Chapter Text
“Dee is such a bitch, dude,” Dennis says, and the relief that flows through Mac’s body feels like the fucking breath of life.
“Bro, I’ve literally been thinking that all day .” Mac’s voice comes out with a spurt of laughter, echoing across the parking lot of the shitty Italian joint that Dee’s conniving had gotten them both to come to. The lie about the chick with the sweet rack catapulted her down into Mac’s shit list, where she’d likely be staying for the time being. The last thing Mac needed today, and exactly what he got, was her pathetic ass inserting herself into him and Dennis’s personal life.
Because of Dee, his dress shirt is covered in water and breadcrumbs, and he owes Dennis twenty-five bucks for the rum and cokes. Because of Dee, he had to live with Charlie and Frank for the day in their disgusting apartment. Because of Dee, he and Dennis went almost twenty-four hours without checking in with each other, and he could count on one hand the amount of times that’s happened; the amount of times where the line connecting them became infinitesimally small, breakable and worn, like the years and years of pushing and pulling finally, finally caught up to it.
And sure. What ever . Because of Dee, the night air between Mac and Dennis is safe again, and Dennis is beaming at Mac, and everything’s fine. Everything is right where they left it.
The reality of that thought sends what feels like liquid joy straight through Mac’s veins. Dennis is here. If he wants to, Mac can reach out and touch him and feel the fabric of his sweater, the promise of his skin beneath the wool. He can smell Dennis’s cologne, and even though it was for the lady with the knockers, he imagines, just for a second, that it was for him. To make him think of beaches, and waveless oceans the color of Dennis’s eyes, or whatever the hell Tommy Bahama had in mind.
And it’s not like Mac needs to physically touch Dennis. He can look over and use his goddamn eyes to know that he’s present and there. But before Dennis can protest, Mac throws an arm over his shoulders, savoring the warmth of his body. After spending the entire day having to imagine Dennis’s presence over the phone, it’s comforting to know that he’s there, real and solid. He throws his other arm out in front of him, palm splayed like he’s surveying an entirely new world and not just a half-empty parking lot that smells vaguely of piss. “The night is ours, Dennis. What do you wanna do?”
Dennis laughs; well, it’s not really a laugh , more like a smiley huff of breath, but it counts. “We still have Transporter 2 to watch, right? I guess we should do that. It’s a rental, so…”
“I already told you, man, what’s the point of watching Transporter 2 if we haven’t even seen the first one?” Mac complains, “We’re gonna be so lost.”
Dennis ducks out of Mac’s shoulder hug when they get to the Range Rover, trying to retrieve his keys from his pocket. “Like I said; it takes a supreme lack of brain power to be ‘lost’ watching a movie called Transporter 2 .”
“Yeah, well,” Mac says, rolling his eyes when Dennis shoos him around to the passengers side, “that video store clerk had a supreme lack of brain power for suggesting a dumb movie, then. Can’t imagine a Blockbuster sales guy having more than a high school degree.”
He heaves himself into the seat, smirking at his own sick burn and turning to see if Dennis is smiling, too.
But he catches Dennis at the exact moment an unfamiliar expression flickers over his face. His features darken ever so slightly; the shadows in his wrinkles look heavier, like they’ve been traced over with Magic Marker, and his lips tighten, pulling a little too hard on the skin of his cheeks. The spark in his gaze goes out like an old lightbulb. His fingers flex once, twice, around the steering wheel, and as soon as Mac’s stomach plunges, a sickening swoop of shit, what did I say?, the moment passes, like it didn’t even happen at all. The shadows trail off, and Dennis’s skin relaxes, the breath that Mac doesn’t realize he’s been holding trickles out of his nose, and it is over so fast that Mac almost thinks he imagined it.
It’s not like he hasn’t imagined stuff like that before. If Mac knows anything, it’s that you can’t trust your brain to always see things as they are. Sometimes moments like that are just a trick of the light. Hell, sometimes Mac will look over at Dennis when they’re hanging out and catch a strange, tender look in his eyes, a weirdly soft smile that looks out of place on his sharp features; but it’s always gone within the second of Mac noticing, and Dennis will snap at Mac to get him another beer, or make some comment about how Mac must be skipping the gym, even though he’s the one paying for the membership so Mac obviously goes to get Dennis’s money’s worth. He can’t help but feel off-kilter whenever he thinks he sees a crack in Dennis’s facade; it never lasts for longer than a blink of the eye, flashing by so fast it makes Mac feel like he’s going crazy. So when Dennis finally speaks again, it’s a familiar kind of whiplash: “Mac, you barely passed high school. If I didn’t know you better, I would guess that you worked at a Blockbuster, too.”
Mac can’t think of a good enough comeback right now (he really shouldn’t have had that many rum and cokes) so he just slouches down in his seat, grumbling something about how you went to college and now you bartend, so who’s the real loser? and settles into the tiring comfortableness that comes with the inevitable sound of Steve Winwood trickling from the speakers. Within seconds, the Rover is peeling out of the parking lot and onto Second Street, where the lights from apartment complexes scatter through the windshield.
In most of the big cities that Mac’s visited, the lights from the buildings at night create a strange sort of contrast; the dark bits feel much darker, and the lights are almost too bright, like when you turn on the TV at shit-o’clock in the morning and the blue glare drills straight into your retinas. Everything’s got these sharp lines, opposites driven apart only by the fact that they’re different from each other; like they have to be apart. The lights in the subway stations of New York don’t mix with the darkness of the tunnel; it's just a yellowy haze, and then blackness as far as the eye can see.
But as Mac looks around at the red glare of the traffic, and the glowing bulbs of lamps in the park, and the teeny-tiny specks of stars just barely visible through the sunroof, he realizes that Philly isn’t like that at all. He watches how scarlet brake lights turn silver buildings bronze; the street lights illuminate patches of grass that scatter shadows of sage across sidewalks; the stars look like glitter spilled into a roiling sea, shifting under his gaze. And when he looks over at Dennis, singing along to “Higher Love” and looking ahead into the waves of blood red and emerald and deep sable, he watches how the colors track across his face like they belong there, like they’re coming home; nestling in the grooves of his skin and arching across the bridge of his nose, trailing along his jawline and hooking under his ears.
It’s… Mac tries to think of the word, but it dances away from the tip of his tongue, lodging itself somewhere in his throat as his eyes trace over Dennis’s features. It could suffocate him, he thinks, if he wasn’t careful enough.
“Do you really feel like I’m holding you back?”
Dennis blinks hard, Steve Winwood carrying on without him as he stops singing. “What?”
Mac swallows, throat clicking. He didn’t mean to say that, but the words are there now, hovering between them and turning the air stale. Curse the stupid lights and the stupid alcohol and his stupid brain imagining things. He can never keep his mouth shut around Dennis, especially when he’s drunk and everything’s hazy, like his thoughts are swimming through jelly and sliding unceremoniously out of his head and onto his tongue and flinging themselves into the universe like the world’s weirdest birth. And now he’s thinking of that gross birthing video they played in health class his freshman year of high school, and now he’s thinking of high school , and now he’s thinking of meeting Dennis for the first time and hating him, with his dumb pressed polo shirts and perfectly manicured hair and sharp wit, things that Mac despised but he was really just jealous of. High school seems like so long ago. He feels like he’s known Dennis for eons.
He shakes his head, feeling his brain slosh around like goo inside his skull. “Nothing. It doesn’t matter.”
Dennis is staring at him as they come to a stoplight, the Rover shifting back on the brakes. Mac’s waiting for the inevitable insult – trying to ruin the mood, huh? Or even worse – Dennis actually answering the question; yeah, Mac, you embarrass me all the time and you’re ugly and I actually can’t stand to be around you, you know that, right? Who gives a shit that we’ve been friends for years. I’m done with this and you. Mac’s thoughts slog around through possibilities, rolling backwards into the past day, when Dennis kicked him out of the apartment with his handprint still burning a hole into Mac’s shoulder. I feel like I’m not… flourishing .
Like Dennis is a goddamn flower without sun or rain. Like Mac can’t be the sun and the rain for him.
Mac turns his head half an inch, and Dennis’s gaze is still swirling with the colors of the city, locked onto Mac’s face, expression neutral but tension rippling under the surface. It’s familiar; like the expression Dennis makes when he’s the victim of the emotional battery challenge during Chardee MacDennis. But he’s not shakily smirking, and there's no faint tears glistening in his eyes; it’s just the ocean of Dennis, rip currents pulling and pushing under the waves, staring at Mac like he’s never seen him before in this kind of light.
Mac clears his throat, glancing away and trying not to let blood rush to his ears. “Seriously, Den, it doesn’t –”
“No.”
Mac’s eyes flick back around to Dennis, whose gaze is back on the road, looking ahead with more focus than he’s ever put into driving. His hands are fidgeting with the leather on the steering wheel, Adam's apple shifting in his throat.
“What?” It comes out softer than Mac intended, but Dennis responds as if he’d yelled it, fingers digging into the wheel.
“You’re not holding me back,” he says. His voice doesn’t shake, but the words come out like they’ve been shoved blind out of a plane, hitting the air between them with more force than was probably intended.
“Yeah. Yeah, dude, I… I guess I just –” Mac knows what’s about to happen before it does, a speeding bullet train approaching a too-tight turn, but he can’t stop it nonetheless – “You just said you were in a rut, and you said I was keeping you from flourishing, and I feel like you meant it? When you said it? I don’t – I don’t want to make you feel like that, dude, so…” Where the fuck is he going with this? And Dennis is staring at him again . Fuck.
He laughs to cut the tension, but it just makes things worse; Dennis flinches, and suddenly he’s jerking the wheel to the left, cruising past a red light and stomping on the brakes once they reach a handicapped spot in front of a new hipster restaurant. He stabs the hazards, and the steady rhythm of the lights fills the silence left by the Winwood CD being hastily ejected from the stereo.
“You’re not holding me back,” he repeats. His voice is level the way a rubber band about to snap is level. His fingers twitch around the CD; Mac doesn’t know whether he’s about to snap it in half or slice Mac’s throat with it. Maybe both.
“Okay. Okay, bro, it’s fine, sorry I asked,” He responds, sliding a hand down his face and turning his gaze to the window to avoid Dennis’s. His cheeks are definitely red now, but he thinks the darkness of the car might be enough to obscure them – that is, until Dennis shoots a hand up to click on the overheads, and Mac shouts in surprise at the influx of light, squinting against the assault on his sensitive retinas.
“Jesus, dude! What’s your problem –”
“ Shut up .”
Mac does, snapping his jaw closed. Dennis’s nostrils flare in his periphery.
“I’m only going to say this once, Mac, so please, can you shut your goddamn mouth and just listen to me?” Dennis bites out, “I’m dead serious.”
Mac knows that it’s best to let Dennis just ride out the anger until it fizzles out, so he should just shut up and let Dennis say his piece about how Mac is stupid for reading too much into his words back at the apartment and stupid for interrupting their reunion with more insecure bullshit. Besides, Dennis has a look on his face that says he’s actually dead serious, and Mac doesn’t want to test his limits in the close confines of the Rover. And yet…
“Can we turn the lights off?” He says weakly.
Dennis might as well have sunk his fist through the roof of the car with how hard he slams the button on the overheads.
Mac sighs at the relief of the darkness, throwing his head back into the headrest. He can feel Dennis’s rage more than he can see it, hear the way his breaths are being ripped out of his lungs and his hands are squeaking on the leather of the steering wheel. He regrets talking, but some primal part of him, some teeny tiny speck of his soul, is filled with satisfaction at getting a reaction like this out of Dennis. It happens more than he would like to admit; the way a microdose of adrenaline rushes through him every time Dennis turns his eerily focused blue eyes on him, every time his fists curl up like he’s going to hit him, even though he rarely actually does. His face goes pale, and the tips of his ears flush with blood, and Mac has to bite back a rush of nervous excitement every damn time. After being sidelined for the whole day, getting non-answers and cold-shoulders from Dennis, Mac feels a sickening sense of dreadful anticipation for what’s to come.
Until Dennis actually speaks again, and Mac’s entire world comes grinding to a halt.
“Sometimes I feel like I can’t get away from you.”
Mac’s fingers twitch, digging into his Dickies as the words fully sink into his brain.
What the fuck does that mean?
He doesn’t respond, still trying to process, but Dennis keeps going, his voice clipped like he’s trying to keep it from leaping out of his throat and splattering onto the dashboard. “We just keep… coming back to each other. What the fuck is up with that? I should hate you. I mean… I do, but you should hate me too. We’re really fucking awful to each other, dude. But I just…”
Mac turns and watches him try to find the words. It’s pathetic, really, but he can’t find it in himself to laugh or tease, not when Dennis looks like he’s moments away from throwing himself out of the parked car and rolling into traffic.
“I don’t know. I can’t get away from you, and it seems like you can’t get away from me, so… is this just going to keep happening forever?” Dennis huffs in a breath after the last word, closing his eyes for half a second before they’re wide and open again, the whites reflecting the blinking of the hazards.
“Would that be a bad thing?” Mac says softly, hoping to not get yelled at again for speaking. His heart thuds uncomfortably at how saturated his words sound, like there’s layers and layers of emotion hiding beneath the question. He hopes Dennis doesn’t pick up on it.
“I – do you think it would be a bad thing?” Dennis responds, voice finally dipping into quivering territory. When he turns back to Mac, his expression is split open, unsure and exposed, and Mac doesn’t think he’s ever seen Dennis look quite this vulnerable before.
Dennis thinks he has power over a lot of things. Women, the gang, schemes and plots and scams. And there are times where he’s able to convince the world that he does have that power; it’s not difficult, by any means. He has enough confidence (however unearned) to enact some semblance of control over the things in his life. But Mac knows the control is just that – a resemblance of reality, without anything real to back it up. Dennis’s power over the things he thinks he has power over is empty, weak, hollow. Even when Mac feels swayed by Dennis’s convincing nature, his bright eyes and nefarious grin, it’s more that Mac is willing to go along with his ideas, not that he’s forced into it. There’s no point in telling Dennis that his control is a lie. It’s not like Dennis would believe him, anyway.
But over the years, Mac’s noticed that Dennis’s power is stronger when he doesn’t actually realize he has power over something. For example, right now; Dennis’s eyes are wide and unguarded, his figure defenseless, yet the air in the car is positively thrumming with tension. Sometimes Mac imagines radio dials that control the electricity in the atmosphere; times like this are when Dennis’s elbow bumps unintended into the control set, sending everything into static in Mac’s brain. Everything gets shifted a little off its axis. Mac gets shifted off his axis. And he’d really like to be on his axis right now, not left spinning wildly across the universe, on a fucking collision course with Planet Dennis.
“I don’t think it’s a bad thing,” Mac finally chokes out, after a much longer pause than he intended, “I… I like that we’re… I don’t know, connected? I mean, Den, there’s not a lot of people out there that actually want to be around us, so… I like that we like to be around each other.”
Dennis lets out a raspy laugh. “So you’re saying that since we’re the only ones who can stand each other… what? We deserve to be around each other forever?”
“No one’s saying that, dude,” Mac says bitterly, “And no one’s forcing you to be around me. You left me alone today after Dee said, like, one thing about our relationship.” He ignores how Dennis flinches almost imperceptibly at the word “relationship”. “You say ‘be around each other forever’ like it’s some horrible thing, like we haven’t been living together and working together and being best friends for twenty years!”
Mac is so, so tired of being angry at Dennis, but here is again; blood rushes to his face, and he turns to Dennis, still looking like a deer in the headlights. “God, dude! Why can’t we fight like normal fucking people?! I don’t get it! And you always make us weird! I didn’t think this was weird until you started acting like it was weird, you know I don’t give a shit what Dee says about us! I like that we’re two guys who can just be good friends and, and you just – you made it weird, Dennis! You made this really fucking weird and I don’t know how we’re supposed to move past it!” His voice breaks a little on the last line, cutting through his anger and reducing it to shards. He swipes a hand down his cheek.
Dennis swallows, silent. The glow of the building next to them is casting long streaks of light across his chin, illuminating a smattering of stubble, digging into the wrinkles around his mouth, and he suddenly looks like he’s aged ten years in one second, time slapping him across the face without mercy. Mac wonders if – hopes, with a sickening sort of frustration – he’s grown older on the inside, too. If he still remembers Mac’s face in a decade, if he’s still living with him and having movie nights with him and driving him to work and smiling at his jokes. Mac’s mind flashes through the future, flipping through the calendar pages, and thinks of him and Dennis – loving each other and leaving each other and coming back to each other, like they always do. Tides sweeping the shoreline, the moon passing over and under the Earth, the sun dipping below the trees then coming back to kiss the grass with its warmth. Lights flickering across buildings, sidewalks, Range Rovers and sharp angles and blue eyes, before darkness inevitably approaches, blurring lines and obscuring the truth, leaving nothing but this – frustration and anger and Dennis and Mac, reuniting over and over and over again.
And as the last of his anger trickles from his body, and the silence of the car fills his ears, Mac feels a strange sense of comfort tightening inside his chest. If this is destiny, if this is their fate – to come back again and again, to fight and to make up like it’s a routine – then maybe he can handle that. Twenty years is a long time to know someone. It's an even longer time to love them.
They turn to each other simultaneously, both quiet. Dennis’s mouth twists into a half-frown.
“I didn’t mean to make it weird,” he says, like it’s obvious. It is. It should be, at least.
“I know,” Mac responds weakly, “But it is. ”
“So… how do we make it not weird?” Dennis says. “ I don’t want it to be weird. I really don’t, dude, can you imagine what Charlie and Dee and Frank would think if we showed up to work acting all awkward around each other?”
“Yeah,” Mac half-laughs, “They’d probably think we banged or something.”
Silence falls over them again, this time thicker and more potent than the last. Mac’s cheeks burn. He kicks himself internally, the desire for the car to be moving so he can throw himself out of it growing stronger with each second that Dennis doesn’t respond. But finally, Dennis speaks, even if his voice is a little more strained than normal.
“Yeah. So, obviously, we can’t have that.”
“Right. Right.”
“I think we should just continue like usual. Do our movie night, drink our beer, pass out on the couch, and roll back into the bar thirty minutes late like always. Hell, if we get drunk enough, we might even forget this whole thing even happened,” he laughs. Mac’s insides twist.
Of course. They should forget this happened. Obviously. What good does it do either of them to remember something like this? Mac knows, deep down, that blacking out with Dennis and waking up tomorrow with his brain a clean slate is the best course of action. They can bypass the awkwardness that he still doesn’t completely understand, go straight back to being best friends and messing around and avoiding all their stupid feelings that contribute nothing to their relationship. Mac swallows, trying to push the hurt bubbling up in his throat back down. Yet another instance where Dennis doesn’t realize the power he has – the way his words can tear holes into Mac’s confidence, leaving it dripping, bleeding, from his chest.
He opens his mouth to speak, but Dennis is already turning the wheel and pulling out into traffic. His jaw is set, a smile pulled tight across his face, a glint of manic energy present in his eyes. Mac bites his tongue, and suddenly, getting plastered doesn’t seem like such a bad idea; maybe forgetting this, the way his stomach is churning at the thought of having to deal with this strange electricity between them, would be a good thing.
“Okay. Let’s get hammered.”
Dennis turns towards him, grinning. It should feel earned. This is what Mac wants, right? His best friend, smiling at him, promising to watch movies and drink with him back at their apartment. It’s what he’s been working towards all day.
But the lights are shimmering and colorful and tracking brilliant streaks across Dennis’s face, sliding over his skin as he drives, and Mac just wishes he never noticed them at all.