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chapter 2: i’ll regret it if i didn’t say this isn’t what it could be
The Charlie Thing was supposed to be uncomplicated. The Charlie Thing was supposed to be easy. He wanted to be with him, but not in the same way that still flickered up in him sometimes, looking at Mac.
Because easy would have been slipping his hand in Charlie’s back pocket while they were walking around. Easy would have been not lowering their voices just because their friends were in the other room. Easy would have been just calling him his fucking boyfriend, since that’s basically what they were doing anyway.
But uncomplicated didn’t come from shoving all of his Charlie Feelings and his Mac Feelings and his Other Feelings (which were wrapped up in the same exact caution tape as those first two batches) into a locked drawer that he never visited in the back of his head.
Maybe “easy” and “uncomplicated” were just fancy ways for Dennis to dress up pretending he never had thoughts like that in the first place.
Read in search of a heartbeat for the first time today and I’m so sad oh my god. You’re writing is incredible but my heart is broken
wig thank u SO much…….as a token of my appreciation for your appreciation, heres a (sad) excerpt from ch 4:
Dennis snorted.
“You fat fuck,” he saidderisively, shaking his head. His heart was looming in a place so low in hisstomach, it was almost an interdimensional void. Was it even possible to feelsomething that far down? That couldn’t be real, but it hurt like it did. “You couldn’twalk down five blocks before you collapsed.”
Mac scowled at him. “Fuck you,Dennis.”
Dennis just looked at him foranother long moment. Then he sighed, turned, and went back to the living room.When he was gone, Mac slammed the door shut; Dennis jumped, halfway to a cringe.For a minute Dennis stood frozen there, where he’d been abandoned in the livingroom. His hands shaking, his heart loud but steady.
Neither one of them wasleaving, and the kids weren’t shouting on the street anymore and they hadn’tkilled anybody and Dennis could finally go to sleep. Another day done, anotherdisaster averted.
But sometimes it was hard toignore how little Mac needed him. Sometimes Dennis wanted to ask him, like he’ddone years ago on the banks of the Schuylkill River, if Mac would skip townwith him. Just to see if he’d still say yes.
He lay on the couch watchingHGTV reruns for a couple of hours, until the sky peeking through the curtainswas a hazy morning gray. Through the wall, he could hear Mac watching someaction flick with a lot of gunfire. There was a reason, he thought, the ache inhis gut smoothed over to a dull numb sensation. There was a reason he neverasked Mac to start over somewhere far away with him and it wasn’t because hewouldn’t want to follow through after.
re-read in search of a heartbeat 2day for the third time......Lads, it still hits just as good as it did the first time
holy shit…….i love you for doing All That (reading nearly 60k of dennis being a stupid hoe) 💕💗💞 hopefully within the next few weeks i can finish it up!!
just finished the newest chapter and im gonna die.....They Were Banging In Season 5: The Novelization. my hairline has receded by 2 inches. thanks for your service alex lesbianfreyja andchaos its been an honour
ugh thank urself babe because the validation and praise of the, like, twenty people who read it is half of why i’m writing what’s shaping up to be all 80k-ish (so, literally a novel) in the first place
isoah is one of my favorite things ever i downloaded it to read on the plane a few days ago
I LOVE THIS THANK YOU.
as promised, some unposted excerpts under the cut. i always lowkey intended to finish this if macdennis ever went canon because i wanted to keep up the canon compliance as per my HCs. unfortunately RCG are not getting the memo, but i wrote it up through season 8 anyway. ATP i could probably continue it but im trying to stop writing fic and keep writing original content so i can quit my job and get famous 😭 you never know, i finished knocked out by the midas touch in quarantine randomly
PS this list of WIPs depresses me
And he was. The urges didn’t fade, the feelings didn’t abate. He looked at Mac and saw all the same impulses jump up inside him: He wanted to kiss him, he wanted to hear him moan, he wanted to punch him in the face. But the thin thread of fury that accompanied his Mac Feelings nowadays made them significantly easier to keep locked away in that drawer, and that counted as better in his mind. He hooked a new combination lock on it and hoped Mac was too fucking dumb to stumble on it by accident, but not so dumb that he went searching for the code.
So no, he didn’t have a perfect lid on the matter, not when the impulses jumped up in him like they did. But even though he was lacking in tamping down his urges, he could do better in other ways. He kept a little distance, started hanging out with Charlie more again. Without the danger of their semi-dating between them, it was light and easy and good, like it had been back in their early twenties. He spent a little time with Dee too, especially while she was pregnant. Mostly because she was always calling him to get him to pick shit up for her and bring it over, like pregnant suddenly equaled invalid.
The year after that, Mac got fat.
**********
“Well,” he said, “I’m going to head to b—”
“Come here,” Dennis blurted out.
Mac just stared at him. Dennis swallowed and looked back down at his fingers, picking feathers out of the blankets little by little. He didn’t look up even as he could see, from the corner of his eye, that Mac stepped into his room and shut the door behind him.
They were bathed in the dark. Dennis’s throat felt very dry, and he didn’t think it was just because of the vodka he had drunk tonight. Carefully, he set the glass down on his bedside table. Then he curled back up onto his side and laid down, facing the wall.
He felt Mac slip into bed beside him, but he didn’t move closer and they just lay there for a very long time. Side by side, in the dark. Dennis was drifting again; he wasn’t sure how long it took until he rolled over and buried his face in Mac’s chest, although he’d tell himself that it was just because Mac happened to be laying closer to him than he was expecting and he misjudged the distance.
Mac curled his arm around Dennis’s shoulder, still flat on his back. Dennis fit himself to the curve of Mac’s body, tucked against his side. A dry, unhappy noise bled out of him and he pressed even closer.
Dennis hated sharing beds with Mac. He slept too long and he always rolled onto Dennis in the night until he was half-suffocating with his weight. Mac wheezed, and he’d developed sleep apnea, too. It kept Dennis up all night because it was impossible to sleep with that much shifting and noise. Mac was too warm and it made Dennis sweat in the night, he always needed a shower or two the next day. Mac was too big and Dennis hated to touch him. Mac was Mac, and Dennis hated him for that, too.
It was so fucking scary to be around Mac, sometimes. Pressed head to toe with him in bed, all of those feelings were amplified and thrown back at him. Dennis was a little tipsy and that just made things worse, because all the thoughts he usually pushed the fringes of his head were swimming up to greet him, and he loathed to look them in the eye. Mac might die of a million different things, and Dennis could name all of the top ten most likely killers without any hesitation. Mac would die one day, and Dennis was sure it was going to be long before he himself did — and that future was both tangible enough to touch and so very foggy. He had absolutely no idea who he would be, after Mac. Because After Mac there lived a Dennis who was less tense and worried all the time, and who had time to destress at the end of the day without all his personal space being eaten up from morning until night. Dennis didn’t want to meet that version of himself, ever. How unhappy he would be, he thought. Even more than he was now.
Mac pressed his cheek in against Dennis’s hair, and Dennis’s fingertips bit into the skin showing off above the waistband of Mac’s boxers. His too-tight shirt was riding up, and why he couldn’t wear clothes that fit right when he bought them new was a whole other mystery to unravel.
Dennis’s fingers crept higher. Mac’s breath barely hitched when Dennis’s hand slipped up underneath his shirt, palm coming to rest over his warm, flushed chest. Mac’s heart was still beating, underneath all the layers of skin and bone and fat. Dennis closed his eyes.
Mac’s arm tightened around him, just barely. Dennis breathed out and tried to sleep.
Lines got blurred. Was he just stroking his hair, touching his back, watching him that closely as a friend? Getting matching t-shirts and going out for Mexican food and trying to score drugs to get high together as roommates? Ever since Mac had accused him of not acting normal around him, the thought worried at the back of his brain like it was chewing quietly away at his sanity. A nagging, persistent headache.
“I don’t love you,” Dennis said bitterly to his bedroom ceiling, punch drunk on glue with Charlie and Mac’s hand on his back and lots and lots of tequila. The room never stopped spinning, not even when he closed his eyes.
*************
But Dennis was afraid. Because Mac was getting careless in his age, giving in to his impulses more and more, and losing control — all his fat proved that — and if he started to slip up from the careful charade they were always putting on for one another nowadays, Dennis didn’t know what he’d do. If anything, the fact of the charade itself, all the careful distance they had and how things still hadn’t gone back to how it was before that fucking play of Charlie’s, was enough to prove that Mac still wanted him on some level. If Mac kept on the path he was going on, Dennis didn’t see what would stop him from trying something and making a move, and he knew he couldn’t do that shit with him again. He was so fucking tired.
Sometimes, he was glad he’d pretended for so long to have a thick skin even when it wasn’t true, because it made it a hell of a lot easier to grow one now that he needed it. Because he was going to stop them from hurtling down this fucking path at any cost. He was too exhausted, and pissed off, and bitter to do it all again. If Mac’s arms were getting tired of holding up the wall between them, then goddamn it, Dennis would just have to do it himself.
************
And then Mac grabbed his shoulders and tried to kiss him.
Every other time before that was suddenly on a reel, going through and through his head. Mac and Dennis high on the thrill of performing and kissing, the first time, in the apartment after Charlie’s dumb play (Mac and Dennis obsessing about it, later, back in their separate rooms with time to think it over. Looking at each other for a month after that with that same glint in their eyes and not doing a fucking thing about it, then giving in with zeal and absolutely no self-control). Mac and Dennis hurried and surreal, getting into character to sell houses. Mac and Dennis fumbling off their clothes, working Dennis out of a thong after their merchandising plans worked too well on each other. Mac and Dennis angry in the bar bathroom, furious that Dennis had kicked him out and that Mac had gone so willingly and it had all gone to shit anyway.
And then nothing, a long and severe drought, until this moment when Mac leaned in and Dennis reared away, staring. His heart fucking pounding in his chest.
Mac didn’t seem fazed at all, for all it must have taken him to pluck up the courage in the first place. Maybe he had expected this. Maybe he had been thinking about it for a while and then he had done it and he didn’t care about the outcome, he was just thrilled to have gone through with trying at all. His bravery, a good enough reward.
Dennis didn’t know. Numbly, he let Charlie wrap his arm around his shoulders.
“He just tried to kiss me,” Dennis said. His head felt blank. His head was spinning.
“Yeah, he did a little bit.”
Charlie pulled Dennis along and he felt, as he felt too often nowadays, in control of nothing. Not even his own mind.
It didn’t come up again for one day. Twenty-four whole hours for Mac to think that things were fine, and for Dennis to think that things couldn’t get any worse.
It was supposed to make things better, it was supposed to solve it.
Dennis found him in the back of the bar, messing around with something on the computer. He stopped when Dennis came in, and looked up at him.
“What’s up?” Mac asked, but idly, like he didn’t sense the impending storm that was coming.
Dennis just stood there in the doorway, staring at him furiously. God, he felt hot all over. Sometimes — a lot of the time, actually — he really goddamn hated him.
Mac raised his eyebrows when Dennis continued to just stand there, looking at him and breathing hard and going steadily redder in the face. Then, like he wasn’t afraid of him at all, Mac turned back to the computer and started tapping away at the keyboard again. Whatever he was cooking up must have been really important.
Being ignored finally snapped him out of it. He strode forward until he could lean over the desk, and he grabbed both of Mac’s wrists and pinned them hard down to the desk.
“Ow!”
Mac looked up at him for real finally. His eyes were wide and innocent. So fucking goddamn clueless. Jesus Christ.
Dennis ducked his face close.
“What the fuck, man?” he hissed.
“What the fuck me?” Mac struggled to free his hands and managed to shake off Dennis’s grip on him. Dennis stood up and put his hands on his hips, watching him. “What the fuck you! What are you doing, dude? You just come in here and start attacking me—”
Oh. Maybe it wasn’t hate making him run hot after all. Or at least not only that.
***********
“That’s bullshit! You go home with chicks all the time, dude,” Mac said, pointing accusatorily at him. Dennis wanted to bite back that he hadn’t done that in a while, but somehow saying that wouldn’t feel any more like winning than letting Mac believe this did. Besides, they were in the middle of the goddamn street and he didn’t feel like arguing the point in front of a busy burger joint. “So sometimes I get drunk and think you’re a chick or something, so what? That doesn’t mean anything about me, you know, or about us—”
This fight was not new. If fights could go stale, then this one would have hit its expiration date at least six times over.
Mac, in late October: “Bro, I am the straightest dude you will ever meet. Yeah, I’ve seen your balls, but I mean like — Who hasn’t seen your balls? I think all of Philadelphia has seen your balls. They look weird and besides, you had your mouth on mine last.”
Mac, early December: “I am not spending Christmas with you because it’s a romantic holiday, Dennis. We used to go skiing, yeah, but that’s when your parents were paying for all of our shit. It was purely a financial decision — and besides, I deserved that! High school blew, dude, of course I’m gonna jump on a chance to go to the Poconos if some rich schmuck offers.” (Mac spent Christmas curled up on Dennis’s lap in front of their favorite holiday movies from their childhood, drinking hot chocolate with too many marshmallows and letting Dennis lick the taste of whipped cream out of his mouth, the same exact way that he had a few Christmases before.)
Mac, January first: “My New Year’s resolution is to finally get a girlfriend. It’s time I spread my seed and preserve my legacy.”
Mac, now: “—we are not a fucking couple!”
“I never said that we were!” Dennis shouted back, and goddamn it. He hadn’t wanted to get pulled back into this stupid fucking conversation in the first place, but here he was. Just like always. “I just said that it’s fucking annoying for you to ditch our dinner plans just because some girl implied that she might be willing to suck your dick later!”
“And if you had your way, I would never get my dick sucked ever again.”
Mac crossed his arms. Dennis rolled his eyes, reaching out to shove at him.
“Don’t be fucking dramatic,” he said. “I don’t care who’s sucking your dick. If a blowjob is a good enough reason to ditch me, then whatever. I’ll suck your goddamn dick later if it’s that important to you.”
He didn’t even mean it, which was the stupid thing. Yeah, he probably was going to end up blowing Mac later, or at least jerking him off or something, because that’s what tended to happen when they went out to nice dinners and got drunk on good wine. That’s what happened when Dennis dropped a ton of money reserving a table, and then even more on whatever lobster or steak Mac felt like shoving multiple pounds of down his throat. That’s what happened every fucking month.
Now, it wasn’t looking so much like that’s how their night was going to go, which was just fine with him anyway.
“Are you gay, dude?” Mac hissed, scandalized. “Are you like, gay for me?”
“What?” Dennis said. “No, I’m not gay for you, you fucking idiot. I like women. I didn’t mean I’d blow you later, I just meant—”
He had to start watching his mouth. Mac wouldn’t get a joke about Dennis blowing him if it came down from Heaven on a beautiful woman’s shoulders wearing a big sign around her neck that read: I mean this as heterosexually as I possibly can! Dennis could say that he wanted to watch Mac bleed out in a vat of boiling water, and Mac would probably take it better than a joke about Dennis going down on him.
“Well…Well, good,” Mac said shakily. He dragged a hand over his face. “I don’t want to star in your weird homo dreams.”
“I don’t have weird homo dreams about you!” Dennis hissed, leaning in toward him so that they could lower their voices as they argued. People passing by were beginning to stare. “I just—”
“But you want to bang me?”
“Holy shit, that’s not what this is about!” Dennis said. “Can’t you be normal about this for five fucking seconds? I didn’t mean it, okay? I’m not going to go anywhere near your dick, I promise you! I just already put down a lot of money on this table and canceling this close to the reservation is another thirty bucks, already, Jesus Christ—”
“Fine, whatever,” Mac spat, holding up his hands. “I’ll cancel my date and go to fucking dinner with you. God.”
“Great,” said Dennis furiously. “Fantastic. I can’t wait.”
He backed off, shoving his hands into his jeans pockets instead and scowling at the sidewalk. Sometimes winning arguments with Mac felt a lot like losing them.
“Great,” Mac echoed.
Dennis scuffed at the ground with the toe of his shoe for a long while. He refused to look at him, but he could still hear it a few moments later when Mac sighed.
“I guess we should go home, then,” said Mac in a low, pissed off voice. “I have to get dressed now or whatever.”
“Whatever,” Dennis said.
They set off down the street toward their apartment, several inches of space between them the whole entire time. Dennis curled his hands into fists by his sides and tried to remember how to breathe.
*********
Dennis left Philly because he thought that’s what he wanted to do. He came back because he knew it’s what he needed to do. It wasn’t a choice any more than it had been to pull Mac into his lease, any more than that small and tentative thing with Charlie had been, any more than having his twin sister always around. It needed to happen so the long monotony of days could hit a bump and find another path to trundle down for a while.
**********
>in s13
There was rot within him like a dead tooth. He didn’t know how far down it stretched, and he didn’t know where the heart of it was rooted. He didn’t know when it had sunk into him or why or how many tendrils it had spread out to touch every other aspect of himself, turning them rotten and ugly and just as dead, but it was there. It wasn’t a question of healing so much as it was one of turning back time.
He didn’t know where the ugly parts began, or even where they ended. What was making him so tense and frantic and close to exploding all the time? He could make a list of the things that made him angry, but he’d never know the reasons. His dad; Mac, touching him; Dee looking at him like she thought she knew him; Charlie acting like his brain was half as developed as Dennis’s, or like he could provide any coherent analysis on Dennis’s mental state; a dusty bottle of medication on the bathroom shelf; recently, sex; eating too much, or not eating enough; his own reflection. There was nowhere he could find that would fix that trapped, clawing feeling. Nothing he could do to start to make it go away.
“Dennis?” He looked up into Mac’s open, curious face. “I said there’s a Rocky marathon on TV.”
How do you unrot a tooth? Easy. You pull it out and replace the space with filling. And when the porcelain, or the gold, or the amalgam, or the booze and women and sleepless nights don’t work? You tear out the whole tooth and put in a new one. How do you unrot a person?
Mac was looking up at him, worrying his lower lip in his mouth. Dennis looked at him for a long while before he swiped his hand over his face and sighed.
“I’m going to bed,” he said tonelessly.
He felt Mac staring after him, his expression unreadable when it never had been before, long after he shut his door between them.
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do you have plans to finish "in search of a heartbeat"? You really capture what makes dennis repress that part of himself in such a beautiful way. Love your writing as always ♥️
yeah i do plan on finishing it! i’m finding it a bit hard to work out the end until we know how macden’s arc is gonna end (either them getting together or mac getting over him or den coming out or what) but after i’m done with my current wips i wanna get back to it and maybe just post up til s11 or 12 and leave 13/14 for another part. happy to know ppl are still reading it!!! i def wanna get back to it soon!
