"send 💣 for a stress headcanon" about mason pls
So, once McKinley became an arts school, Mason and Madison weren’t cheerios anymore, but they were still cheerleaders. It would be like saying they weren’t twins anymore because he had Trig while she had Spanish - the environment can’t change the truth, and they were cheerleaders.
So they found a community cheer squad, together, and started going after school. Which was fine! It was good. It was good for Mason to have something physical to do aside from spin Jane around the floor of the Choir Room. It was good for Madison to find her way around girls that weren’t Kitty; it was good. It was good, really.
It’s just that he’s a senior, and the school he’d grown up in did a 180 and he’s on a new cheer squad and all of a sudden, everything is changing so fast.
It’s just that college applications are due. Like, soon. And before that there’s the SAT and the ACT, both of which Madison is requiring they take and refusing to explain to Mason where they got the cash for at least four tests, and that’s assuming neither of them have to retake either test, which Mason at least probably will because it’s six hours long and their school just became focused on ‘performing arts’ instead of, you know, school.
Which is fine, really. Mason loves it. He loves getting to be creative all the time, he loves getting to be with his friends, he loves meeting new people on the other cheer squad and he loves his girlfriend and really, he loves his life.
What he does not love is not sleeping.
What he does not love in the way his insides coil like a cobra whenever anyone so much as mentions the future.
What he does ot love is that everything is changing, so fast. He doesn’t love it.
What he does love is snack food, and a lot of it. Madison’s written it off, since the cheer squad is keeping them in almost as good as shape as Coach ever did and anyway, it’s study snacks, so it’s probably fine–but she doesn’t know about his secret stash.
(She does, but he doesn’t know that.)
He snacks. He focuses better on a full stomach, and anyway sometimes he sugar crashes or finds himself in that mood where he just really needs something crunchy.
What he does not love is having to say no to going over to Spencer’s house for a ‘bro’s night’ (whatever that means) because he’s got six hours of homework to do in the three hours before Madison sends them to bed, like Mason can’t clearly see that she’s been staying up well past their bedtime too, no matter how much under-eye concealer she wears.
What he does not love is the way he has to walk on eggshells around Madison, who is about two inches and a bad hair day away from being front page of the Lima News for fratricide.
What he does love, though, is Jane.
When Jane’s with him, dancing or cuddled under his arm or holding his hand in a dark movie theater or even just–texting him good night, for a second or two all the noise just stops, fades all the way away and he’s able to just be there, and feel it. Feel how he feels, for her, and feel how she feels for him.
Everything’s changing, but that won’t, and that’s the only reason he hasn’t left Lima in favor of becoming a hermit who never, ever has to squint at graphs printed on cheap paper to determine the value of XY.
When Jane asks him, very very quietly, how he’s feeling, he doesn’t deflect her the way he did Kitty or Madison or Allistair. He doesn’t laugh it off. He just–he sort of deflates and he can feel it, all of his bones are so heavy and he just…
He is so tired. And he says this and feels so old, old all the way through because even if he passes the SATs and gets a semi-decent score on the ACTs and applies to every arts school in the country or even the world, he’s not going to college. He can’t. They can’t afford it. His parents are on a charity tour in Amsterdam or Austria or something, he doesn’t remember and he mostly doesn’t care, but he does care about how he checked on the studet aide idea, on how what the legal steps were for someone whose parents still technically had custody but hadn’t seen them in months.
There weren’t a lot of options, and Mason didn’t know why he was pretending there were, and he didn’t know why he was trying so hard to be everything Glee needed him to be, everything Madison needed, everything the cheer squad needed–it was all so stupid and pointless, but all that came out was ‘I’m just really, really tired’.
So that night, he and Jane slept together, for the first time. Completely innocently; he got dressed in the bathroom and she made quick work of dispatching her dirty clothes into a hidden location. She texted Madison and promised her nineteen times (she counted) that nothing above PG-13 was going to happen, because she didn’t want to ‘jeopardize their futures’ either, thank you.
Once they were lying there, in Jane’s big four-poster bed, her pink plastic butterflies loose amorphous shadows on the gauzy covering above them, Jane waited. Mason could feel it. He wanted to get out of bed, but her bed was really comfortable, and Jane was so close, and he’d never shared a bed like this with a girl before, unless you counted his sister, which he did not, regardless of what the rumors said.
Mason did not know how to put it into words. He opened his mouth to try and found nothing - which was unusual, because he always had words, even if they were stuttered and stupid and awkward, but he always had something to say. But now–just, nothing. His brain was somehow wired and going a hundred miles an hour and absolutely depleted. Sorry, try again later.
Jane didn’t ask. She just rolled over, wrapped her arm over his chest and kissed his cheek. She settled against him and let out a soft sigh, her thumb tracing over the little dip between his neck and his shoulder. It tickled.
But Jane always helped. Jane was the one thing in his life that wasn’t making him feel like he was headed for an early grave, so he wrapped his arm around her and squeezed, and she squeezed him back, and she let out a happy sigh.
Maybe it was that he hadn’t slept, or eaten a proper solid meal in over a week, or maybe it was just the Jane of it all–he didn’t know why or how, but the next thing he knew it was morning and Jane’s alarm was going off persistently in his ear. Jane was already awake and finishing getting ready, which seemed to defeat the purpose of having an alarm. Which struck Mason as odd, until–
Oh. She’d let him sleep in.
Mason had never, ever loved her more.