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Seth catches up to them a day later, at the new arena. His suit is well-fitted and his hair is pulled tightly back behind him and he tries not to let it make him feel like a different person. (“You method piece of shit,” Dean would rib him, if he were around to do it. Seth thinks of him as not being around, rather than being around and not wanting to, because - because.)
He actually finds Roman first, who greets him with a heavy sigh and a pat on the back, his fingertips curling in a little at the end of it.
“Your back okay?” Seth asks. His collar itches.
“I had the worst of the damage massaged out of me this morning.” Roman stretches out, and his shoulders are - still huge. Familiar and huge. Seth blinks at them, then lets his mouth relax a little, not curling it one way or the other.
“How many guys did it take this time?” is what he ends up asking, and it was the right thing to do. Roman pushes some of his hair (already oiled back, a shame) out of his face and tweaks Seth’s temple, pulling some of the blonde out of his neat ponytail.
“Twenty. Thirty spectators.”
“Oh shit.”
“Entire villages were destroyed to create a big enough massage table.”
“Yeah, yeah. Alright, Goliath.” Roman lets out his own little version of a chuckle, quiet and genuine. It takes maybe another four seconds.
“…where’s David?” Seth asks, and immediately feels like an idiot, because David and Goliath, really, and Roman might even think he’s talking about Batista -
Roman rolls his neck. “Certainly not out in public.”
Got it in one, then. “He’s that upset?”
“Upset, maybe. Homicidal, definitely.”
Seth blows out a noisy breath, puffing out his cheeks. Roman side-eyes him, one side of his mouth tilted up.
“Dean’s not a moron,” Seth reasons.
“No, but he also isn’t a man known for being particularly cruel.”
“Are we talking about the same Dean?” Because that’s basically his whole schitck, is Roman kidding?
Roman levels him with a look. “Possibly not.” And - well. Well, that’s. A level to this that Seth was kind of hoping he wouldn’t have to toe the boundary line to.
Their relationship has always struck Seth as interesting because they don’t slip up - not with each other. Even Seth sometimes wakes up in the morning and exists ambivalently as Tyler Black until he sees himself in the mirror, shagging out the blonde in his hair between his fingers, but Dean never slips up. Not once. And neither does he about Dean.
They’ve known one another through every phase they’ve had ever had, known one another longer than most of the guys their age on the roster have known anyone who wasn’t a high school fluke of a friend. “Seth” and “Dean” are characters - caricatures, really, of who they are, some days more accurate than others, but it’s who they are now. To call one another anything else feels to Seth like a compartmentalization, feels like ignoring everything before this.
He’d been lucky enough for Dean to feel the same way, and they’ve operated like this ever since. It’s why Roman’s attention to the distinction makes something nervous jump in the back of his throat.
He winces. “Ouch.”
“You asked, chief.”
Seth can’t argue with that, so he doesn’t. “His, then?”
“Your head doesn’t look half bad with the glasses,” Roman compliments him. “Try not to lose it.”
Seth nods a goodbye at him and tries to look like he’s not hurrying as he heads to Dean’s door. He gets into a brief staring contest with the AMBROSE placard on the door before he knocks. God, this is stupid. Dean wouldn’t - he’s not actually crazy. For all the hype, Seth is confident they can talk this out like a couple of adult people.
Dean opens the door with a toothbrush hanging out of his mouth, but gives Seth a nod, letting him into the dressing room as he heads back to the adjacent bathroom. He seems… perfectly normal, and Seth feels the skin at the back of his neck cool because he’s suddenly not sure if he can handle this like an adult person. He kind of just wants to go home. Dean punctuates his chickenshit little thought by spitting into the sink and reappearing.
“Nice suit,” is the first thing out of his mouth, because of course it is.
“It is kinda nice, isn’t it?” Seth plays, trying to derail that particular train of conversation before Dean can get any momentum with it. “I like the black on black.”
“You would.”
“Okay, we all chose the whole for-great-justice bomber aesthetic, so I don’t know what you’re trying to pin on me.”
It was supposed to be a joke, but Seth remembers kind of harshly that they aren’t exactly “we” anymore. It feels strange and removed, because of course they’re still brothers, but they’re not - he. They. Augh.
Thankfully, Dean lifts his palms up to try and placate him. “Nothing, nothing.”
“They told us to prepare for a fight,” Seth blurts, too nervous to take the steps of their conversation in the right order - because it’s really not nothing and the tension is making his fingers and toes feel inside-out, a feeling he doesn’t want crawling up into his stomach before a match. “So that’s what we did.”
And they had - back when they were still The Shield that night. They’d even warmed up together. Seth supposes it isn’t his fault that he’d been asked to play dumb about who they were fighting, no matter that it feels so irreversible now.
Dean is leaning against the back of his couch, arms folded and ankles crossed. He’s staring at Seth like he’s trying to figure him out, methodically picking his brain for all the things he’d carefully avoided saying.
“…are you okay?” Seth asks lamely, feels like he has to. Dean shrugs.
“Of course.” And Seth bites his lip, because there are few ways to make Dean Ambrose pissier than asking if he’s sure about something.
“Roman said you might take my head off.”
Dean points at him and raises his eyebrows. “I might yet. Don’t put anything past me, Rollins, there is a clean razor in my bathroom.”
There are a lot of things he could respond to. “That thing is not clean.”
Dean grins. “Oh, it’s disgusting.”
A silence settles over them, a blank space where Seth probably would’ve inserted a Sweeney Todd joke if he’d been feeling at ease, which indadvertedly tells Dean everything he needs to know.
Dean leans further back, snaps his gum. He’s clearly not ready to speak yet, but Seth has no idea what to say next. It must show on his face, as well, because - apparently Dean’s lean was only a stretch, working him into standing up straight and walking further into the dressing room.
Seth stays where he is and crosses his arms. Dean quietly messes with bits and bops around the room. Asshole.
“I,” Seth starts, for the sake of testing his foothold on the conversation. Dean looks at him with a sort of bullshit attentiveness, which is about what he expects. “I never know how to smile for pictures,” he finally says. “I always try too hard, then my eyes are like - open too wide? And I can’t - ?” He gestures vaguely. “They just always look.” He stops.
“I cry at weird shit,” he starts again, shrugging, tracing patterns in the ceiling with his eyes. “I cried at the end of Marley and Me. Book and movie. I bawled like a baby.”
“Queer,” Dean offers with some modicum of affection, and for some godforsaken reason, Seth knows with certainty that that’s Dean’s way of telling him he has the cutest dogs in the world. Their conversations are impossible, Seth’s honestly not always sure he’s even following them right, but experience presents evidence in front of him that he can’t ignore.
“That too,” Seth continues, almost aimless. “Seriously. I feel like that weird gay nerd who stays after school and plays video games all by himself for hours before going home. Except not gay. And.” He looks down at himself, at the shine on his shoes. Right, he’s a professional wrestler. He’s with the WWE. That’s right. “And I guess - not really. At all.”
“You gonna try to convince me you don’t have some decrepit Pokemon game in your bag right now?” And Dean does the thing again, directing Seth’s words around in pretty little circles for him, getting progressively, sickeningly madder that Seth can’t figure out how to break out of the cycle and just say what he means. It’s consistently charming in hindsight and a bitch in the moment.
“No, I - have more important things to convince you of.” Seth finally looks down, stares at the look of encouraging annoyance on Dean’s face.
“Like,” Dean offers generously.
“Like that I’m not actually an asshole?”
“Bullshit.”
“Okay, I’m not as much of an asshole as I was last night. I’m not that kind of asshole.”
And at last night there’s a sting, something that makes Dean’s forehead pinch a little bit. He is hurt, the great idiot.
“I know that,” he says anyway.
Seth bites his lip, because there’s no real way to say the look on your face is haunting me and I don’t know how to get rid of it. For god’s sakes they might be actors, but Seth isn’t that much of a woobie.
“I - I know, but.”
“But nothin’, Rollins,” Dean says. He purses his lips in that strange doggy way he has, a carryover from his persona in the ring. He even throws up his fists in a couple of feints that aren’t fooling anyone. “You’re an Authority man now. I gotta bust your teeth up, or something.”
Seth slouches. “Dean.”
“Don’t Dean me.”
“I’ll Dean you all I want, man, you’re being a prick.”
Dean narrows his eyes. “But it’s true.”
“No! No, it’s - it’s not. Don’t you get it? It’s not.” Seth licks his bottom lip. “I - I guess that was the whole point, of like. Telling you that dumb shit earlier? About the picture smiles and the dogs - “
“And the crying.”
“Shut up, asshole, I’m trying to have a moment with you.”
Dean bats his eyelashes. It looks wholly ridiculous. “You do know how to woo a man.”
Seth grouses wordlessly, but does his best to look sympathetic, hoping not rising to Dean’s bait will earn him a little air time. “That was the point of me bringin’ all that up,” he repeats, serious as he knows how to be. “It’s that I’m - still the same guy, Dean.”
He appears to have hit the nail of Dean’s discomfort on the head, based on the look on his face. Seth lets himself feel self-congratulatory for a few seconds.
“You know that, right? That improv is hard, and I have to be the boogeyman out there, but I’m still the same moron who threatened to throw you out of a moving bus for drooling?”
A section of Dean’s lips quirks. “You never did make good on that.”
“Yeah, well,” Seth allows. Trying to trust the mood of this conversation to do what he wants it to do feels like trying to navigate ass-first through a minefield. “Somehow I found it in my heart to forgive you.”
“Weirdo,” Dean says.
“Maybe I knew I’d need to call in a similar favor,” Seth counters. Dean blinks his eyes open all the way at that, apparently caught off guard. Good.
“…I’m not mad at you,” Dean admits. He lets out a breath so huge that his shoulders slump, and Seth feels almost immediately better about the entire interaction; Dean isn’t crazy, true, but he can be kind of a shithead about overly honest communication. (“Not a liar,” he’d insisted once - “I don’t lie about shit. Ain’t my fault some people are too fucked in the head to ask the right questions.”)
“I was hoping that’d be the case,” Seth says quietly. So what are you mad at goes unspoken.
“It was just a rough night I guess,” is what he goes with. He makes the face he makes when he’s fed up with someone’s horseshit, but he doesn’t make it at Seth so much as he makes it at the ceiling, like he’s making it at himself. “I mean - fuck, real actors get to have those, don’t they? They need to kinda shake off a hard scene? Surely us idiots get to have that every now and again.”
(‘Real actors,’ one of Dean’s favorite complaints.
“I could bust Jude Law into a concrete wall, and if he put his leg up the right way I wouldn’t even hurt him,” he’d grumbled one night, after one reminiscence too many.
“Stop acting like you need an excuse to want Jude Law with his legs up over his head,” Seth had retorted, and Dean had barked a laugh so hard he’d nearly rolled off the hotel bedside.)
Seth tries not to get too distracted wondering if he and Dean will share a hotel room ever again. Probably not, the higher-ups take their ring personas pretty seriously. Ugh.
“That’s not weird,” he says, to assure Dean he’s still involved in the conversation. It takes him a minute to back out of his own thoughts. “It’s. It isn’t weird. It makes sense.”
Dean purses his lips. Something about his expression feels clouded or smudged, and Seth wishes he could squint and understand.
“Yeah,” is all he says to that. “I guess.”
Seth is overcome with the desire to hug him, but - but no. What the fuck. It’s not like they’re weird about contact backstage, god no, but -
Something about it feels forced, at this point. The pressed lapels of Seth’s suit are holding him back from it this time. It isn’t a happy position to be in.
“Sorry,” he says. He thinks he might be apologizing for ten separate things.
Dean shrugs his good shoulder. “Naw.”
“I’m serious.”
“So am I. You haven’t done anything wrong, Seth. You didn’t betray shit, okay, and we both know that.
“I still walloped you with a chair,” Seth hedges.
Dean raises his eyebrows. “Technically.”
“Technically.”
Dean walks closer to him, toward the door, and pulls him into a one-armed hug around the shoulder. It’s a little weird, wearing so many layers and getting the buddy-buddy-shoulder-shake from Dean, decked out as the madman he’s supposed to hate.
“Technicalities don’t mean much, in this context,” he says. “I know that’s your thing, but try not to let it fuck you over too badly.” His arm is still over Seth’s shoulders, and he looks sidelong at him with his doofy little grin.
“Yeah,” Seth agrees. Because - alright. “Yeah, okay.”
Dean shakes him one more time, playful. “Good. Now get the fuck outta here, prettyboy, your suit’s giving me indigestion.”
Seth rolls his eyes. “Indigestion and erections aren’t interchangeable words.”
“In your dreams.”
Seth blows him a kiss, totally ridiculous when they’re still stood this close, then opens the door. Dean shoves him out over the threshold and he snickers to himself, swiveling around to stick his tongue out one last time before the door shuts.
“I’m gonna punch you in the dick.” Mumbled, from the other side of the door.
“You’re just upset because we were playing a game to see who could be the most childish and I beat you.”
“I hate losing.”
Seth slams his palm into the door and hears Dean’s feet scuff on the other side. Heh heh. “Stop trying to get the last word, I have shit to do.”
“Fine, go do it then.” Of course.
“You’re being a child."
“Does that mean I win?”
Seth laughs, but doesn’t respond. Lets him suffer. It’s as good as a goodbye, really - he feels like a teenage girl, stuck in a forever game of no you hang up first with Dean, except for how their version usually ends in punching.
He catches Roman on his way back, who only arches his eyebrows at him from where he’s stretching one of his legs out. Seth shrugs, and Roman smiles at the ground. They really are a bunch of weirdos, a truly unorthodox team for all they aren’t one in the public eye anymore.
“You’re a good man, Rollins,” Roman tells him.
“Don’t spread that shit,” is what he says. Roman laughs, and Seth realizes late that it’s because that’s definitely something Dean would’ve said. Whoops.
“Your secret’s safe with me,” he replies.