. I have already printed out nondisclosure agreements for the both of you to sign.”
Clay continues ignoring the executive, slowly turning his head to gauge George’s reaction to this fiasco.
George’s eyebrows have shot up to his forehead, and his eyes are so far bugged out of his head it looks painful. His mouth has dropped open, and he’s staring at their executive producer with bewilderment written all across his face.
Clay breaks the duo’s silence, shaking his head, “Wait- you- Th- What?” As he fumbles for words and his boss snaps her mouth shut with a click. She gives Clay and George a once-over, eyebrows furrowing.
“As we talked about last week, recently your channel and stream views have dropped off a great deal. After consulting with the rest of the team, this is the course of action we theorize would produce the most significant results.”
George seems to have partially recovered, but the corners of his mouth begin to curl, “So, you want us to… date ?” He says the last part with thinly repressed mirth, sneaking a glance at Clay, who is staring at George with a pinched expression on his face.
“ Fabricate a romantic relationship, that is correct.” She finishes for him.
George nods and schools his face back to neutral. He is seemingly okay with it all, much to Clay’s confusion. Suddenly, a wide smile breaks out on his face and he begins glancing wildly around the room. He turns back to the exec, laughing, “You almost had me. How much did Quackity pay you to go through with this?”
The executive fixes him with a stern look before leaning toward them both, “George, this is not a joke. We’ve done extensive research-”
“Extensive research?!” Clay interrupts, huffing. “Who the hell are you paying to do extensive research on this ?”
The executive starts right back up, “To repeat myself, we have contacted an elite, top-of-the-line group of social media specialists to analyze-”
George, who was now wearing a similar expression of disbelief to Clay, furrows his brows and stands up, waving his hands around wildly. “Ok! We get it. Where’s the pen so I can sign the papers.”
Now it was Clay’s turn to jump out of his seat. He wrapped his arms around George’s body, clamping his arms to his torso and physically restraining George from grabbing a pen out of the exec’s pen-holder and signing both their freedoms away.
“LET ME GO!” George struggled in Clay’s grasp.
Dream shot a strained smile at the executive, “Could we- he paused his speech to grunt in an effort to keep George detained, the guy was surprisingly strong for his twink looks- have a moment to talk it over? Please?”
The executive stared at them struggling with an unimpressed look on her face for a solid five seconds. Then she abruptly stood up and reached to pinch the area between her brows as if warding off a headache. “Sure, fine. You guys talk it over for a few minutes. I’m going to go grab a coffee.”
She walked to the door, slipped out of it, and closed it with a secure click.
As soon as she left, George paused his struggling and Clay released him. He flopped back down onto his chair, Clay following and sitting in his own chair, but a lot more robotically.
As if he could read George’s thoughts, Dream immediately looked at George, saying a simple, “No.”
George whipped his head up to look at Clay and rolled his eyes. Dream was making a big deal out of this when it just wasn’t one. He looked at Clay, scoffing, “Dream, I don’t think we have a choice here. It’s in our contracts that we have to do whatever the marketing company says to do even if we don’t want to do it. Otherwise, they’ll fire us, which means I’ll lose my work visa and will get deported. I know it's not the best situation, but it’s not a big deal. And we don’t really have any other choice.”
Clay looked at George, eyebrows furrowed despite George’s logical reasoning. “No, there has to be another way. They can’t just make us do this! And it’s probably all because some stupid interns are DNF shippers. There’s no way they can get enough information on this just based on some stupid tweets. They probably didn’t even study Reddit, the most reliable and best source of information out there.”
George shook his head, and held out a pen for Clay to grab, “Dream, do you really want me to get deported?”
Clay hesitated, trying to come up with another way to get out of this. “We can find another agency. We don’t have to do this, George.”
George rolled his eyes and forced the pen into Clay’s hand. He scooted his chair forward to reach the executive’s desk, beginning to sign at all the lines the executive had starred in highlighter. He sighed, “Just sign the fucking NDA, Dream.”
Dream reluctantly scooted his chair forward as well, gripping the pen, and watched as his hand slowly lowered to the paper. He dropped his head, letting out a sigh before signing on all the necessary spots. Of course, he fucked up over half of them, because his signature was shit.
As soon as both men capped their pens, they heard a knock at the door before the executive slowly opened it. She took in the situation, glancing at the documents before a wide grin broke out on her face. She moved past the duo to sit behind her desk, collecting the papers and stacking them neatly together with a thunk sound. She placed the documents back into the file cabinet she got them from and whirled around to face Clay and George. Her face was schooled back to a polite, businesswoman smile, and she reached across her desk with her hand outstretched to shake Clay and George’s hands. “I’m pleased you two could come to an agreement. The entire management team, myself included, are excited to see what this next step could mean for your channel.”
Clay and George both shared a glance before standing up to shake her hand with forced smiles. But as George reached for the door to escape, she interrupted them once more, “Oh! I just remembered, and I don’t think I mentioned it before, but the team thinks it would be best if Nick and the rest of your colleagues don’t know about the whole ‘faking it’ part of this agreement. We think it would be in everyone’s best interest if you two, the marketing team and I are the only ones who know this meeting took place. Starting Monday, you will go public with your ‘relationship,’ and we’ll need you both to keep suspicion low and truly convince the rest of the team your friendship has naturally progressed into a romance.”
She paused for a moment to take in the shell-shocked and horrified looks on George and Clay’s faces. She smiled, an evil glint in her eye, “Have a great weekend you two, and see you Monday morning!”