#wbgblogging

[parkeryangs]

thinking about chance/mike again but in a decidedly very chance/michael way. what if you loved someone so much that existing on the outskirts of their life was good enough. what if you're not you and they're still them, in the same way you remember from countless years ago, and they don't treat you quite the same because you aren't theirs anymore (and really, you never were)

what if you find them again and they don't remember everything and their accent is thick with the same southern vowels you adopted, a very long time ago, to survive. maybe it's because of you, maybe not, but it doesn't really matter while you're running for your lives. there's so much you want to tell them, but they wouldn't understand it, because that wasn't them and this isn't your chance but at least for a night you can pretend, settle into something you've always known you could never have until the sun comes up and everything is too real again

[parkeryangs]

do you ever think that matt has dreams about dying.

like— he doesn't sleep well, never has, and he hates those minutes where you're torn between wake and sleep because his ears don't stop ringing, but eventually he drifts off and it's fine. after mike saved him, he almost never dreams at all, or he never remembers it once he wakes up. he thinks he's too exhausted. (mike half-jokes that maybe it's some sort of trauma response. neither of them laugh.)

sleeping alone gets harder and harder but mike refuses to make a place for him at base, saying he needs to keep matt safe, that he needs him to stay in vancouver, ignoring the fact that matt doesn't feel safe in vancouver now, not since before mustardseed. he tries not to sleep when it's dark out, instead spending his nights camped out in the bushes outside mdawg and edman's house. it's a waste of time, really, but it's better than waking up in a cold sweat, almost tasting blood in his mouth and reliving a death that never happened.

after mustardseed, matt can't stop dreaming. more often than not, he wakes up in the dead of night with tears in his eyes and a bolt of terror still twisting violently in his chest. he calls mike, sometimes. (he feels guilty, because he knows that now he's bothering edgar too.) he tells mike in one of their middle-of-the-night phone calls that he can't stop remembering the accident. the screech of tires and metal-on-metal and so many sirens, flashes of red-and-blue light through closed eyes, pain so all-encompassing that he felt more hurt than human.

he tells mike that, sometimes, he's not sure if all of this was even worth it. (he doesn't point out that the all of this is mike's fault. that, if he fought so hard to save matt then, why it doesn't make any sense that dooming him to the fringes is actually a good option now.) mike's whispered apology streams from the line and matt pretends not to hear edgar's half-asleep questions of who mike was talking to while he checks his pulse. mike doesn't—can't—talk long anymore, and after clipped goodbyes, matt is left standing in the kitchen, alone, alive, knowing what it feels like to be dead.

[parkeryangs]

college mattkey who get jobs at the bakery downtown together, causing just enough trouble that their boss almost regrets hiring both of them on the same shift. it's close enough to campus that they don't even bother driving when the weather's nice, just walking single file along the edge of the road and accidentally stepping on the heels of each other's shoes along the way.

college mattkey who spend most of their lunch breaks in a corner booth of the shop, splitting a blueberry muffin and nudging each other's ankles under the tables. sometimes they listen to music, stringing mike's earbuds across the table to play whatever songs they've found that week, sharing tracks they think the other might like and ones they're almost certain they'll hate, just for the novelty of it all.

college mattkey who can't stay away from each other, who are always matt and mike now, because none of their friends ever see one without the other these days. it's matt's 21st birthday and they have a small party to celebrate and mike has a mouth on him when he's tipsy, though he denies it when he's sober. they make out on mike's couch and fall asleep in a messy heap and pointedly ignore all the pictures their friends show them the next day.

[parkeryangs]

just. mikey who has been in love with matt almost since the moment they met making the choice to put that aside time and again for the sake of their friendship even if he hates it. because he can never entertain the fact that matt might feel the same, that matt could even be anything but straight. so they're in college and he settles for making excuses to play with his hair and grabbing his hand whenever it's cold out and calling him "partner" in an awful southern accent after one too many drinks, and, eventually, leaving matt behind when he moves to the valley.

and matt who doesn't know how he feels, matt who has NEVER known how he feels because he can't give himself the time to slow down and really think because he has more important things to worry about, namely keeping an eye on the mike and edgar in vancouver. and matt never considered himself the jealous type, but as he watches the pair he gets more envious of the runaways, so far removed from their "original" selves that they hardly shared more than a name these days.

then mike is keeping matt as far away from the fires he starts at o.v.e.r. as he possibly can, and matt hates it. in a way, everything that has happened is his fault, and he feels at least some inkling of responsibility that is constantly denied to him. they're not in college anymore and matt misses his friend and mike drives 26 hours to matt's house and he transports, drunk, to his doorstep and there's so many things matt wishes he could tell him but he can't. not now, not like this.

[parkeryangs]

woe.begone au where matt isn't real.

mike was a loner in college— he had a roommate he never saw, classmates that were too blunt or too pretentious for him to enjoy the company of, so he kept to himself and kept his head down, spending free evenings arguing on the internet with strangers and drinking whiskey straight from the bottle.

he was a loner and he hated that, the deep-seated feeling that nobody was looking out for him, nobody cared what happened to him. but matt did. mike's solitude had turned to inventing a friend that he never had, with a bright smile and dark eyes and hair, who smoked and played electric guitar and would do anything for mike.

it's not that matt just died, he just never existed; but he was real to mike, real enough that he left space on his bed for the other to sit, snagged extra bottles of water from the fridge and, even by hinself, never felt as lonely as he had before. it was so far from healthy and mike was far too aware of the fact, but—well—he liked having a friend.

then, it gets easy enough to ignore the fact that matt is just a hallucination. it gets easy enough to, when he runs into his roommate on a friday afternoon, say he's busy that weekend. he has plans with his friend matt, and oh, you probably wouldn't know him, he transferred here last semester. it gets easy enough that mike starts to fall a little bit in love with this person who isn't even real.

matt becomes the only constant in mike's life as he graduates and moves into a one-bedroom apartment, in a city where nobody knows him and he likes it that way. here, he manages to make some friends, gets a partner—john—and loses him in a shattered argument, and matt becomes an old friend in the stories he tells, though at the apartment he still speaks like matt is right there, curled up on the couch or half-buried underneath the blankets in their bed.

still not quite shaking the loner streak, mike spends a lot of time online when he stumbles on woe.begone, and his curiosity gets the better of him. he's not even thinking about matt, but he does think the gamerunners must be playing tricks on him when, the day after the voicemail to john, he wakes up knowing matt is alive and living in vancouver.

it doesn't make sense; matt was never alive, he was a figment of mike's imagination, created in desperate attempts to cope. he couldn't be alive, couldn't have died in the car wreck mike now remembers distantly, a wreck that had never actually happened, but— he calls matt, and matt answers, and they talk and matt sounds just like what he'd always imagined and mike wants to know everything but he's scared that one wrong question would wreck...whatever this was.

still; he's alive and now mike is fighting to keep him that way.

[parkeryangs]

the thing about hard of hearing ty betteridge is that he's incredibly in denial about the fact that he's hard of hearing.

sure, he has distant memories of chronic illness in his childhood, the more-than-annual ear infections that left him sicker than a dog, spending time in and out of surgery at a hospital in london a handful of times when he was younger, but that was a long time ago. he was better now, albeit with plenty of scars on his eardrums.

his ears ring when it gets too quiet and ache when the weather turns cold, but that's nothing to worry about, really. the first flare of concern doesn't even come from ty, it's felix that gets all uneasy after ty's been having trouble hearing him the last few months, and it's only gotten worse in the time since.

(when they have a conversation about it, felix is worried and ty is distant. that just happens sometimes, felix, not hearing people. and, he doesn't say, the worst thing is when people aren't facing him as they speak and their words are totally lost, something less than noise.)

always chasing answers, felix mentions that he should go to the doctor, just in case. ty goes all pale even if he denies it, then flat-out refuses to seek any treatment. there's nothing wrong, i'm fine. it's fine. except his ears hurt almost all the time now and the thrumming never stops and noise has gone soft and shadowed in a way it wasn't before and he's losing everything, except that constant ring in his head that leaves him dizzy on his feet.

he's not sick. he can't hear, maybe, but he can't be sick, even if he's resorted to music playing on loop in his office in a weak attempt to drown out the noise, asking his coworkers to repeat themselves and growing apologetic when he can't catch what they said on the second time either. (he never has to ask felix, who repeats himself as soon as ty pauses too long before answering.)

see, recognizing that he might be losing one of the few things he has is a sort of loss in and of itself. being able to hear means being able to communicate while doing his job, means listening to felix's scattered ramblings and michael's guitar and a thousand other things that ty doesn't want to lose. so he keeps it in a far corner of his mind and ignores the sharp flares of pain in his ears and pretends that it's all fine, and he'll learn to survive it all somehow.

[parkeryangs]

in my heart matt woe.begone has such a weird relationship to identity/gender;

yeah, he's gay, he's been gay and everybody else knew it before he even knew what the word meant. that was fine—it meant there were no "surprises" when he came out in middle school, and his family, despite being religious, loved him the same as they always had.

he was the only queer kid in his backwater town but that was fine, too, he wasn't all that set on dating as it was. then he went to college and met mike and anne and the reat of their friends and his worldview was shattered; for the better, undeniably, but it left him reevaluating everything he'd taken as truth for the last decade.

anne was trans and so was mike's shitty boyfriend he'd had since high school, and matt sat next to someone in his history lecture that used they/them pronouns and it was all new and a bit terrifying, but he did his best to be respectful and learn whatever he could, turning to the internet for things he didn't want to bother his friends with.

it was scary because it felt familiar; the disconnect anne casually mentioned or the flash of something like jealousy following her thrill at passing in public when they took a trip to the mall—and, in leaps and bounds, matt realized he wanted that too. it wasn't an easy realization; he was fine with his identity the way it was, the way it had been, and any change felt like it might tear the world apart if he didn't tread carefully.

after class one day, he caught his history classmate by the shoulder and spoke in a rush. their name was felix and they studied biomedical science and they said hi to matt three times a week and they listened now as he spilled his guts and then some. i don't know who i am anymore and i'm scared, felix, what am i supposed to do. please tell me there's a right answer. it was a lot to unpack standing in the rundown history department, so, after a gentle suggestion from felix, they went to the coffee shop on campus and talked at a too-small table over half-cold coffee. it became a weekly ritual for them, every wednesday afternoon, like clockwork. felix jokingly called it gender therapy, once, which was closer to the truth than anything else.

the first time, matt says he doesn't feel like a boy and he doesn't know what that even means, really, but nothing else feels right either and feeling unsafe in your own body is a terrifying feeling. felix says they've been there, and together they drink coffee and sift through whatever resources they can dig up from the first page of a google search.

(the second time, matt says he doesn't feel quite like a girl, either, knows he's not totally a girl, though the thought of letting his hair grow out a bit and maybe, in the safety of his dorm room, trying on a skirt or two, still holds some level of curiosity to be explored.)

matt doesn't remember how many weeks at the coffee shop it took until he tells felix that nonbinary feels right, but eventually he does, adding that he still likes he/him or she/her pronouns better than anything else. whenever he tells mike, his friend says he's proud of matt and then returns a few days later with a button with the nonbinary flag from the pride center to put on his backpack, and they graduated years ago now but matt still has it even though he's pretty sure mike doesn't even remember giving it to him.

[parkeryangs]

@falloutcoys CHANCE/MIKE THOUGHTS !!! :]

the thing about chance/mike is that they're the best and worst parts of each other. they're both too curious for their own good, and while their other relationships balance that self-destruction, they revel in it. this wordless thing happening between them is just a new kind of trouble that moves quick and fast until they're both drowning in thoughtless touches and shared bottles of whiskey and sneaking out of obv like they're fifteen years old and too clever for their own good and ready to fight the world even if they'll lose.

it's not good for them and they know it but that's what makes it intoxicating!! mike's existence is a scorch mark through time and chance doesn't even care about getting burned now. any cost seems worth it when they're looking back with smiles on their faces, because everything is so uncertain all of the time. chance could be dead in an hour and mike could never have existed and they need this because there is a certain safety in the danger.

chance doesn't have to slow down, when mike is there. he's always been a runner, jumping from one moment to the next because slowing down means really feeling and that scares him more than anything. he's haunted and he gets the bitter-tongued sort of angry when he's sad and scared and cornered like an animal, with that sickly-sweet bite of regret in the back of his throat. maybe he never should've gotten involved at all but now they're both running and he doesn't have to slow down, so tangled up it's hard to tell the start from the end these days.

and mike's guilt doesn't feel so heavy when he's with chance. he's got the world on his shoulders most days, the responsibility of hundreds of lifetimes and people he has to protect. chance is a breath of fresh air, the calm before the storm, even if they both know at the end of the day it won't ever work, not really. it's easier to be friends, and it wouldn't hurt so much when mike falls for edgar and chance almost wishes he was the one with ocean water in his lungs, but clever as they both are they were never smart about one another, chasing devastation like it might save them if they just hold on tight enough.

here's the og post i wrote about them on my other blog, for anyone thats curious!