I found an ask yesterday where someone asked what MIA/RT would be like, if the incident had happened when Awsten was younger. And now I can’t stop thinking abt what MIA/RT would be like if the incident never happened. I assume he wouldn’t have him to P&P, and would have finished highschool. But would he have still ended up at Mr W’s house in RT??
later on, mr. w will wonder this, too <3
awsten would baaaarely pass high school. he’d have a little help via encouragement from mr. w, but it’s nothing like when he actually starts trying at p&p and is able to make a pretty decent dent in his grades.
he wouldn’t have ended up at mr. w’s house because he wouldn’t feel nearly as close to him. i don’t talk much about their email communication, but it was a big deal to awsten. he was talking to mr. w more than he was talking to otto or otto’s parents, even if it was just a few sentences about a cat every day. and the fact that mr. w kept coming all the way out to p&p every week and showing that he wanted to be there for awsten was HUGE to awsten. without that, they wouldn’t have had anything close to the bond that they had at the end of mia.
yeah, mr. w is a cool teacher and a great listener, but that would have been all he was. because of the p&p experience, awsten was able to see mr. w as reliable and caring and genuine and willing to go out of his way to be there for awsten. and those things were essential to awsten showing up at the house to say goodbye.
that brings us to rt. if awsten had been through part one living at the woods’ house, he wouldn’t have been able to miss otto’s college admissions process. even if nothing else seemed out of the ordinary, otto and his parents would have just completely disappeared for a full weekend for otto’s baseball tryout.
the bottom line is that they wouldn’t have felt the need to hide it from him, so awsten would have been sad that otto was leaving but not devastated. there would have been no fight.
awsten would have started working and tried to get out of the woods’ house just a few months after otto left. and otto would have been totally successful at school bc he is a bright little crayon and he wants to do well. baby can do anything he puts his mind to. and he still can; it’s just a LOT harder than it would have been before.
so would awsten have run away?
he would have gotten his own place either in the town over - which would have been really fun to write about - or somewhere completely different. mr. w would just be a cool teacher, not someone he actually felt the need to say goodbye to. he might have said thank you to him at graduation (knowing awsten, he probably would have).
BUT he wouldn’t have “run away” in the sense that no one knew where he was and it was ‘awsten against the world.’ it wouldn’t be an escape plan or a cry for help or a test to see who loved him or anything like that. he’d keep in contact with otto and mrs. wood. it’d just be like he moved thirty minutes away (or less) and got a job.
and you know that mrs. wood is totally sending him money every so often to help with rent and stuff. the only reason he accepts it is because he knows she’d help otto out if he needed it.
so awsten would just be working in another town and coming back to have dinner with mom at duffy’s on his day off. he buys her meal and feels all proud of himself then she gives him $250. lol.
