Work Text:
Breathing's harder now
I've loved you more than now
But despite all the things you've said
My thoughts won't change
—Lontalius - my dreams are dark
Chase doesn’t do feelings.
Well. That’s not true. He feels—not friendship exactly, but a kind of camaraderie with his lacrosse teammates. He loves his mother, even if that’s getting all twisted and confusing after the night at Alex’s house. He loved his old friends, before it all fell apart, and he supposes he feels regret for how things turned out, but that one is easy to ignore, to place the blame on someone else. He feels a whole incomprehensible mess of things toward his dad, anger and hatred and fear and some strand of not-quite-love, but an urge, a need to make him proud, to meet his impossible standards for once.
(He knows that even if he does somehow meet his father’s standards, he’ll never make him proud. Victor Stein doesn’t feel pride or love or empathy. Victor’s emotionless, violent presence reassures Chase that there’s nothing wrong with him, that Chase is doing just fine.)
But Chase doesn’t do romance. He dates, sure, but he doesn’t get butterflies in his stomach or fireworks when he kisses someone or any of the other cliches that everyone else seems to understand. He dates girls who are fun to be around, who view relationships the same way he does: a fun distraction from everyday life. He’s pretty upfront about it, really. He doesn’t want to hurt anyone or lead people on. He just isn’t that into the whole romance and love thing.
That’s how it is with Karolina. She’s pretty, and she’s in the same insane situation as he is with PRIDE and their parents and her apparent superpowers, and it would be really nice to have someone to talk to. Or not talk to. But then Karolina isn’t into him, and while it’s vaguely disappointing, they’re still friends and he thinks he maybe knows why she wasn’t into him. He’s seen the way she and Nico act around each other, awkward and stilted and tense.
So he and Karolina don’t get together, and that’s okay. They have a lot more important things going on than half-hearted teenage romance, like their parents being serial killers and Molly being a mutant and Karolina being…whatever she is. Life goes on; Chase works on his fistigons and goes to school and pretends to be ignorant of all the insanity going on around him. They all get closer again, and Chase finally stops trying to ignore his part in the end of their friendship. It was on all of them, and now it’s on all of them to rebuild. He and Alex have a lot more issues than they used to; they respect each other, but it’s tenuous. Karolina turns out to be a pretty great friend, and Chase is sort of glad things didn’t work out between them, since it means they get to be friends. Nico is aloof and sarcastic and her commitment to the whole goth thing is kind of intimidating, but she’s funny when she wants to be and unquestionably brave. Molly is just as sweet as she used to be, and Chase realizes how much he missed having her around. She’s sort of the entire group’s little sister.
And then there’s Gert.
Chase knows about half the words she uses on a daily basis, and understands maybe a third of the things she says, but he’s never heard anyone speak with so much passion. His father talks that way about his inventions, but that’s all vicious anger and ego. Gert speaks with anger, maybe, but it’s righteous anger, and from what Chase can tell, everything she says and everything she believes comes out of wanting to help people. So he may not understand the politics behind the bills that Gert seems to be protesting every other week or know the definition of heterosexism, but when she talks, he listens. He doesn’t ask questions, because she kind of scares him when she really gets going on a topic, but he listens as carefully as he can and tries to learn.
Chase doesn’t assign any kind of meaning to it. He doesn’t treat Gert any differently than the rest of his friends, at least not consciously. He doesn’t get nervous around her. Being around her is actually kind of…well, not relaxing, exactly, but…soothing. Like, in the middle of the shitshow his life has become, Gert is still there, giving everyone who bothers her the finger, getting up in guys’ faces when she sees them harassing girls, still not taking shit from anybody. And it kind of makes him feel like everything is going to be okay; like, if Gert can still be her brave, passionate, flawed, beautiful self in the middle of everything, maybe he can make it out of all this in one piece.
Still, Chase doesn’t think about it. Gert is strong and wild and good and makes Chase wish he could do better, be better. None of that is new. It’s Gert, the way Gert has always been. So Chase doesn’t think about it.
And then his dad gets shot and Chase’s first instinct is to call Gert, and that—
That makes Chase think. Because what is Gert going to do? His dad is bleeding out on the floor of his garage because his mom shot him, and PRIDE is there, and what can Gert do about any of it? If he asked, she would probably rush in, probably bring her dinosaur (which Chase cannot get used to) and come charging in with no plan except to help him, not because Chase is special but because they’re friends and that’s the kind of person Gert is. But Chase would never ask her to do that, and yet, he still calls her. He just wants to hear her voice, hear about her latest protest sign ideas or silly stories about things she’s done with Molly or just hear about her day.
Instead, he gets Gert’s voicemail. The sound of her voice is calming enough that he calls again just to hear the recording a second time.
Chase has a lot on his mind after that, between his father and PRIDE and his mom and Robert and Jonah and really, he has way, way too much going on to be thinking about Gert. But somehow he ends up doing just that. He thinks about Gert. He still doesn’t understand the whole butterflies-and-fireworks thing, but he’s starting to think maybe he gets the appeal of romance, because he thinks about all that with Gert, about dates and cuddling and just hanging out because he likes being around Gert more than being around anyone else, about talking about their pasts and their futures and everything, about falling in love, and it honestly sounds pretty incredible.
Shockingly, the realization that he likes Gert, that he really likes her, doesn’t scare Chase at all. It’s Gert. Nothing with her is scary. If it turns out she doesn’t like him back, she’ll probably rattle off something about how the idea that friendships can’t survive one person liking the other is a product of the patriarchy or something, and that will be that, and life will go on. Chase isn’t worried. It’ll work out or it won’t, and either way, he’ll still get to be friends with her, and that’s all he could ever ask for.
And then they go to the dance.
Chase likes sex. Sex is pretty incredible, in his opinion, one of the best things in the world next to inventing and the original Star Wars movies. But with Gert? It’s life-changing. If Chase didn’t know how he felt before, he knows beyond any shadow of doubt now. Gert may not be it for him; he doesn’t know if he believes in true love and soulmates and all that, but he cares more about her than he thinks he’s ever cared about anyone before.
Best of all, she feels the same way.
Until she doesn’t.
“A one time thing,” she tells him, and Chase doesn’t tell her how much that hurts, but he’s pretty sure it shows.
They don’t really talk about it after that. It’s all Chase can think about, though. Gert is all Chase can think about. But she said that was it, and he has to respect that.
Still, though, it blows a hole through a friendship that Chase has started to rely on. He doesn’t know if he trusts Alex. Molly is too young to be involved in any of this. Karolina and Nico are caught up in their thing, and he’s okay with that, he’s glad they’re happy, but they’re much more concerned with each other than anyone else. They’ve all run away from home and nothing will ever be the same, and all he wants to do is talk to Gert about it.
But he can’t, because she won’t look him in the eye, won’t talk to him without someone else around to act as a buffer, and it makes him kind of angry. It’s not her fault, not really; it’s no one’s fault, they both wanted what happened and didn’t think about the consequences to their friendship, but he’s still angry.
Still, that first, horrible night in the van, when Gert reaches for his hand, he takes it. Every night after that, even when holding hands turns into her head on his shoulder and then her arm across his body and their legs intertwined and it makes him all sorts of confused because it was a one-time thing, he holds her. It’s kind of his job now. Hold Gert, hold his friends together. It’s the least he can do. She holds him together, even if she’s not really talking to him right now.
Some nights Chase can’t sleep. Gert says it’s normal when Molly mentions the same; they’re all traumatized, scared. It makes sense to have a little insomnia. On those nights, Chase listens to Gert breathe and counts the puffs of air against his chest and wonders if they’ll make it out of this. If they do, he wonders if he and Gert will another chance, a chance to talk things out and make whatever’s between them work.
He hopes, more than anything, that they do.