Chapter Text
He’s always been there. Not physically of course, no, physically he’s off somewhere down in Texas, probably sleeping off another remarkable day in the standard public schooling system or eating shitty Chinese takeout or mixing something on those dumb turntables of his. He’s always on your mind, though. Your thoughts wander to him in Algebra while your teacher walks you all through basic factoring and you doze off in the back of the classroom during group reading in English after another night of accommodating the time difference by losing out on a few hours of sleep. You’d roll your eyes, tell him it’s no biggie, you could always nap it off once you got home, this always afforded you another hour or so of mindless chatter before you finally began nodding off as you typed, two vibrant colors of text blurring together as the desktop’s light burned your retinas and you finally gave in after logging off for the night.
Some days you have to remind yourself that you don’t have any more of a right to claim his time than anyone else. Well, not anymore, anyways. You used to. It was just the sort of entitlement you came to assume was achieved after establishing a relationship with someone. Sometimes he was busy, and that was okay, you could wait for a while. It was so worth having his undivided attention once he was finished. Things are different though, now. Someone else occupies his time and affections and most likely his thoughts and the idea of it is enough to make your mouth turn sour as you shift uncomfortably in your computer chair.
You ditch that thought in favor of another. This is stupid. And it is, too. It’s redundant, and pointless, and you’re pining over someone who’s already moved on and found someone else who supposedly suits them better than you ever could have. And you want that to be okay, you really do. You want to be happy because he’s happy, and you want to be content with the fact that he has someone who cares for him and makes him smile. But you can’t. Because no matter how hard you try to forget, you desperately want to be that person.
And you want to forget the way he’d tease you with that stupid smirk over a grainy webcam image at three o’clock in the morning, and you want to forget the way you felt as you drug yourself through the school day, half asleep but satisfied that you were in your sluggish state because you’d wasted half a night talking about something you didn’t even remember with your dumbass boyfriend who lived a thousand miles away. You want to forget how great that last bit sounded when you finally managed to work a genuine smile out of him and he’d shake his head and you could physically feel his eyes roll while he shot you a sarcastically stated comment about his awful taste in dates.
So you don’t forget those, you just sort of repress them. Shove them to the back of your mind, where they can peacefully reside with that bad grade you got in Civics last week, and the daunting task of holding your own against dad’s unending rain of pranking fury that looms ahead on April 1st, just like every year. You distract yourself with other things, like chatting with Jade about her weird, nonexistent napping schedules, or allowing Rose to actually explain her weird dark prophecies. Your usual conversations provide a great diversion for the days you can’t seem to muster up your patented sheen of optimistic sarcasm with just a hint of japery. You just listen and reply every now and then, that’s easy enough. Even when Rose loses you at the words “unspeakable terrors”, you provide an eloquent ‘uh huh’ and neither of them are the wiser.
It’s harder when Dave messages you, though. He has a talent for dragging out idle chatter for hours with his run away metaphors and awful jokes and god, yeah, you love that about him, but when that idle chatter is about this mysterious flame of his, it just burns. Metaphorically, duh. The worst of it is when you have to reply with an “aww, our little davey’s growing up!” or the occasional “they sound great, dave.” And even still, he expects the same lively conversationalist you’re pretty sure you usually are. You can still be that person some days, when he drops the topic of his new relationship and you’re able to forget for just a little while. It all comes back when he logs off early to ‘meet a friend’, and the differences of time zones can only leave you up for hours, disappointed and distraught; or when he happens to forget the promise he’d made just that morning to FaceTime with you. That sudden heavy gloom is unshakable, and you know it’ll take you at least a day to sleep it off before you can feel like yourself again and the cycle repeats itself.