"Did I ever matter?" - Cody to Alex in whatever verse lol.
Sitting in a dim, dingy bar, Alex had never expected to see Cody walk through the door. In fact, he had never really expected to see Cody ever again, and thought he had pushed him away for good. Apparently that wasn’t the case, even though he knew that he didn’t deserve the chance to see Cody again, so of course the first thing he did when he saw the younger male was pound down what was left in his glass of whiskey and order another one.
Alex knew fully well that this was Lily’s doing. His sister had been worried about him for a couple of months now. It honestly surprised him that she had noticed him acting strange at all, considering she had her daughter and her boyfriend home and nine months of memories to catch up on. As much as Alex loved his sister, his niece, and his best friend (and probably soon to be brother in law), he couldn’t help but be bitter when he was in this mindset. They had everything, and all he had were memories of gunfire and explosions.
It had started a couple of weeks after they had all gotten home from overseas. At first, everything was fine. Alex was happy to be home, to have his boyfriend by his side, but soon he realized that he was paranoid over every little thing - every person he saw on the street and every sound that he heard. It kept him awake at night, and not even having Cody in his arms could help. Alex had supposed that he’d get better, and tried his hardest to hide what he was feeling from everyone. That worked for a bit, until they were over at his parent’s house for one of their weekly dinner nights and Alex had a few drinks. He didn’t really remember what had happened even, but something made him tick and the next thing he knew, his bowl of spaghetti was being hurled at the wall, causing his niece to cry.
That night, Alex suggested that it might be a good idea for he and Cody to take a break. All he meant was for them to spend a couple of days apart so that Alex could try to clear his mind, but the next thing he knew, Cody was gone and on a plane home, and Alex was left with nothing.
"You’re kidding me, right? You tell me to leave and you decide to play the victim?" Cody asked the moment he was in earshot of Alex. The next glass of whiskey couldn’t possibly come soon enough. Alex didn’t respond, knowing it was better not to, but Cody was having none of it. "Do you expect me to come back and make everything okay again? Did you think that I’d beg you to let me stay? Did I even matter?” Cody asked, and it was then that Alex chose to finally look him in the eyes.
"Did you matter to me? How can you possibly ask that? If you hadn’t mattered, I wouldn’t have brought you home to meet my parents. I would’ve just said goodbye to you at the base and lost touch, but I didn’t," Alex said, taking all the energy that he could muster to try to keep his cool. "I should be asking you if I mattered. Clearly there was something fucking wrong, and I know that I tried to hide it but I’m not that good at hiding it. Or did the spaghetti on the wall seem normal? Did that just seem like something I’d do?” Alex continued, his voice growing louder before he paused to take a deep breath.
"The only reason that I wanted to take a break was because I didn’t know what was going on, and I didn’t want to hurt you. I thought I just needed a few days to sort myself out. You were the one that left, so don’t you dare try to make it seem like I didn’t care about you.”
