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Bad decision making is a form of art, if you think about it.
Art often has many variations; degrees of conformity and rigid non-conformity that make specific styles unique to the artists. In fact, most styles of bad decision making can be categorized by intent and risk. High-risk full-intent is for self-sabotage, for those making “cries for help” or for true self-hate. On the other end of the spectrum, low-risk no-intent is for those who just make choices that end up being thoughtless or unwise in retrospect.
By this metric, Awsten would be categorized as somewhere firmly in the middle. One might be able to argue for a lower score because of his lack of strong intent, but the risks he takes drag him back up to the middle ground overall. It’s not like he keeps making a lot of bad decisions either. He tries not to make that many, actually.
Just one big pretty bad one.
Awsten is a guideless Sentinel whose vocation is being a rock star.
Jawn is not, unfortunately, an actual Guide. It would be great if he was, because that would mean Awsten would have a way to manage himself while on the road. However, Jawn trips only about three of the sixteen genetic markers for being a Guide, so his claim to the title is doubtful at best.
He helps monumentally, though.
Awsten is squatting behind the venue building, head between his knees, hands linked behind his head.
“Are you spiking? What’s your hearing at?” Jawn asks.
“High,” Awsten grunts out, and then he gasps when even speaking makes his headache pulse in intense pain.
“Then focus it. Focus on me . My voice. If you’ve gotta zone out, I’m right here, so you should focus on me instead of whatever’s happening over there. And who knows what’s happening over there, because it doesn’t matter, it’s just dumb kids trying to figure out if there’s an afterparty. Just a bunch of wannabe punks who think they were born too late,” Jawn rambles, probably meaning none of it but just saying whatever pops into mind.
It sort of works, is the thing. Jawn’s voice is not particularly soothing (not like the Guides that Awsten’s gotten the chance to talk to), but it is familiar. At his suggestion, Awsten does his best to focus his annoying super-hearing onto the rasp of his voice and the tones and the inflection.
“What else is bad? Is it just hearing? Any other senses?” Jawn asks.
“Touch,” Awsten whispers. His body feels like it’s crawling. The show has been over for the nearly an hour by now, but he sweats as much as anyone else on stage, and it’s cooled off on his skin, leaving him with a sticky feeling and slightly-cold-and-damp clothes. He holds very still for fear of shifting the clothes and losing himself to the sensation of that. There’s a real danger in that, too. If he zones here, he might be catatonic and useless for hours, which would not be good at all.
“I’m sorry,” Jawn says.
“Mm.” His headache from the noise spike is receding, but he’s actually super worried about his sense of touch. It’s dialed up to approximately eleven right now, and anything he does will just make it worse. “Can’t move.”
“Hey, let me try something,” Jawn says.
“Don’t touch me,” Awsten says sharply, pulling in on himself reflexively and freezing immediately when his clothes shift against his skin.
“I won’t, I promise, but here. Just try and… try and focus on this.”
And then, on the back of his hand, he feels something silky smooth.
Like a charm, his brain hones in on the new sensation, and he’s reaching out for the new thing with one of his hands. He brings it in front of his face and opens his eyes and runs his thumb over the little square of fabric over and over and over. The soft drag of it is everything, completely overriding the terrible gross feeling of his sweaty skin.
He’s so focused on the soft fabric that it takes him a while to hear Jawn calling his name.
“...sten? Awsten. Awsten, come on, man. Awsten,” Jawn says over and over in a quiet monotone that’s simultaneously courteously quiet but also so bored that he must have been saying it for a while. “Awsten. Awsteeeen. Awsten. Aw—”
“Hm?” Awsten asks.
“You zoned.”
“For how long?” Awsten asks, lifting his head.
Jawn checks his phone. “Only five minutes or so. It’s been fifteen since we ducked out.”
“Oh, sick,” Awsten says. That’s a much shorter length of time than he’s usual. Though, admittedly, he’s always happier to have a zone than a spike. Zones make you lose track of time, sure, but spikes are just complete torture in the form of sensory overload. That, to Awsten, makes prolonged dissociation a piece of cake. He's glad that he just zoned out on the texture of… of this… Awsten frowns. “Hey, what is this thing?”
“A glasses-cleaner cloth. I saw a pack at a gas station recently and wondered if it might help, since it’s like, microfiber. It’s meant not to scratch glass, so I figured it must have a really high thread count.”
“It’s like fucking silk,” Awsten agrees.
“So it was a good zone?”
“Yeah. Good zone. We should probably go, though.”
“Back inside, or to the bus?” Jawn asks.
Awsten draws his lips tight, thinking of going back into the venue with the stage crew and the venue staff and whoever else gets to hang out backstage. “Uhh… let’s not get hasty.”
Jawn smirks, but it warms into a genuine smile within seconds. “Yeah. Good plan. Let’s just go to bed.”
Here’s a fun fact: Awsten has a theory that one of his bandmates is a Guide.
Every American is supposed to take the genetic test at some point in high school, but neither Otto nor Geoff actually got tested. Otto missed his test because his family pulled him out of school for a week when a tree fell on their roof in a big monsoon, so he was absent when his class got called in. Geoff, on the other hand, moved from California to Texas in the summer between his 11th and 12th grade, and the California state standard was to test their kids in 12th grade and Texas did it in 11th, so he just bypassed the entire process by mistake.
But one of them is…
Okay, listen, Awsten has evidence.
He experiences spikes a lot at live shows. Or rather, he used to.
When he was a teenager, excited to play any show he could get permission to play at, he never minded that the act of simply going onstage would put him out of commission for a day or more afterward. All that mattered was that he got to do the thing he always wanted to do with his life.
And then, of course, there was finally Over 9000!, a band where Jawn was there to see what a toll shows took on Awsten, and Awsten promptly got himself a personal semi-Guide to talk his senses down after a show so that he didn’t literally have to be bedridden by severe spikes. It got better around then, but he honestly can’t recall if it was because Otto was around or because Jawn stepped in.
Likewise, the first time he got an indication that the band itself was helping him was when they started clicking as friends, after Geoff and Otto had both joined Waterparks.
So, really, it could be either of them.
Awsten rolls out of his bunk and walks towards the couches to grab a snack and staggers along the way. “Jesus!”
“Huh?” Geoff asks from the couch.
“Otto. Dude,” Awsten exclaims, dragging the collar of his shirt up over his nose to cover the unmistakable stench of Otto’s feet. “Put some fucking shoes on so help me.”
Otto, probably sleeping like a rock, does not respond from inside his bunk.
The smell is gross and overpowering and sort of makes Awsten want to chuck himself out the door into 60 mph traffic to get away from it, but he has enough presence of mind to recognize that’s a dramatic response to a bad smell. Awsten marches past the bunks faster and sits himself down beside Geoff. His appetite is properly fucking ruined now, because his stomach is churning and the smell of his own shirt and body doesn’t block out the smell of Otto’s feet that lingers in his nose. “Ugh.”
“Should I get Jawn?” Geoff asks, tapping something on his controller. The background noise of his video game stops, which is actually something Awsten genuinely hadn’t noticed until it cut out.
“No, it’s fine,” Awsten says stubbornly, but it’s muffled as it passes through his shirt.
“You don’t look fine,” Geoff says.
Awsten rolls his eyes. “You know how you don’t notice how bad you smell until you literally take a shower and smell-check your old clothes?”
“Like smell-blindness in all the Ferbreeze commercials?”
“Yeah. I’m smell-blind to myself and I can't use my own stink to block out Otto's stink and it sucks. Actually, fuck that, I’m just gonna use you to fix it,” Awsten decides, and he tucks his legs closer to Geoff's so he can lean curl up right into Geoff’s chest, arms wrapped around the small of his back and shoulders hunched to seal away outside air. He’s not overly-concerned about Geoff’s boundaries. His bandmates let him lay on top of them in every other interview anyway, so this is like, nothing in comparison. He breathes in and relaxes. Dude-stink isn’t fresh flowers and soft breeze, but it’s literally so much better than Otto’s feet.
“Should I… “ Geoff trails off. “Uhh, would it help you if I just gave you a shirt of mine?”
“Just play your fucking game,” Awsten mumbles.
After a second, Geoff’s arm comes over Awsten’s shoulder and settles along his back as he holds his controller. The game noises resume. The urge to jump out of the moving bus recedes. He slowly relaxes.
Hm.
It’s a show, like any other, except that he had the bright idea to convince the crowd to clap during Rare.
He expected way too much of them.
Almost as soon as they start, it’s clear that none of them are on the same page. He can’t even tell if they lack the ability to identify where the beat is or if they just insist on speeding up the tempo, but suddenly the claps from the audience are deafening and nothing from his in-ear monitor is keeping him on beat.
The worst part is that they won’t fucking stop.
And fuck, here comes the bridge in all its low-volume no-drums extended-live-version glory.
Awsten swipes the sweat off his brow and closes his eyes, trying to hone in on Geoff’s guitar. He tries to keep his internal tempo, and sings the “ooo-o-ooo-o-o” s in time, but he gets about three in before someone’s palms happen to clap sharper than the rest and his attention is drawn back to the terrible, shitty, uncoordinated claps of The Audience That Refused To Quit. He feels faint panic at that, and has the presence of mind to pull the microphone to his lips and say, “sing,” before jutting it out towards the crowd.
They start singing along, he thinks, but he’s staring at the sea of hands moving through the air, unseeing as his ears focus in on the claps, the cacophonous all-encompassing—
A new noise cuts in.
High pitched, sharp, repeating, brief, rhythmic - like a “ting-t-ting-t-ting-t-ting” , harsher on downbeats and lighter on the &s and it totally breaks Awsten out of his— oh shit, he really was zoning in the middle of a song.
Awsten turns his head back to the new noise and watches Otto tap out an improvised beat on the bell of his hi-hat. That’s a smart move, Awsten thinks. He probably wouldn’t have thought to change the song to get someone to focus. But the point still stands that he completely lost track of which measure they’re on. When he meets his drummer’s eye with a panicked/lost/oh-god-help-me look, Otto nods. He plays another two measures of the hi-hat beat and mouths “one, two.” Then, he plays a fill for the next two beats and hits his snare and tom simultaneously on the one beat and subsequently stops playing.
The crowd sings “ooo-o-ooo-o-ooo,” for him.
Awsten pulls the mic back to his lips. “You know I think you’re rare,” he sings, now knowing exactly where he is.
Hmmmmm.
“How would you like to help me make my life better?” Awsten asks, putting on a big grin and some hopeful eyes to really sell it.
Lucas doesn’t even look up. What a dick.
“Lucas. Dude.”
“I guess it all depends on how relevant it is to the tour and how difficult it is,” Lucas says with a sigh.
“Okay, but here’s the thing. Super easy. Like, two hours of work.”
“Work?” Lucas repeats doubtfully.
“Two hours of detour from the tour,” Awsten amends.
“ Two hours?”
“Most of that would be waiting,” Awsten says quickly. “I’m not asking you for anything but a ride to get us there.”
Lucas’s face screws up. “What, do you want me to take you to an amusement park or something?”
“No!” Awsten scoffs. “Dude, no.”
“So what is it?”
“I want to get Geoff and Otto genetic tests for Guide markers.”
A blank expression pastes itself across Lucas’s face, and he opens his mouth and furrows his brows. “… Uh…”
“Neither of them have ever gotten their own results,” Awsten says. “And like, obviously I know I’m a Sentinel, but Jawn is a shitty Guide—”
“I thought he was enough to help you,” Lucas says, suddenly concerned on top of being confused.
“Yeah— whatever. He’s fine. He’s Jawn , of course he helps, big deal. But he has like three Guide markers out of sixteen,” Awsten shrugs. “My point is that someone’s been helping me out of zones when Jawn isn’t around, and I really can’t tell which one of them it is.”
“Have you considered that they might just be regular nice people?” Lucas asks. “Not everybody’s a Sentinel or a Guide. They could just be perceptive and good at accommodating.”
“I hear you,” Awsten says. He pauses. “… but you’re totally wrong because I can tell.”
“If you can’t tell which of them is a Guide, how can you be sure that there’s a Guide at all?”
Awsten scowls. “Are you saying I’m wrong?”
“I’m asking why you’re convinced,” Lucas says.
“I just know,” Awsten says, shrugging. “It’s just one of those things. I can feel it.”
Lucas hums thoughtfully and glances off to the side, staring away the way he does when he’s turning something over in his head.
“So can I get my detour scheduled into our tour, please?”
Scoffing, Lucas shakes his head. “Fine. I’ll tell you when and where.”
“Fuck yes,” Awsten whispers to himself.
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
Awsten spreads the papers out on the table, all five. The Center had them all take both sets of tests for the sake of having it all on file, and now the results are in his hand. Or, on the table. All of their genetic markers laid out in neat, tidy little lists of checkboxes.
“You’re all Guides?” Awsten exclaims.
“Barely,” Lucas says, because he only tested positive for 1 out of 16 Guide markers and 2 out of 15 Sentinel markers. He’s nowhere near the standards required to categorize someone as either, because the benchmarks are 6+ for Guides and 5+ for Sentinels (which are obviously pretty weak scores, but those are the threshold for which the genes start being dominant or— or something in biology class that Awsten hadn’t paid full attention to. Something about how 6/16 Guides always score 0s for Sentinel genes and 5/15 Sentinels always get 0s for Guide genes).
“This is absolutely wild,” Awsten says. He’s sort of amazed, because he knew Jawn had 3 Guide markers, he had no idea that Geoff and Otto would score equally matched 9s.
“Does this mean we have to take classes or something?” Geoff asks. “Did we dodge the draft? Like, metaphorically. I thought Guides had to go to The Academy.”
“That’s only for Guides that score higher than 10,” Jawn says. “It’s optional for everyone lower.”
“Lucky us,” Otto mutters.
Geoff hesitates. “Is there… should this mean something? Or, like, does this change something with the band?”
“No. I mean, why would it?” Otto says, starting flippant but dissolving into uncertainty in the span of a short couple of seconds.
“Because…” Geoff trails off.
Awsten glances at his own results. 13/15 Sentinel. All he’s missing is one marker for taste and one for sight - otherwise he would be a full-blown Sentinel. He already knew that, of course. He had to go to the Academy, get training, learn about Guides, learn his own limits. The whole nine yards. The new part is that his bandmates are Guides as well. And yet…
“No,” Awsten says. “We’re good.”
“We are?” Jawn asks.
“Yeah, of course,” Awsten says, turning back to them. “We’re us. We’ve been like this for eight years now, and turns out we balance each other out great even when we’re not trying to. So why mess with a good thing?”
“It’s that easy?” Geoff asks. “You didn’t… you didn’t want this test to mean something more?”
“I just wanted to prove myself right,” Awsten says, flashing his teeth as he grins widely. “And I totally called it, by the way.”
“I think he meant to ask if you wanted to bond with a Guide,” Jawn says hesitantly.
“You mean within the band?” Awsten asks.
Geoff and Otto both sort of freeze and start looking shifty, scratching their heads and glancing away.
“Hey, no need to get serious,” Awsten says. “I’m fine. I don’t need to settle down. We’re like, super young. And I’m not at a critical state where I’m at risk of zoning myself into a coma. I’m doing fine. I don’t need to pick a Guide.”
“I don’t think it’s a good thing to trust me with your safety, though,” Jawn says. For emphasis, he taps his finger on the counter over his test results, as if to show how unqualified he is.
“It’s a good thing I’m not asking you, then,” Awsten says. He glances to the side. “I mean, you two aren’t going to let me get myself hurt, right?”
“No!” Geoff exclaims.
“Of course not, dude,” Otto says.
“Great. And when we’re not on tour, I can control my own environment. So I’ll always be either completely surrounded by Guides or chilling at home. Sounds foolproof to me. Lucas, back me up!”
All eyes turn to their tour manager, as if Awsten’s plan hinges on Lucas’s approval.
(It doesn’t, but Lucas’s insight will indicate whether or not it’s another bad idea.)
With a sigh, Lucas closes his eyes and shrugs. “To be fair, I don’t think that any of you are going to leave him hanging.”
“Hell yeah,” Awsten says. He sweeps all the papers into a pile and picks them up. “You heard the man! My plan is foolproof and you’re all idiots for not trusting me.”
“He didn’t say that,” Jawn grumbles.
He takes the sheets back to the counter for the group, which impatiently leaves the building, talking about where they should go get dinner.
“Perfect,” the receptionist says. “I'll file these in the medical records. Are you going to be in need of a room?”
“A room?” Awsten repeats.
“Oh, maybe I’m being presumptuous,” the receptionist says quickly. “I’d assumed you were having your friends tested to see if any of them were eligible to bond with you.”
Awsten feels a cold shock run through his veins, making his blood icy and uncomfortable. “Why would I need that?”
“You don’t. But with as many markers as you have, and at your age, many health experts would advise you to start looking for a Guide,” the lady says. “I’m sure you know that the average unbonded Sentinel begins to experience significant degradation of their sensory control around their early thirties.”
“I know,” Awsten says quietly.
“Then you should consider your options,” she says. She glances down at the stack of papers. “Two of your friends are technically eligible, should you decide to go that route. Perhaps a little mismatched in terms of genetic strength, but if you felt strongly enough, there would be ways around it.”
The urge to leap to their defense and curse out this receptionist is strong enough that he actually has to close his eyes and breathe through it. She wasn’t trying to insult them. She’s just doing her job, giving out advice to a Sentinel who she thinks needs it. He shakes his head and smiles tightly. “I’m not considering bonding at the moment.”
The receptionist looks disappointed, but not surprised. She nods politely. “Please feel free to reach out to The Center at any time if you have need of our resources.”
“Thanks,” Awsten says, pushing away from the counter and heading for the parking lot, where everyone’s waiting for him.
Yeah, he’s not choosing one of them over the others.
For now, he gets to keep all three of them.