cody didn’t answer right away. just blinked at @forev3r, the words hanging there like smoke in the air—familiar, amused, biting. ❝ you can't go 24 hours without having some kind of accident, huh? ❞ and damn if it didn’t land. his jaw ticked, not out of anger, but because—well, he couldn’t even deny it. he had knocked over the lighting rig. and the coffee spill in catering? absolutely his fault. the pyro? okay, maybe partially him. but it wasn’t like he meant for any of it to happen. it’s just that things tended to fall apart around him when he wasn’t looking. maybe when he was looking too.
he didn’t mean to be a walking disaster. it just kind of... followed him. like a shadow he couldn’t shake.
his fingers curled at his sides. part of him wanted to defend himself. explain. joke it off. but another part—the quieter, more tired one—just sighed. because punk wasn’t wrong. he never was, and that made it worse. he glanced at him. all smug smirks and arms crossed and that knowing look that always managed to dig under his skin. 'you don’t hate it,' cody thought. 'you love having something to roll your eyes at. something to fix.'
the silence stretched between them for a beat too long, so cody just shrugged, lips twitching like he wasn’t sure if he wanted to laugh or punch a wall. ❝ yeah, well... at least i'm consistent. ❞ truth was, it scared him sometimes—how easy it was to mess things up. how no matter how hard he tried to hold it all together, something always slipped. always cracked. always burned. he looked down at his hands, scuffed and bandaged from a fall he pretended didn’t hurt. some people leave legacy. others leave wreckage. and maybe—just maybe—he was both.
