Work Text:
For all of his life, Walter had known what to do. He had spent hours pacing back and forth in his bedroom, scripting everything out. The world was a game to be played. It was a glimmering puzzle box with some set of codes and instructions to be imputed, to make it all make sense. He could remember being very young, looking up at the sky and thinking that one day he would find it. And it would all click into place.
But once he was standing alone in an airport -Florence gone- left- abandoning him- after trying to justify his actions, after everything. It was becoming increasingly clear that the world had no plan behind it. He didn’t know how he would deal with that. He remembered standing in that familiar living room, Florence sitting in that chair, the walls curving a little bit near the ceiling as he looked her in the eyes -he didn’t like looking people in the eyes -he was good at pretending to do it without actually doing it -it was a kind of intimacy he could tolerate from someone like her -like Freddie - where was Freddie?
She was looking him in the eyes and she said “Walter. There is no blueprint. I can’t tell you what to do all the time. You have to figure that out for yourself. There is no one right answer. This is a great freedom.”
He could remember Freddie pushing up against his certainty in determination, he could see that smile, that spark in his eyes while he told him that it didn’t matter what he set up, what the rules were. It mattered how much he wanted to win. “That’s what’s important,” he said. “Obsession, passion are what matter. It matters how loud you are. To win or lose is a choice you make. You know what we will choose!”
He was standing in an airport, he was standing in a hotel bathroom, staring into his eyes, and it was clear that there was nothing. No blueprint, no instruction manual. No one was mailed the Rules To Life when they were born, wrapped up in a nice little book. They all just had to figure that out on their own, they just had more room for clumsiness, a more natural sense for how to be. He wondered why he couldn’t figure it out. He wondered how everyone wasn’t going mad from the revelation, that the world made no sense, that there was no script to follow.
He never liked chess all that much, but he had a tendency to love chess players, a tendency to end up constantly around it anyways, so maybe he accidentally ended up thinking about the world like chess. A game to play, a universe that made sense. Adopting too much of Freddie’s mannerisms, Florence’s anxieties. He didn’t have that anymore. She wouldn’t come back anymore. There was no plan, no set of instructions to follow and he was alone. And he would have to keep doing things. The future would come, the clouds rolling over from daylight to darkness, seasons changing over and over, and he would have to keep doing things. Keep being the person he had built for himself. And he had to have trust that it would all make sense someday.