Chapter Text
The moment we forgot we were just good friends,
I moved my arm, your face went red again
One more bus home, another silent weekend
-
You wake up from a dream that feels like a nightmare to the sound of the world shaking apart.
No, wait, that’s just your phone.
Damn.
Barely conscious, the hazy reaches of sleep reluctant to leave your head, you grope blindly at your bedside table, latch onto your angrily vibrating phone, and bring it in front of your face. The words DON PEDRO flash across the screen, unmissable. You briefly contemplate throwing your phone out the window. For a blissful second, the thought seems like a logical course of action. Then you actually think about it, and decide picking up the call might just end less catastrophically. Though, to be fair, one can never really tell with Pedro Donaldson.
“’Lo?”
“Balthazar, you bastard, are you still in bed?”
You groan, bringing your hand up to your eyes to shield them from the sun. “Definitely not.”
“Don’t lie, it’s not a nice color on you.” You stick your tongue out before you remember he can’t see you. “I’m going to be over there in ten minutes, and if you’re not up I’m dragging you into my car, PJ’s and all.”
“I’d like to see you try,” you say, though you’re fully aware that such a feat is possible. It has happened several times in the past.
“Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, and guess what?”
“What?”
“It’s the first day of the last year of school!” With a whoop loud enough to force you to hold your phone away from your ear, Pedro hangs up.
The first day of the last year of school.
You stare at the ceiling, the words echoing in your ears, and the beginning of the end washes over you, no longer a distant thing of the future. Almost tangible. It leaves a taste in the back of your mouth, and you can’t really tell if you like it or not. You can’t really tell what you’re feeling about it at all.
It’s too early for this shit, you think. Too early to think about the ending of things you’ve known your whole life, and too early to think about the beginning of things you’ve never experienced before. Too early to be paralyzed with the fear, or the relief, or the thousand other feelings you could spend your whole life trying to decipher and never being able to.
What were you dreaming about, you wonder. You can’t really remember all that well. There’s a lingering feeling in the back of your head, though, sweet and beautiful and poisonous. Maybe you don’t want to know.
And then your thoughts latch onto well-styled hair, and smooth white skin, and suddenly you know all too well. You should have known better, anyway. You dream about the same thing every night, don’t you?
“God,” you say to your ceiling, and you wish you could sink into your blankets. You wish you could drown in them forever.
It’s a miracle that, ten minutes later, you find yourself on your porch as Pedro’s half-alive, mostly rusted truck sputters into the driveway. You barely remember how you got there.
“Balthazar!” Pedro sticks his head out the window, the truck still running, bless his soul. “Come on, you beautiful fucker!”
You adjust the straps of your bag on your shoulder and make your way to the car. “So you admit it,” you say as you climb in.
“Admit what?”
You grin, making sure he catches it in the mirror. “That I’m beautiful.”
He snorts, takes his hand off the steering wheel and, though distracted by the road, manages to shove your shoulder with enough force to make your whole body rock. “Don’t kid yourself.”
“Hey, you need two hands for driving.”
“Shove it,” Pedro says automatically. You can’t help but laugh in his face, and it doesn’t take much for him to join in as well.
The silence that the laughter leaves in its wake is familiar, one you both have inhabited countless times in the past. You can’t remember when they stopped being awkward; you just know the sound of silence is not nearly as comfortable with anyone else as it is with him.
“So Ursula’s doing this video project after school today,” Pedro says finally. He’s usually the first to break the moment, isn’t he? You don’t really mind, can’t remember the last time you did. “Says she wants to ask us a bunch of questions.”
“Questions? What kind?”
Pedro shrugs. “Dunno. Reckon it’ll be fun though, yeah? You game?”
Not really. “Yeah, why not.” With him, maybe.
You look over just in time to catch Pedro’s face breaking into a smile, and he’s the kind of guy to smile all the time but not the kind of guy to smile like this very often, so open and unguarded, the kind of look you don’t see as often as you like. You’ve spent your whole life chasing after smiles like those, and they’re never around for very long but you’d do anything – anything – to be there for them whenever they come. You’re surprised – surprised, but grateful – that you have been allowed to bear witness to this one.
“Brilliant,” he says. “Great.” And before you can really help yourself, your heart stutters in your chest, overwhelmed with – with something – and you hate yourself, a little, for slipping hold of your control even for just this one second.
Because you can’t ever lose it. Not ever. Not even a single inch.
“We’re here,” Pedro says, and as he pulls into the parking spot his smile fades away with the slowing speed of the car.
It was nice while it lasted, you think.
The rest of the day feels insignificant, inconsequential compared to those precious few minutes in the car. You can’t really bring yourself to pay attention to anything else around you, not the teacher’s pseudo-enthusiastic voice, not the manufactured chaos of your classmates around you, certainly not the minutia of the classes themselves. None of your friends are in your classes, anyway, so nothing’s really keeping your attention. There’s a song stuck inside your head, circling around itself in haphazard beats, and your foot taps the whole day, waiting impatiently until the moment you can get home and get it out of there.
That’s the thing about music – to you, it’s less a hobby and more a compulsion, less an interest and more a way of life. Less something you like to do and more something you have to do. It fills you up, from your toes to the bottom of your lungs to the scattered thoughts in your head, and it’s everything and nothing all at once. You breathe it; you live in it every waking second.
After school ends, you find Pedro sitting on a ledge in the courtyard, his head leaning against a nearby pole. Ursula is nowhere to be seen.
“Hey, so how was your day?” you say as you step onto the ledge beside him. “And, er, where’s Ursula?”
“She’s got others to interview, I’d bet,” Pedro says, standing up. “And it was fine, I suppose. Better now that you’re here.”
“Don’t say things like that.”
Pedro looks up at you, his brow furrowing. “Why?”
Before you can respond, Ursula enters the courtyard. “Sorry I’m running late, guys,” she says, hurriedly setting up her camera. “Beatrice held me up. Said something about how all the invasive questions were unfair? She made me answer some myself.”
“Yup,” Pedro says, nodding thoughtfully. “Sounds like her, all right.”
“Anyway, just wanted to let you guys know, if you want to check out the video, I’ll have it up in a month or maybe two – still quite a few people to interview. All right, so, um, say your names when you’re ready. Camera’s on now, but I can just cut out whatever’s unnecessary.”
“Right, Pedro Donaldson.” And just like that, he’s broken into a winning smile, from nothing to everything in seconds flat. You’d always been amazed by how quickly he could change his emotions like that. Until the day you realized it wasn’t his emotions that were changing.
“Oh.” You realize suddenly that you’re still standing on the ledge and jump down. “Uh, Balthazar.”
The rest of the interview continues uneventfully. To be honest, the questions were fairly innocuous, for what you’d been led to imagine. You’d half-expected being forced to share your first crush or something.
As you walk back to the car, though, you notice the crease between Pedro’s eyebrows, almost impossible to distinguish for anyone who is less familiar with him than you. It seems he does not share your opinions. But his lips are pursed, and he doesn’t say anything, so you figure if he decides to share with you what it is, he can do it on his own terms. It was never your style to push him into anything he didn’t want.
So you get into the passenger seat and you keep your silence, though the unspoken questions burn in your throat.
The road passes by, and it’s as quiet as your thoughts.
“Did you mean it?” Pedro says suddenly. You feel your head snap over to look at him, though his eyes are determinedly fixed on the road. Besides a whiteness on his knuckles that implies a tight grip on the steering wheel, there’s nothing that indicates how he feels, or what he’s talking about. “What you said, back there?”
You blink. “Er. Said what, exactly?” As far as you can remember, there wasn’t anything life-shattering that was said by either of you.
“Your favorite quote.” A squeeze on the wheel. “’Love will not betray you, dismay or enslave you. It will set you free.’ Something like that.”
Oh.
“You really think that it’s true?” he says, and it’s only six words that are spoken but you’ve always had a thing for being able to tell what he really meant in far fewer. And you wish you didn’t. You really do.
“Of course.” In an attempt to shake off the heaviness in the car, you continue, “Are you worried about your love life? That’s a surprise.”
“Not worried about mine,” he says quietly.
No.
Of course he isn’t.
-
He was the most excited you’d ever seen him when he pulled into your driveway for the first time with his very own car. Before then, you’d had to rely on harried parents and long walks, but you both knew the freedom this implied. The power to go wherever you wanted, without having to schedule plans and secure parental permission days in advance; unfettered desires more easily indulged in than ever before.
“Anywhere,” he said when you approached the gloriously rusty truck, his face flushed with happiness. “Anywhere you want, I can take you there.”
Slowly, you opened the door and climbed into the passenger seat. The whole time, you could feel his eyes on you, eager with anticipation. You carefully remained silent until you pulled your seatbelt home. His undivided attention was something you savored greatly, at the time.
“I don’t care,” you said finally. “Just drive.”
With a loud whoop of appreciation, he backed out of the driveway, the sun falling across his face as radiant as the smile that split his lips. You had to turn to the window to hide your own behind your palm, had to focus on the fields that passed by so that you didn’t have to face the whole of his brightness. Most days, it was already too much, but today he was just overwhelmingly, wonderfully blinding.
When you’d gotten into the car, the radio had been blaring a loud top 40 song that was somehow appropriate for this impromptu exaltation. Soon, though, it switched to a soft track, strummed guitar and hushed vocals. It was a song for getting lost, for lazy driving days. You knew the lyrics well, whispered them under your breath before you went to bed some nights. It was a song that made your heart ache.
He became as quiet as the music, but when you looked over at him you could see the corners of his mouth still upturned. The afternoon sunlight lit the edges of his profile into sharp relief, setting the tips of his golden hair aflame. His eyes had never seemed so full; it had never been so hard for you to breathe.
He only had one hand on the steering wheel. The other was resting lightly on the gear shift. Dangerously close to your own. In a brief, heartstopping moment, the urge to rest your hand on his seized your mind. Before you could do anything to stop yourself, you wondered what it would be like to press your sweaty palms together and–
Just –
The guitar played quietly from the radio speakers.
Your head snapped back to the window, and your pulse felt as loud as your thoughts, and that damned song was still playing, and the emotions you wanted to swallow down like so many pills wouldn’t seem to go away. You could feel the heat rushing to your cheeks before you could ever hope to stop it. And everything was too much. Everything was always too much, with him. And that’s why you turned away from him.
He noticed.
“All right?” You couldn’t bear the concern in his voice. It was supposed to be a good day, and you were ruining it already.
Then you looked over at him, and he couldn’t keep his eyes off the road for very long but in that briefest of brief moments he was looking at you too, and there was nothing in his face but contentment, satisfaction, happiness. And you wanted nothing more but to live in that happiness with him too.
You wanted it more than life.
But there were no words to express that to him, and so the hills passed by in silence.
-
You realize, with a start, that a song filled with wistful sounding guitar and hazy vocals is playing on the radio. It’s not the same song. It’s not the same song, but it still makes your heart hurt.
“Pedro,” you say. “Don Pedro.”
He clicks his tongue between his teeth. “I told you to stop calling me that.”
“You can’t tell me what to do,” you say. “And you can’t feel guilty for things that aren’t your fault.”
He snorts. “Yeah, not my fault. Right.”
You suffocate your momentary annoyance. He has a good heart, you remind yourself. He has the best heart of anyone you’ve ever known.
“Look, if you’re still thinking about what happened yesterday, it’s fine. I already told you, I don’t want things to change between us.”
“And they won’t!” he says quickly, taking a hand off the wheel to run it through his hair. “They haven’t. You’re my best friend, you know that, Balthazar? But I can’t just not worry about my best friend. And we’ve kind of just – pushed this thing under the rug, you know? But I’d really, really hate for you to feel like you couldn’t talk to me about this. Or anything, really. Just – I want you to know that if there’s anything on your mind at all, I’m here for you. I feel like I don’t tell you that enough.”
You smile softly. “I’m not a guy of many words.”
“So that may be,” he mutters. “But still.”
God, this boy. This infuriating, damnable boy. Half of you wants to reach over and reassuringly ruffle his hair. Half of you wants to embrace him, bury your face in his chest and breathe all you can of him in. For obvious reasons, neither are options.
“I don’t want to stop being your friend, Pedro,” you say finally, putting as much truth into the words as you can. Because god, you mean it. You mean it more than you can say.
“Yeah,” he says under his breath, so quietly you can barely catch the words. “Me neither.”
Before you can respond, you realize you’re pulling into your driveway. The guitar fades away into cloudy-sounding synth. Your heart feels just as overcast.
“See you tomorrow, Balthazar,” he says as you get out.
“’F course,” is your response.
That’s one thing you can count on, at least, isn’t it? The day you don’t see Pedro, the day you don’t stand by his side is the day the world will end. You can’t even fathom such a thing happening.
And what would it be like, to never see Pedro Donaldson again?
That’s why what you said earlier is the truth. Because you know, in your heart and bones and all the parts of you that are deeper than you can even feel, that you could never give him up, and to be like this, to count him among your friends and to be there for him in even the smallest of ways, is colossally better than nothing at all. It is more than enough, and more than you expected.
It always has been.
-
You said love was painted gold,
Like all things growing old,
The paint peels and slowly falls