Chapter Text
“Hey, love! Did you miss me?”
A wide, shit-eating grin accompanies the words.
Michael snorts despite opening his arms to the British boy skipping towards him, who promptly flung his skinny frame into his arms. “No way, eat shit.” His voice came out muffled against the coat the other boy was wearing.
Gavin laughs, head tossed back to the wind that was whipping around them on the rooftop of a high rise. He ran a hand through his sandy hair as he leaned back from the hug to take a look at the curly-haired boy. “Oh, Michael,” he said affectionately. “You don’t really want that.”
He’s right, of course, but that’s how they’ve always been. Michael fights a smile as he felt soft lips press against his temple in a kiss. He snuggles into Gavin and begins to say, “I love yo–“
“But you know, I don’t miss you, not at all,” Gavin suddenly goes, and Michael barks out a laugh again as he looks up as if to say, alright, we’re over this thread of the joke. After all, they’re going out. What’s more to say? But Gavin’s face is solemn and it freezes Michael’s insides more than the bitter winter wind does his fingertips.
Why are we here again? The thought occurs to Michael and he looks around, anxiety welling up inside him at the unfamiliar setting.
“Really, I don’t. Can’t.” Gavin has a faraway look in his eyes as he backs away, taking his warmth with him, hands shoved in his coat pockets. He shakes his head, hair flying as he turns away.
“Gavin?” Michael shouts, the wind picking up and shrieking unbearably loud around them. He takes a step forward, only to be pushed back. Shivering uncontrollably, he tries again. “Gavin? Gavin?”
When the British boy glances over his shoulder, his bright sea-green eyes are faded to something duller; washed-out. Strange. He looks confused for a split second and he hesitates.
“Who are you again?”
Michael’s words won’t come out – can’t. They’re caught halfway up his throat and his response lodges there against his shock, choking him, as Gavin takes a step back, and another, and another, until he’s on the edge of the rooftop somehow with no fence in sight –
He falls backwards off the high rise, lips twisted in a faint smile. Michael, they mouth.
Michael bolts upright in bed in a cold sweat. He trembles harshly, breathing erratic. “F-fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck,” he mutters in a cracked voice, shaking hands carding through his messy curls and rooting themselves there in clenched fists as he doubled over on his duvet. The world is crumbling before him so he squeezes his eyes shut but emerald eyes stare back from behind his eyelids.
His eyes fly open again.
Don’t lose it. Don’t lose it. Breathe.
The alarm clock on the stand reads 4:26 AM in blurry red.
Michael’s vision is swimming and his stomach turns but he manages to draw in a shuddering breath. Yeah, that’s good. In. Hold. Out. His heart is still hammering away at an unforgiving pace in his chest and he can still feel Gavin’s touch as if it was real, but it’s some miniscule comfort that at least, this time, he’s not crying.
It’s the small things, Michael muses dimly as he touched a hand to his forehead. It’s been months since he’s had a dream like that. He was so sure his dumb fucking brain was over making up these shitty scenarios by now. It’s been years, for fucks sake. And logically, it shouldn’t be something this disastrous to start.
Obviously, he was wrong.
“Fuck,” Michael says again, raking his hands over his freckled face as he fell back onto his pillow, slowly calming down.
But it’s hard to fall back asleep when the shade of the ceiling in shadows matches the darkening sky in his dream so perfectly. Forget the familiar, sketchy noises coming from upstairs and behind too-thin walls, he got used to those a long time ago. Michael rolls over and averts his eyes, but he doesn’t close them again.
There’s a baby loudly crying in the unit across the hall by the time it’s five in the morning and Michael wants almost nothing more than to just punt the child out a window so he can sleep, even if he only lives on the first floor, but his body feels heavy from the conjured, brief dream-happiness that dripped out of him all over the floor as soon as he woke so he stays in bed and tries not to sob.
Eventually, his stomach growls so loudly he cramps. So he automatically swings his legs off the bed.
Force of habit. Don’t know why I’m bothering. And it’s true, because there’s only a pack of beer, a travel-sized thing of vodka, some milk, a bottle of mustard, and a single apple sitting in his fridge. He takes the fruit anyways and reminds himself to grocery shop sometime later in the week. Yeah, fat chance of that.
And it takes him back to his last years of university, back when he spent his grocery money at the bar every Friday night because he didn’t have much to do anymore. How Friday nights turned into Thursday nights turned into Wednesday nights and midday runs and then he just started frequenting the bar nearly every day. The bartender knew me by name, holy shit.
Michael chuckled quietly as he took a bite out of the slightly soft apple. He cringes as he spits it out. Yeah, it’s not hard to be hungry, he was almost always hungry back then but it was never as bad as the feeling in his stomach whenever he accidentally thought about –
Michael’s hand reaches for the phone as he feels bile rise up in his throat and before he even realizes what he’s doing, he’s dialing a number he shouldn’t be dialing. The dumb baby’s crying loudly in the background and at first, Michael doesn’t even register that the call connected, but when he does he hangs up almost immediately.
Not before he hears a breathy, laughing voice on the other end, though, and after a moment of stunned silence that shit, that actually happened, Michael yells profanities to himself in the small space of his shitty hole-in-the-wall apartment until his throat is hoarse and he decides that it’s for the best to call in sick for work today.
My boss is probably gonna think I’m hungover, the curly-haired man groans, but he can’t really do anything about it at this point. I’m a fucking trainwreck and I need to get my shit together.
But he doesn’t, of course, and when the phone rings a little while later, Michael chooses to take a shot of vodka instead of picking up; he sits in front of it as it rings and rings and rings in the dimly lit living room. Seven o’clock finds Michael Jones passed out on the living room floor, sprawled out with a voicemail blinking a small red light on his landline, waiting.
Now, this is arguably a good thing, because timing matters and if Michael had picked up just then, it all would have been over before it began. But he didn’t, of course, and a tanned, sandy-haired man awake a couple miles away in the same city is left confused at the phone call he abruptly received before forgetting about it entirely as he notices the time, gingerly removing an arm thrown over him and dressing to leave his one-night stand without another word.
Michael Jones will get fired from his contract job a little while later, and things will fall apart for him after that. But then again, things have fallen apart before, and the world has a funny way of making things right again if a chance is taken. (Or exponentially worse)
And Geoff Ramsey hopes, as he fumbles his way through some rushed words left after a more-than-pissed-off sounding pre-recording of a familiar, slightly raspy voice stating, you’ve reached Michael Jones, please leave a message, that it’s the former and not the latter because he was feeling something awful and a confused Gavin Free somehow wound up stumbling into the Ramseys’ home in the early morning despite having moved out months ago. Habit.
And because, the way he looked at it, this all ended three years ago like a video game where they had all almost gotten to the finish point but fell a little short. But they didn’t die, not exactly, and he figures, he hopes, it just needs something as simple as just starting over again at the beginning.
After all, Geoff Ramsey isn’t the type of person to let something like this go while Gavin Free is, but only because he didn’t have much of a choice.
He knows Michael Jones would like nothing more in the entire fucking world than to let it all go.
But it only took one phone call.