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Dennis Reynolds is fine, mostly. He stares at walls for hours, hasn't eaten in two days, and is currently laying face-down on the floor in his sister’s living room, but he’s fine. Mostly.
Dee is sprawled out on her couch, watching TV and eating popcorn. Dennis flinches every time she laughs, and he’s trying to follow the story line but he can’t tell the actor’s voices apart and the entire movie is blurring into one big mess. He’s almost sure it’s just one actor playing all the parts and he was a fool for trying to discern all the slightly different pitches in the first place. The sound of Dee’s chewing slowly fills the room and drowns out the mindless chatter of the TV, and suddenly it’s all Dennis can hear anymore and he just wants the movie voices back. He puts his hands over his ears, kicks the couch incessantly like he’s three years old again until Dee groans and puts down the popcorn. The TV turns off with a click and he can hear her shift her weight to look at him.
"Dennis..." she starts, but trails off when he lifts his head to give her a venomous look. He slams his head back down and the couch creaks when Dee flinches.
"I’m fine," he tells the carpet. At this rate, not even Dee’s shitty flooring will believe him. Dee stands up and stretches, her back popping sounds like gunshots in the silence and Dennis grinds his teeth in an effort to fill his brain with the sound of anything else. She walks over to him and pokes his side with her foot.
"You have to talk to him, Dennis," she starts up again.
"Your feet are big," Dennis mutters in reply.
"Yeah? Well, your cheeks are puffy and you have a weak jaw line," Dee retaliates. Dennis gasps and pushes his face further into the carpet, and she feels a weird rush of pride.
Dee decides that she’s bored enough now to get dressed and go to the bar, so she leaves Dennis alone to wallow on her floor. He’s a big boy, she figures, he can handle himself.
Mac is in her face before she can take two steps inside, eyes wide and hair on end. Clearly, he doesn’t share the same sentiment.
"Dennis is still at my apartment being a pathetic piece of shit, Mac, you won't see him here." Dee pushes past him to go pour herself a drink. God knows she needs it.
Mac follows her, looking increasingly more like a kicked puppy with every passing second. Dee hopes that Dennis really is serious about Mac, or else she’s going to have to deal with this for months on end once Dennis cuts the poor guy off completely. As she pours the cheapest whiskey she can find into a mostly clean glass, Mac flops onto a bar stool and props his chin up with his hands, carefully watching her.
"Is this whole thing about Dennis not having a dick?" Mac asks, and Dee gracefully sputters and chokes on her drink in response. The coughing fit that ensues is deafening; too long to casually play off but not long enough to properly gather her thoughts.
"Godammit, Mac!" she wipes her face with the hem of her shirt before returning her focus to Mac, whose eyebrows are a mile high and gaining altitude quickly.
"Well, is it?" He really isn’t going to let this go, is he? Dee lifts a finger before uncapping the bottle to pour herself another drink. She has to be at least three shots deep before she can discuss this shit. When Frank and Charlie burst in arguing, she wordlessly pours some for Mac too.
"Where’s your boyfriend?" Frank asks Mac, settling into a bar stool while Charlie gestures at him threateningly. He’s yelling something about the rent and the cats, although Dee isn’t quite sure how the two go together.
"Dennis isn't-" Mac starts, but Dee cuts him off.
"Last I saw him, he was on the floor of my living room screaming at nothing." Charlie pauses his flailing and nods sagely, like he’s been there too.
~~~
"If this is about you not having a dick, dude, I don’t care about that stuff." Dennis is back in their apartment and Mac is trying, bless his heart, but something ugly in Dennis won’t let him appreciate it.
"You think this has anything to do with my body?" Dennis’s voice goes dangerously low and his hands shake (with fury, he reminds himself, not nerves, never nerves), but Mac doesn't shrink back like he's supposed to. Instead, he juts out his chin and takes a step toward Dennis, looms over him in the way he knows Dennis hates.
"Yeah, Denn, I do.” Mac steps back, falters, switches his focus to the ground, then to the couch, then to the shelves over Dennis’s shoulder. “I like you just fine, but I don’t think you like you." His voice is flat, almost apologetic, and Dennis’s blood boils.
"I am a GOLDEN GOD!" he screams. The floodgates open and Mac groans in the back corner of Dennis’s hearing before the roaring in his ears blocks any sound out completely. Dennis starts pacing, yelling something about “Just fine? You like me just fine? You worship me!” and “You're so in love with me you can’t even think about anything else!” and other stuff he can’t remember until all of a sudden he's sitting on the couch with no memory of how he got there. He’s hiccuping and his face might be a little wet and Mac’s hand is running through his hair and Mac’s arm is around his shoulders and Mac’s voice is whispering that it's going to be okay.
There’s a shaky silence for a while and they listen to the sirens going off in the street. The phone rings, but neither of them moves to answer it. The answering machine announces that Dean-dra Reynolds has left a voicemail, and Dee’s garbled voice says that she’s going to bed and "you two dickfucks better have it figured out by now because I’m locking my door."
Dennis mutters that everyone in the gang has a spare key to her apartment anyway and Mac laughs in response and Dennis swears it’s the best sound he’s heard all day.
~~~
“Dennis.” Mac is standing in his doorway at 3am, his hair falling over his forehead and his shoulders hunched. Dennis groans, untangles his arm from the covers to wave Mac over.
Mac clambers in to the bed and under the covers and Dennis carefully puts an arm around him, lets his hand rest on smooth skin, traces the stupid tattoo he told Mac not to get. He sighs and lets Mac put his head down on his shoulder, lets Mac run careful fingers over the twin scars on his chest, lets Mac describe his nightmare in excruciatingly annoying detail.
“I hate it when people talk about their dreams,” Dennis complains half-heartedly. Mac hums in acknowledgment before continuing, whispers about his dad turning into a dragon and setting their apartment ablaze.
Dennis falls asleep like that, with Mac’s hand on his chest and Mac’s voice in his ear, and he dreams about Mac turning into a dragon with floppy hair and setting him on fire.
The smell of eggs doesn’t make Dennis nauseous when he wakes up, and he chalks that up as a win for the day. Mac is cooking breakfast even though it’s well past lunchtime and Dennis stands in the doorway of their kitchen and watches, tries to figure out which song Mac is humming. He’s pretty close to figuring it out, too, when Mac turns around and jumps a mile in the air, hands coming out in front of him as if he could karate his way out of a break-in.
“Dude!” he exhales, putting a hand on his chest like he’s an old British woman who just got cursed out. “You scared the shit out of me!” Dennis smiles slowly and crosses the kitchen, fists a hand into Mac’s shirt and kisses him for the first time in a week. Mac melts into the kiss and threads his hands through Dennis’s curls, holds on for dear life.
“Are you gonna feed me now, or what?” Dennis asks, breaking away with a smirk. Mac grins and pushes Dennis off, turns his attention back to the eggs and pushes them around the pan with a newfound sense of urgency.
Its five minutes later and Mac is smiling at him across the table as he eats and he eats and eats, and he almost throws up and he hates himself a little bit but he feels good, he really does. Mac’s eggs get cold while he’s busy making dopey eyes at Dennis and Dennis makes him microwave them (“don’t eat them cold, you glutton, you heathen, you-”). Mac laughs despite the insults and Dennis feels like he’s on a roll, like he’s on top of the world, and they spend the rest of the day making out on the couch and all of their clothes stay on and Dennis is okay with that.