Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Andrew disappeared.

He was there one minute — terribly, terribly there, terribly present and terribly in the moment, raising his hands up to the sky, thousands of windows breaking and the glass shards gravitating to him like they’d been created to do it, every camera in the entire city focused on him, screaming, the static in Matt’s head so painful his ears were bleeding, and nothing could ever be the same. Andrew had been right. It was done, Matt knew as he stood there, screaming alongside Andrew, knowing what he had to do and hating everything in him for doing it. At that point it had been the only thing he could do, because all of his strength was gone, all of his energy dissipated into the night sky, and all he wanted to do was gather Andrew into his arms and go to fucking sleep. Make all of it stop.

But somehow he still found the strength to rip that spear from the statue and send it straight through his cousin.

Or … he would have, if Andrew hadn’t suddenly not been there anymore.

It was the static that first clued him in, or, rather the lack of it. Matt’s head had been shrieking with feedback. It was the sound of Andrew’s misery, and it was ten million times worse than sensory overload.

Everything else fell quiet. All the shouting from the police and the bystanders, all the glass splintering and breaking in response to Andrew’s pain and suffering. Matt, who had been doubled-over, his hands clasped to his ears, took them away in disbelief, hardly even noticing how they were stained red, and not just from where he’d been shot, either. The wound paled in comparison to the sight that met him when he stood up to see Andrew had … vanished. The statue’s spear was sticking out of the ground. It had hit its target. But its target was nowhere to be seen.

The cops turned to him, then, their guns lifted, a quiet, suspicious murmuring passing between them, the only sound other than the blades of the helicopters hovering overhead. He wanted to laugh at them. As if he’d … what? Spirited Andrew away somewhere? Didn’t they know how much more powerful than him Andrew was? Didn’t they know that by this point he couldn’t have made Andrew do anything he didn’t want to do? Didn’t they know that—

There was sunlight coming in through his window, which was not par for the course with Seattle weather, but he wasn’t complaining. He could smell toast from downstairs. His mother was probably making it, which meant it was going to end up burnt, and ever since he’d learned that a person smelled burnt toast when they were having a stroke, he had begged his mother not to make toast just in case he was having one and couldn’t tell, to which she’d rolled her eyes and told him that he was being ridiculous, that he was thirteen and thirteen-year-olds didn’t get strokes, and anyway, she didn’t burn toast that badly, and Matt had been, like, Mom, I could play street hockey with that thing.

But he could smell chocolate chips underneath of the burnt toast, and his mom was good at making other things, things that weren’t toast, so Matt pushed himself up off his bed and went to the bathroom, where he brushed his teeth and splashed his face with cold water. When he stood to look in the mirror, he pressed his fingers to a bruise painting the curve of his jaw on his left side and spreading down across the top half of his neck. Jesus, what a shiner. It didn’t look like the kind of thing you’d get just from falling down after having a few too many, so though he couldn’t remember exactly where he’d gotten it, he was pretty sure his family already knew about it. And if not, he’d tell them the truth — he’d tripped and wiped out on the sidewalk and hadn’t noticed it had left a lasting mark.

He just wished he could, like, remember tripping and wiping out on the sidewalk.

He walked out into the living room and was immediately accosted by his mother.

“Oh my god,” she said, crushing him in a hug so tight he couldn’t breathe. “Matt, baby. Oh, you poor, sweet thing.”

His shirt was wet where her eyes were hidden in it. She was … crying?

Huh?

He hugged her back, because he didn’t know what else to do, and surveyed the living room over her shoulder. His father was standing off to one side, arms crossed in the way that fathers tended to do, searching him with an expression he couldn’t quite figure out. What was strange about it was that there was no trace of anger in it. If he’d been pissed off plus something, Matt might have understood — might have figured that he’d blacked out the other night, done something really stupid, and at least then he could start piecing all this together. Except that that wasn’t it at all. He was … worried? And … intrigued? Something like that?

And there, on the couch, biting her lip as she looked up at him…

“Casey,” he said.

“Hi, Matt,” she answered.

“What… What are you doing here?”

And everyone was looking at him, like, Does he really not know? Except he had no fucking clue what he was supposed to know.

Casey’s voice, normally so sure of itself, was tremulous. One of her hands rested on a videocamera, palming the side, like it was precious cargo. She said, “He didn’t take it with him. So, I don’t know, I just thought I’d keep it, just in case…”

Andrew.

The name hit him like a sledgehammer, a physical blow. He was left temporarily speechless; how on Earth could he have forgotten what had happened last night? How in the world could he have put that shrieking static out of his mind, his cousin’s screaming, how the searchlights were so bright that half the time he had to rely on his telekinesis like an extra sense because he couldn’t see what the hell he was moving, the pain, the universe-ending pain, and oh my god, Andrew, Andrew, Andrew.

His hand was to his face. He was sure some other Matt, somewhere back along the timeline, would have thought it was so incredibly uncool to cry in front of Casey, but oh, God, he loved Andrew so fucking much.

“I should have told you guys,” he managed through his tears.

He could hear his father start to speak up, but this connection was not something anyone but he and Steve and Andrew could ever have known. They’d been something— family, siblings, something— his mind felt like it was fracturing into pieces, with the other two parts of this makeshift little triad they’d become dead. This was not how it was supposed to happen.

“Stop,” he said, voice trembling, to his father. “Stop, let me talk. As soon as it happened, I should’ve said something. And, and then Steve wouldn’t have had to die, and Andrew wouldn’t have gotten hurt, and he wouldn’t have had to worry so much about Aunt Karen and Seattle wouldn’t have had to happen, and oh my fucking god, he was in so much pain. Jesus Christ, he was hurting so badly. And they wouldn’t stop, you know? They wouldn’t stop, and he needed them to stop, just for a fucking minute, and they wouldn’t, so, like, what else was he supposed to do? God, if I’d just helped him stop them…”

But he’d been so weak already. And, in the same set of circumstances, Andrew had just kept getting stronger and stronger.

“Matt,” said Casey quietly, “where’s Andrew?”

Matt said, truthfully, “I don’t know.”

Before he went to school, he stopped by Andrew’s house.

He never went inside. Even if he’d wanted to — and he hadn’t, of course, because that house was the sort of place that you could look at and know evil things happened there — Andrew wouldn’t have let him. There was one time he’d gone in, when they were a little younger, just starting highschool, and he’d seen Aunt Karen hacking and coughing with wires and tubes all stuck in her like a lab experiment. The house had been dark and messy and smelled of alcohol. The TV was on Animal Planet, and Andrew had been lying on the couch, looking halfway to being a corpse already, blood staining the corners of his mouth, his eyes the only living thing about him, and god, they’d been alive. He’d never seen a creature with eyes so wide and terrified.

He’d never gone inside again.

The next day at school, they’d hung out like nothing had happened. The only sign that what he had seen had been real was the dark rings under Andrew’s eyes and a tiny cut on the right where his top and bottom lip met.

Today, everything was different.

Matt parked the car and slammed the door so loud he was surprised it didn’t fall off the hinges. A neighbor or two peeked their heads out of their houses — though they must have been used to Richard’s drunken tantrums, this was something new and delicious. Something they didn’t have to feel bad about witnessing and doing nothing about.

He ignored them and shoved open the door without knocking. Which was an accomplishment, because it was locked, but he hadn’t bothered with the knob or the lock. When you were psychic, there wasn’t a need to. The door went blasting across the room, where it crashed into the wall opposite. Mouth drawn tight, Matt nearly wished Richard had been standing behind it. Another part of him was thrilled he wasn’t. He didn’t get to get off that easy.

“What the hell?” Richard slurred from somewhere in this dark, desolate hell.

“Where’s Andrew?” Matt demanded as his eyes began to adjust to the dark.

Richard stood up slowly. He’d been on the couch, which was, unsurprisingly, littered with beer bottles, a bottle of whiskey on the side table next to him, nearly drained. He’d never looked good, but he looked especially terrible now, as if his body was only moving because it was expected to and not because there was an actual person inside of it ambulating it.

“Dunno where that fucker is,” said Richard, already sinking back into whatever bender he was in the middle of. “Why? He late for school or somethin’? Guess that ain’t a surprise, since his mom ain’t around to wake him up anymore.”

Matt paled. “…what?”

“Oh, you didn’t know? Yeah, Garretty — your aunt died. Came in and told Andrew. Made that little shit apologize, ‘cause she died while I was out lookin’ for him. Let ‘im know it was his fault. Had a weird dream it was in a hospital room, though.”

“You… You made Andrew…” Matt swallowed. He had to put a hand on the ruined doorjamb to keep himself from stumbling. If weed slowed his mind down, he imagined this must have been crystal meth — darting, frantic, wondering if everything he looked at was going to give him a new earth-shattering revelation. He had to work to remember how to form words. “You made Andrew … apologize.”

“Sure as hell did.”

“You mean… While he was in that hospital bed… unconscious. You… made him… apologize… for his mother dying.”

Richard snorted and took another swig from a beer he had probably woken up holding. “You stupid? ‘course I did. Wait — did you say hospital bed?”

The windows exploded inwards, all at once.

Matt hadn’t moved an inch. He stood there, trembling with the force of his anger. He could feel the familiar warm wetness of blood oozing from his nose and dribbling over his lips, coming so fast and heavy he would probably have been concerned about it, if he’d had any thoughts to spare towards it. But his head was thundering. There was a pounding in the back of his skull, and he thought he might understand Andrew a little bit, now, because he could see the fractures ripping their way up every one of the walls in Richard’s house and all he could think was how he wished he was strong enough to make them so deep the house collapsed right here and now, with Richard in it.

He couldn’t believe he had checked here first. Why would Andrew ever want to come back here?

“You’re a fucking monster,” Matt hissed. “I should have let Andrew kill you.”

And the realization was dawning on Richard, through the haze of alcohol. That what happened the other night hadn’t been a dream. That no matter how much alcohol he used to try and drown it out, it had happened. And that nothing would ever be the same.

His eyes were the only living thing about him. And they were wide and terrified.

It was like he was carrying a contagious disease, which he guessed he sort of was, except that the contagion was localized to, like, the thing in the ground, and also, not really all that much a disease.

Matt walked through the halls at Covington High School and crowds parted for him. People rushed from their lockers when they saw him coming, not even bothering to hide their terror. School staff shied away and retreated into their offices, watching from the corner of their windows, peeking through the blinds. Matt didn’t need to do any research to find out if last night had happened. It couldn’t be any clearer if the walls had been covered with printed-out articles about it.

Not for the first time, he wondered if it really had been only twelve hours. He would have thought the school would be in lockdown. He would have thought the whole city would be in lockdown. The only reason he was here was because he hadn’t known what else to do after leaving Andrew’s house.

He found Casey at her locker. The girls she’d been talking to fled, sprinting down the hall as fast as possible.

“Is the government, like … trying to pretend like it didn’t happen?” he asked Casey, who also was at school for some reason?

She wouldn’t meet his eyes. She kept trying to, but she couldn’t hold them for more than a second or two before looking away. She gave him a cagey, nervous smile and said, “Did you find out anything about Andrew?”

“No,” said Matt. He watched the black half-sphere of a camera in the corner. Before any of this, he would have bet money on not a single one of them being functional. Now, he had no doubt that every single one in the school was trained on him. Had they brought in the CIA to watch him behind the scenes? Were they in some dark room, crowded around a wall of screens, ready to fill him with bullets if he so much as breathed in a way they didn’t like? He said, “I went to his house before school. His dad was there. He, uh, he said some pretty awful things about what he did to Andrew.” And I think I got mad and accidentally blew out the window, he wanted to say, but didn’t, because the last thing he wanted anyone to think, if they were letting him walk around and seeing if he was a threat to humanity at large, was that he wasn’t in control of his powers.

“So,” said Casey, “are you going to keep looking for him? I mean, he’s your cousin, so it’s kind of important, right?”

She wasn’t even trying to look at him now. She was buried in her locker, rifling through books and papers without any rhyme or reason. Her lips were pressed into a tight line.

“Yeah…” said Matt. “Yeah, I guess … Casey, you’re okay, right?”

Her eyes were shining with tears that she was blinking furiously to try and get rid of. “Of course I’m okay, Matt.”

“Then, uh, where’s Andrew’s videocamera?”

She collapsed to the floor.

She was shaking. Seizing. Her eyes were rolled halfway up into her head. Sick with terror, Matt knelt over her and concentrated on straightening her arms and legs, placing them inside invisible barriers like Andrew had taught them at the diner. Like Andrew had taught them? He remembered, back then, how he’d been convinced he’d never be at that level. And yet, Casey’s arms and legs were stilling. Hitting unseen glass walls and going no farther. He watched as dark drops of blood fell from his face and spattered the white tile floor.

The emergency rescue team arrived a lot later than they should have. As they surrounded Casey — and him — and loaded her onto a stretcher, Matt met their eyes — or thought he did, because all of them resembled Secret Service agents, with the dark glasses and everything, and said, “You should have been here sooner. I mean, Christ — if you’re going to put her undercover, make sure you fucking have someone around to take care of her in case things go wrong.”

He probably would have gotten away with it if these had been the police.

Unfortunately, these were not the police.

There was a jolt and then an electric shock in the middle of his spine. Somewhere along the way, he must have passed out, because when he next was aware of himself, he was lying on the cold tile floor, and the world was sideways. One of the whatever-they-were was kneeling behind him, knee shoved into his back, doing … what? Cuffing him? They had to know that wouldn’t work.

Stay calm, he told himself, though he was anything but. Don’t give them a reason.

The school ripped apart.

Matt could only tell from the sound. His vision was flickering in and out, partially because of his condition, partially because the world had become a cyclone of shrieking metal and glass and cement. He was half-delirious — probably more — with shock. Oh, god, he thought desperately to himself, I hope Casey is okay.

He didn’t know how long it lasted; he only knew that at some point the world settled into silence. His ears were ringing. The tips of his fingers were numb. He was coughing, covered in dust and dirt and detritus, things that had probably been parts of classrooms at one point but were unrecognizable as such now. He pressed bleeding fingers to the ground and pushed himself up, though he was only able to identify it as such because his body kept trying to topple back over. The air was hazy with smoke, like he’d been inside a building that had been bombed to near-nothing. He was surrounded by enormous slabs of concrete and bent steel beams. The school was in no way recognizable.

Oh, god, he had to get out of here. He’d obviously lost any shred of control he’d had over his powers. The windows exploding back at the house, the school being reduced quite literally down to rubble … he hadn’t meant to do either of those things. And now, stumbling through what he was faintly sure had at one point been the school’s front walkway, he could barely put a coherent thought together. If someone tried to go after him now, he wasn’t sure he could stop himself if he tried.

Of course, that was exactly when a shiny black BMW raced down the street towards him, swerving so harshly that it left black tire tracks on the street.

With his last rational thought, he launched himself into the air.

A rope tied itself around Matt’s ankle and yanked him down to the ground.

What little breath he had was knocked out of him. His ankle was radiating with pain — but then the pressure disappeared from around it. Matt blinked down at it from where he was lying on the ground.

There was no rope, and there was no sign of any rope ever having been anywhere near him.

All the BMW’s doors opened at once.

There was no one in the car.

Wonderingly, Matt pushed himself up one more time, keeping his weight off his ankle, limping as quickly as he could to it. He could hear helicopters in the distance — he thought. Who was to say what was real and what wasn’t anymore? The world floated around him like thick fog. All he could think about was his next action. Nothing past that. But whether they were real or not, he had to move. No way was he putting himself in this fucking situation again. No fucking way.

He dragged himself into the backseat of the car, his face crushed into the leather seat, breathing it in. The doors slammed behind him; he couldn’t even find it in himself to care when the BMW shot off far past the speed limit in an escape route from King County.

He smiled into the seat. Everything was going to be okay now.

“Hi, Andrew,” he said.

Chapter Text

Matt slept for twelve full hours. When he woke, he very nearly fell asleep again — except that he remembered who had come to save him, and consequently bolted upright.

At first, he thought he might have been mistaken. He’d been delirious, after all, barely hanging onto consciousness. At that point he hadn’t been sure what he was seeing. The school bringing to mind the visual of some destroyed building in a war-torn third-world country had been so out of the realm of normalcy that even though he now knew there were people with the ability to make it like that, he hadn’t accepted it, not really.

But now, he was sitting up, and he was leaning against the back of the passenger seat, his arms looped around the headrest. They were still blitzing down the highway, King County far behind them, if the surrounding desert was anything to go by. But there was no driver, no one else in the car except for Matt, and as he watched he saw that the steering wheel was turning slightly by itself, compensating for when the car drifted just a little bit this way or that.

“Andrew,” he sighed. That night, he’d been screaming the name as a desperate plea. Now, he said it softly, and he didn’t think he could stop saying it. His cousin was here. Thank God. Thank God. “Hey,” he said suddenly, “where are we headed? Do you…” But it was futile, asking if Andrew had a plan. He stopped himself halfway. “Never mind. Don’t worry, man, it’s cool. I guess I’ll just wait ‘til we get there.”

He’d tried to take charge once. Look how well that had turned out.

But now, Andrew was here. And even though Andrew was headstrong and short-sighted, he was the most powerful out of all of them. There was a certain comfort in going through life knowing that your cousin was stronger than God and loved you enough to come get you, even though the last he’d seen of you was you trying to kill him.

“Andrew,” he said, and the car stalled out for a millisecond, as if mimicking, Hm? Matt traced a pattern on the headrest absently, his eyes falling to the empty passenger seat. “I’m sorry. About all of it. I should have gone to you, you know, I shouldn’t have, like— I shouldn’t have reacted, not like that. I should have asked you what was going on. I went to see your dad and, uhm, he told me. What he’d done to you.” Even that was a weak admission, because Matt had known what went on in that house and he hadn’t done a goddamn thing. “Andrew,” he said again. “God. I’m really, really sorry.”

And of course it probably wouldn’t have helped, because at that point Andrew had been blind with hatred, and Matt would have been surprised to hear him string a sentence together, but for fuck’s sake, he hadn’t even tried.

And he was already fucking up again, really, because there was no doubt his parents were being questioned by the CIA or whoever it had been at the school, and Casey definitely wasn’t having a great time, wherever she was, and he’d left everyone in King County to deal with the fallout of what they’d done, but Jesus fucking Christ, he was so goddamn tired of being responsible.

He sank back into the seat and spread out across the back. With one arm hooked under his head, he said, “We’re running away, huh?”

The car slowed down dangerously.

“No, no,” said Matt, “I wasn’t saying it was, like, bad. This is what we should have done, you know? I should have just, I don’t know, come in the middle of the night or something and picked you up from your dad’s place. I know, you wouldn’t have left your mom alone, but, like, Jesus, man. I should have tried. Gotten away from all of it for a while. Or forever, if we could figure it out. I mean … with the things we can do now? We could have found some way to make sure your mom was taken care of. Could’ve grabbed Steve and, like, gone anywhere.” He drew in a shaky breath. “At least we’re doing it now.”

The sun had just crossed the horizon. The last vestiges of light were valiantly clinging to the sky, and there were stars, all over, more stars than Matt had ever seen, and he knew that this was only a fraction of them, that there were skies where they were so thick it seemed like you could trail your fingers through them. Normally he had to be high to care so much about something like this. But after last night, he found himself endlessly marveling.

He laid a hand on the back of the driver seat’s headrest and said, “Hey, dude … I’m wiped. Let me know when we get wherever we’re going, okay? Or, like, even if you just see something cool or, like, if you decide to actually show up from wherever you are, so I can, I don’t know, give you a hug. Okay?” At the risk of being the target of Andrew’s teasing later down the line, he said, “A family hug. You know. Since we’re cool now. I hope.” Then, “…you’re a good guy, Andrew. Night.”

He woke up stifling a scream.

He pushed himself up so that he was sitting against the car door. Outside, he could see the desert sliding smoothly past. Now that they were no longer in danger of being chased — Matt assumed — the car had slowed down to regular cruising speed, maybe sixty miles an hour. The background was no longer a smear of color as they raced away from the scene of the crime. Matt just wished it had happened in a place that was a little more interesting to look at.

He slid his hand underneath his shirt and felt the rabbit-thumping of his heart within. God, he hadn’t had a nightmare so bad that he wanted his mom in ages. Probably the last time it happened had been the day before he started highschool. Safe to say, this was a far more serious situation — but somehow he still felt, deep-down, that if his mother was here she would have been able to fix everything.

Which was ridiculous, because he’d woken up in his house, and she’d been there, and all she’d done was cry into him, and now she was probably being interrogated by the CIA — or FBI, or the Department of Telekinetic Affairs or whatever the hell — but the panicked thought process of someone who had just woken up from a nightmare had never been the most rational.

Once he’d gotten himself under control, he pulled himself the rest of the way up so that he was sitting in the backseat like normal, his head resting against the window. Every few moments the car would hit a bump in the road, minor or otherwise, and Matt’s teeth would shake with the impact of it, but he didn’t move his head. He was so tired — emotionally tired, mostly, now that he’d caught up on so much sleep, but a physical tired, too, the kind that came from having to push his mind far past its normal processing speed for far too long. His thoughts now drifted around his head, slow and quiet, and sometimes entirely silent for minutes at a time. He was again grateful beyond belief that Andrew seemed to have taken control of the situation for the time being.

There was a town on the horizon — Matt could see the beginnings of the tall buildings against the endless bright blue sky. He had just pulled out his phone to check where they were when it was tugged out of his hands. As he watched, it came apart into individual pieces, each of which hung in the air for just a moment before compacting into unrecognizability like gravity had just increased a hundredfold. The window opened by itself and the phone was launched out through it.

Matt pinched the bridge of his nose, trying to keep himself calm. Right. No, okay. Andrew knew what he was doing this time. He had a clear head, or clearer than Seattle, at least. They should have made sure his phone had been dismantled back at the school. It was an oversight on both of their parts that they hadn’t. But at least now whoever was chasing them — if they were still chasing them, and Matt doubted they’d given up so easily — didn’t have a traceable signal. If they were tracking Matt’s phone, they’d get this far and no farther; they’d have to rely on tracking them through something else, instead.

Since when had Matt become the careless one?

“Thanks,” he said, sliding his hand down his face, over his chin, down his throat. “Thanks, Andrew. That was my bad.”

The car horn honked once, very softly.

The sun was beginning to think about setting once more when they pulled into the valet of a La Quinta in Chandler, Arizona. Matt tugged his hood up, grateful for the weather, which was edging towards rain but wasn’t convinced it wanted to go with it yet, and walked in, trying to look like he knew what he was doing, and not like someone who had just come in off the street and had no idea how hotels worked.

The front desk was unoccupied, which was strange. Matt had never seen an empty hotel front desk. He debated waiting around for the receptionist — which was ridiculous, since he had maybe seventeen dollars total in his wallet, and this was a four-star hotel — but he felt invisible hands at his back. No — not invisible hands. It was difficult to explain what the telekinesis felt like. It was a limb that had no name. It was like imagining a tail or an extra set of arms; theoretically, the extra limb was there, but it was decidedly less solid than the ones in the corporeal world. That was what he felt now, pushing him along. He tried to walk as if he wasn’t being guided by an outside force, but Andrew was so insistent on him picking up the pace that it was difficult.

“Andrew,” he hissed under his breath, “this is wrong. This is a really nice hotel, and we’re not paying for it.”

But even he could hear how obligatory the words were. It was just a regurgitation of what he’d been taught, growing up in a mom-dad-two-kids-and-a-picket-fence household. Obviously, they weren’t going to pay for it and leave a trail. And it was worse for them to steal the money from someone else than it was to just take one of the empty rooms. So when Andrew continued pushing him along, a little harsher now, he let him, and watched in mild fascination as the elevator’s buttons pushed themselves, and as the electronic lock to a room on the seventh floor turned green without him having to flash a card.

The door shut behind him. Matt closed the drapes with his mind absently. He only noticed after the fact and was a little taken aback by it. Sure, he’d gotten into the habit of doing it here and there in his room, turning the TV off when he was done using it (which had taken some practice, because he wasn’t good at the intricacies and the last thing he wanted was to tell his mom he’d broken his television), closing the door behind him when he didn’t feel like turning around to do so, levitating a baseball overtop of his head at night when he couldn’t sleep, because he’d seen the grin on Andrew’s face when he’d done it and he wanted to know what being that happy was like. But after Andrew’s house and the school, he’d thought he could only manage destructive things with his powers. Except, now that he was thinking about it…

“Andrew,” he said. “That was you, wasn’t it? At the school … and at your house. You’ve been hanging around the whole time. You’ve been with me ever since last night.”

The light flicked once.

He lowered himself to sit on the foot of the bed, his arms crossed over his legs. “You were pissed off. That’s why the windows blew in at your house, and why the school got ripped apart.”

The light took a little longer to flick this time, but it did, a singular off-and-on motion. A begrudging, Yes.

Almost to himself, Matt said, “The school … you did it because they were hurting me.”

Emphatically, immediately, the light flicked several times in quick succession.

Matt slid his hands up to his face and leaned forward. His eyes were starry with tears, and though Andrew wasn’t physically present, Matt felt as embarrassed showing the depth of his feelings as if he was.

“I know I should be angry at you,” he forced out, “but, like, I can’t be, Andrew. I mean … those people got hurt, and we have to figure out how to do things without hurting people. And we’re gonna, because you’re, like, basically God now, and you can do so much shit you couldn’t do when you were here, and you’re strong enough to do that shit without hurting anyone anymore. But, like, Jesus Christ, dude. I tried to kill you. You should hate me.” Jesus, it was destroying him not to be able to hear Andrew’s voice, not to be able to see him, to be throwing this monologue out into empty air and not being able to get any response other than flickering of the lights. He went on: “But you don’t. Or, you do, but you love me, too, and, like, fuck, dude. Fuck! I guess I’m just, I don’t know … in some weird roundabout and fucked-up way I’m trying to say that I love you, too.”

He drifted in and out of sleep, hoping every time that he woke up that it would be to Andrew standing by the bed, or sitting at the foot — just something, anything, to show that he was there. Though it couldn’t have been anyone else doing the things Andrew was doing, Matt was terribly paranoid, and he kept wondering if maybe he was the one doing them, subconsciously, attributing them to Andrew. The strongest argument he had right now was that he had been in no shape after what had happened at the school to grab a getaway car, and he’d never moved anything in his sleep, so an outside influence had to have been driving the BMW.

Still, doubt wouldn’t stop creeping around the corners of his mind.

He had heard that if you pretended like you were supposed to be somewhere, often people didn’t question you about it. That was the philosophy he adopted as he left the room and went down to the free breakfast offered in the hotel lobby. His hands itched with the need to pull his hood up so no one would recognize him, but it would have been so much more suspicious if he had. He sat at a table close to a door at the side of the building, his back to the lobby, which still made him seem a little suspicious, or like some kind of antisocial weirdo, but he didn’t care much about peoples’ opinions of him when it was between that and being recognized as the kid on the news that had been flying around in Seattle.

Slowly, the lobby filled up with other hotel guests. Matt wished he could stop anxiously bouncing his leg. His mind was desperate to move something, to release built-up tension, but that was a surefire way of getting himself caught.

It didn’t matter, in the end, because as he watched, a fleet of important-looking black cars with tinted windows screeched into the hotel parking lot. And to his horror, the people who got out of them were all wearing the same darkglasses that the officers at school had been wearing, their suits too pressed and orderly to be anything other than government-issued. One of them palmed some kind of weapon that Matt had never seen before. It was something in between a pistol and a taser, but crossed with some third thing that made it unrecognizable as either.

Objectively, he knew why they had chased him all the way here. But Jesus Christ, couldn’t they just leave him alone?

He didn’t have time to formulate a plan. It seemed like they were filtering in through every door before he could so much as come up with a single coherent thought. There must have been other cars that had pulled up behind the hotel — officers were coming down the back hall, too. Two of them had come in through the side, and several more stood by the walkway on the opposite side of the door. Matt was left staring at the two that had positioned themselves directly in front of him, who were staring back with no expression on their faces.

“Morning,” Matt said around a mouthful of waffle.

They were not amused.

And it was, like, god, he’d already been through so fucking much. Couldn’t they at least laugh?

There was a commotion happening behind him. The regular hotel guests who had come down for continental breakfast were reacting like anyone would upon seeing multiple government agents show up for no reason. A teenage girl and what Matt presumed was her little brother had snuck around the side and were anxiously looking at the side door and then back at him, trying to gauge if the suits would care if they bolted. When none of them reacted, she tugged on her little brother’s hand and opened the door, sprinting out into the grass.

When the door swung shut behind her, it shattered.

Not just the door, either. As Matt watched, each of the windows blew out, too, the same way they had at Andrew’s house, the glass collapsing to the ground, leaving behind only the empty frames of each window.

The urge, then, was so overwhelming that Matt could almost swear he heard the voice in it.

Run.

The agents — Matt didn’t intend on sticking around long enough to figure out if that’s what they were technically called — lifted that strange weapon at the same time that Matt stood up, telekinetically throwing the table aside, his eyes fixed on the empty window frames. They were already aiming it at him. Similar to a taser, some sort of electrical current jumped from it and towards him, likely to incapacitate him, which it would have done … if he was alone.

Instead, it bounced harmlessly off of what appeared — or didn’t appear, really — to be an invisible force field surrounding him.

Right. His mind flashed again back to the diner. To Andrew stabbing the table in between his fingers, that stupid kids’ game turned into something with so little risk he might as well have been stabbing with a marshmallow. Matt could sense the field around him, even though the only physical evidence it was there was if something crashed against it.

Secure in the knowledge that Andrew had his back, Matt jumped into the air and shot out through the empty window frame…

…only to be thrown into the ground so hard that he lost consciousness before he could see what had done it.

Chapter Text

Matt was really fucking sick of being slammed into shit.

He spent a brief period of time being unconscious — really brief, which he was thankful for, because he was sure it wouldn’t have taken the agents long to come and get him and ship him off to some secure military base miles underground if he’d been out long enough to let them — and when he came to, he was staring at a rock wall. Not the kind used for recreational climbing, but, like, an actual rock wall, like a cave wall. He could only really tell because of the stripe of sunlight coming down from above, filtering through a hole in the ground, a hole that was eerily similar to the one that he and Steve and Andrew had climbed down once upon a time, before everything had changed forever.

He pressed a hand against the cave floor. He didn’t know why, at first; then, as he began to regain his mental faculties, he realized with wonder that he was searching for something. He hadn’t consciously chosen to do it, but some part of his telekinesis was leeching out through his fingers and trying to look for… something. He didn’t know what.

Whatever it was, it wasn’t here. He could only feel traces of it, like a feather brushing diaphanous against his skin, just the tip of it, so that he really had to focus to feel it at all.

But he couldn’t deny that it was calling to him. Which was, like, really fucking weird. Matt had never really been religious aside from cultural Christianity, you know, the sort of thing where he would say grace at the table and knew the Lord’s prayer because it was all over the fucking place and in every TV show ever when a character was about to die, so, like, he knew that sort of thing, but this wasn’t that sort of thing. It wasn’t God. All the same, though, it was calling to him.

He pushed himself up onto his elbows. There was sound coming from outside the hole. He didn’t have long if he was going to give them the slip. Wincing as he did, he brought one knee and then the other up to his chest, and then he stood, swaying a bit, catching himself with his telekinesis when he went too far one way or the other. There was a misshapen tunnel before him, an unplanned exit route, and though he may have been walking from the frying pan into the fire it was at least better than taking his chances flying up and out of the hole and probably getting incapacitated and captured by whatever agency was after him for his trouble.

As he crossed the threshold of the tunnel, dirt and rocks rained down behind him to seal it off. Almost instantly, seeing nothing but a very dim light ahead of him and unable to look back behind him to see the pool of sunlight on the dirt? cave? whatever it was? floor, Matt was thrown into a panic attack. He wrapped his arms tight around himself and breathed deep — in for a few seconds, then hold, then out for a few seconds, then hold, the way he’d been taught the first two or three times he had tried edibles and hadn’t taken kindly to them.

“Andrew,” he said, his voice very small and weak, “you’re still here, right?”

In response, a rock skipped down the tunnel, so far that it would be impossible to think it had happened naturally, especially when the tunnel wasn’t on a downward slope. There was no sound of it hitting a wall at the end — it just kept going, and going, and going until it faded out due to the distance.

That, at least, put a significant damper on the anxiety crawling underneath Matt’s skin. With a deep sigh of relief, he said, “Okay. Thanks, man. I’m kind of flying blind here. Literally. And, like, I don’t know anyone who’s into being buried alive. Yeah, yeah, I know, I’m a hypocrite,” he said, before Andrew got the chance to make a sarcastic — inaudible as it may have been — remark, “since I made you go down in that hole outside of the rave, but, like, we couldn’t not go see what was going on down there, you know? It was…”

Calling to us, was what he had been going to say.

He swallowed.

Behind him, he heard the muffled sound of the agents climbing down into the hole, or starting to. The drop had been nearly thirty feet; they must have had to figure out some way to get down without hurting themselves. He wondered how he’d been able to do it… but then stopped wondering when he remembered the night before last, when he and Andrew had crashed through the walls of a bank and hadn’t suffered nearly the amount of damage a normal, non-psychic person would have if they’d attempted the same thing. As he walked, he could hear more dirt filling the space behind him, scraped off of the walls of the tunnel and filling it in so that the farther Matt went, the more the people chasing him would have to dig through in order to get to him. He was sure Andrew was packing it in tight, too; they’d have a hell of a time excavating enough to catch up to him.

There was nothing to do except walk, so he started talking, as it was more than a little terrifying to be underground in a tunnel filling itself up behind you as you went and to not only be doing that but be doing it alone in complete silence.

“Andrew?” he asked.

A light breeze passed through the tunnel. Matt knew it had to be his cousin, because it was coming from behind him. There wasn’t a chance in hell any wind was making it through the tightly packed dirt at his back.

He said, “What do you think happened to us down there? I mean, I didn’t ask at the time, you know, ‘cause it was, like, we have these powers now, and it’s totally kickass, and so I kind of got caught up in that, but now that we’ve had them for, like, two months, I think it’s a good idea to start questioning where they came from. Like… what was that rock, you know? And how come it changed colors when we touched it? And, like… why telekinesis? Was there a reason any of that happened? If Steve were here, I guess he’d, I don’t know, say radiation or something, some comic book shit. But I think it’s different than that. You know?”

He was sure it was irritating for Andrew to be faced with questions he couldn’t answer, at least not in a way that Matt was able to understand, but asking them made it feel less like he was deluding himself into thinking his cousin had become an invisible god-like being and more like he was just having a conversation with someone that didn’t really like to answer his questions. That was what Andrew had been like before, anyway — always defensive, and a little hostile because of it, even though Matt knew he hadn’t meant to be. He’d never known how to navigate conversations. Matt could at least fumble his way through them, though he messed up a lot; Andrew hadn’t even read the instruction book. He hadn’t even known there was an instruction book to read.

“And obviously, like, the government’s in on it,” Matt continued. “Probably those fucks that are trying to chase us right now, since they had, like, anti-psychic weapons. There’s no way the hole was there that long and then we went and touched it… and didn’t tell anyone… and the very next day they had people filling it in. Like, what was that all about? I bet they couldn’t find it until we activated it or whatever. I bet it’s one of their projects that they fucked up and couldn’t find, and then when we activated it, it sent out a signal or something, and then they could find it. But, uh, if that’s what it is… how come they didn’t give any of their people powers to fight us? ‘cause now they know where it is, yeah? So… it only makes sense. Fight fire with fire, and all.”

Matt liked to hear himself talk, but he was beginning to feel like he was just talking himself into circles. They had too little information, and every avenue he was going down mentally was leading him to a dead end precisely because there were too many possibilities and variables. Ironically, this was when he could have most used Andrew by his side, ferreting out information that Matt didn’t have the finesse to. Not to mention—

“Hey, Andrew?” 

He paused an appropriate amount of time, where his cousin would have answered if he had had the ability to. He could almost delude himself into thinking he heard, Yeah, Matt? What’s up? in that quiet, halting voice Andrew had always had, almost like he was afraid of speaking at all, like his voice was something he had to ask permission to use. 

He went on, “You’re really smart. You know that?”

Because even if people liked things about Andrew, Matt couldn’t recall anyone ever telling him. Maybe that’s why he had warmed up so much to Steve; Steve had liked things about Andrew, and then he had told Andrew those things, and that had let Andrew know, yes, this is something you should keep doing, because it’s what people want to see more of, this is what will open people up to you.

He wished he could be even half the man Steve had been.

Here he paused, reminded himself — end on a high note, he’ll never listen to you otherwise. When you said you could run away together, that it wasn’t too late, that’s what he listened to, not when you were telling him, no, you can’t do this, this is wrong, you’re ruining everything, Andrew! That had been the catalyst to really ruin everything. You couldn’t do something the same way and expect it to turn out differently. And he would do anything to keep it from turning out how it would have turned out, if that spear had hit its mark. He couldn’t chase away the visual of it buried in Andrew’s chest. Weirdly enough, he could picture what had happened if it had skewered him. Really could, like the way that you only could if you had seen it happen, could remember the way Andrew’s limbs had dangled there and the way he had been screaming and instantly gone quiet, the same as had actually happened, except that he could see the body, the way all the life had come out of it all at once, rather than the way Andrew had simply disappeared. Both realities co-existed in his mind, each as clear as the other, and he wasn’t sure why.

Matt was very good at shoving things aside to think of them some other time and then completely forgetting to think about them again until he was so high he found himself in restricted airspace. (That could happen literally now, he realized — he briefly considered making lock all the doors part of his pre-packing ritual, but locked doors were hardly going to stop someone with telekinesis.) So that was what he did now. He put the strikingly clear visual of his dead cousin in a box, and he put that box aside to be opened at a later date — probably a date that would be inconvenient for everyone involved.

He said, “No, really. Like, for one thing, you know all about that camera. I’m sorry the first one got lost in the hole. It looked like the sort of thing you’d, like, take apart and see what was going on inside, you know? You seem like you’d wanna know every inch of that thing. Maybe we can get another one. Or, I don’t know, find a way inside the hole.” He waited an appropriate amount of time for a imagined that’s what she said from Andrew, and snorted appropriately, because, god, there was no way he wouldn’t have said that if he had the ability. “‘cause, like, I really wanna go back, y’know? And I bet you do, too. And then we can get the old camera back.”

He had no idea where the second one had gone, lost or destroyed or forgotten in the heat of the moment. In any case, it hadn’t been there when he’d been with Andrew the other night, up by the Needle, so it was safe to say it was probably gone for good.

“But, I dunno, you always got good grades, and it seemed like you didn’t even have to try. So, I know this is a crappy pep talk, but it’s just something I was thinking, like, how much smarter you are than me — and yeah, I know, well, Matt, if you didn’t smoke so much you wouldn’t have killed so many brain cells—” He said this in a sarcastically deep voice, like Andrew would have if he’d been here physically, and made himself smile in spite of it. “—but even if I didn’t get high all the time, you’d, like, run circles around me at anything book-smart. And, like, street-smart is cool, yeah, but… that shit doesn’t last, right? Once you get out in the world, it’s the people who were good at trigonometry and shit that actually get anywhere. And, who knows, maybe you would have spent your twenties getting really kickass at, like, being charismatic. I mean, everyone loved you at the talent show, right?” He was about to say before— and stopped himself; no need to remind Andrew how that night had ended. “So, you know, people would just need to know what you’re good at. It could be your powers, whatever. If that was what worked. I don’t know, man,” he said, aware he was rambling, and aware he was probably doing it because he was so fucking lonely it pressed on him like the weight of the universe, because, God, he wanted to hear Andrew’s voice so badly, and this was the next best thing, “I just wanted you to know that. So.”

Probably Andrew took a little bit of sadistic pleasure in watching him flounder around like an idiot, verbally, desperate to please him. That was okay. As long as Andrew was happy… or approaching it, at least. 

(He was fairly certain the only times Andrew had ever truly been happy had been those few short halcyon days after they’d really gone at it with their powers. The baseball, Five Below, the day they had flown for the first time.)

He turned his attention then to the light at the end of the tunnel. It was this soft whitish-blue light, and now that he was closer, he could see the way that there were long black tendrils extending from whatever was around the corner to the right, snaking along the ceiling.

Like veins.

He felt something strange, then. A fierce protectiveness. Not to anyone in particular. He just knew that he wanted to keep something safe, and he wasn’t sure what it was. Up ahead was something that posed a threat — but something else in the back of his head nagged at him, told him not to attack, but to observe. Defend if necessary. What? Defend what?

He looked up, where he by default imagined Andrew — and all other all-powerful all-seeing entities — to be, but if Andrew felt the same, he didn’t make it known.

There was no sound behind him. Silent as a crypt. He held himself tightly and continued onward.

Ten minutes later, he rounded the corner—

—and found himself face-to-face with another thing-that-had-been-in-the-hole.

A crystal, he guessed? A geode? He didn’t know what to call it. He guessed ‘crystal’ was good nomenclature. It looked a lot like the other one, a gigantic mess of spikes glowing soft turquoise. The tendrils from the ceiling originated from this one as well, and wrapped around the crystal just the same as the first one they’d encountered, extending as if sensing him, and then retreating in response to something — his powers, he knew, somehow. He couldn’t see them, obviously, but he knew subconsciously — how? — that they were like these tendrils, snaking out and testing, tasting, like antennae. The tendrils on the crystal reached out again — and then shrank back nearly immediately, slithering back into themselves like they had just… like they had just sensed something so much more…

Andrew.

They had sensed him, first, maybe seen him as an inconvenience, but not a threat. It was only when they’d reached out again, maybe to do something about him? that they’d sensed Andrew and immediately decided they didn’t want to have anything to do with him.

Driven by that same mysterious force as the last time he had done this, only two months ago, at the very most, but feeling so much longer, he reached out a hand and placed it on the crystal.

<—and if you touch him, I swear to God, I’ll make you wish you’d never crawled out of the fucking ground. Do you fucking hear me?! Because, trust me, I have had a REALLY shitty two days, and the last thing I need is someone going after the only—>

Astonished, Matt said, “Andrew?!”

<…Matt?!>

Matt thought his legs might buckle with relief. He brought his hand up to his face, covered his eyes. Took a few deep, shaking breaths, blinked back tears that fell from his eyes anyway. When he looked up next, everything was a smear of blue — he knew Andrew would make fun of him, and he didn’t care. He said, “Andrew, holy shit.” About time you showed up came to mind, but he replaced it with the much less confrontational-sounding, “I missed you, man. It’s really, really good to hear your voice again. Christ.”

He covered his face again and was mostly unashamed to let Andrew hear the stupid, wet sound of him crying.

<Jesus, Matt. I’m gone two days and you break down like a little bitch?> But it wasn’t hostile, he could hear it. It was very obvious, when Andrew was smiling. You could hear it in his voice, the thrill, the hope that this meant someone liked him. You could hear the upturned corners of his mouth in it.

Matt sob-laughed and nodded fervently. “Yeah, man. I am so out of my fuckin’ league.”

<Yeah, no kidding,> said Andrew. <Okay, so—>

His voice cut out as suddenly as if someone had thrust a spear through his chest killed him quickly and cleanly clapped a hand over his mouth. A panic slammed through him — and then he realized that he had taken his hand off the crystal. He touched his fingers to it tentatively, and immediately Andrew’s voice flooded back through his head, accompanied by that low sound of feedback that had always come along in the background whenever Steve and Andrew had used their powers.

<—and basically, now I’m it, I guess? But I—>

“Andrew, hold on, hold on.”

<What, too complicated for you?> And there was that arrogance again, but there was Andrew’s smile, right alongside it, overjoyed that he was good at something, better than Matt by far, so it was alright, really.

“No, uh — I think hearing you is, uhm, tied to this thing. When I took my hand off, I couldn’t hear you anymore. So I missed basically all of what you just said.”

<Oh. That’s easy. Stand back.>

He obediently took three big steps back. There was a sound like shing!, and a chunk of the crystal the size of Matt’s middle finger sliced off of the main body of the crystal and fell into the dirt below. After a few seconds of nothing else happening, Matt bent down and picked it up, and Andrew’s voice slid back into his mind, smooth as water.

<There. Now you’ll always be able to appreciate my dulcet tones.>

Matt snorted again. “You dork.”

But he turned the crystal over in his fingers reverently. It glowed just the same as the larger crystal; though he was touching it, it didn’t turn red like the first one had. Maybe because he already had his powers?

“So what were you saying?” he asked, leaning back against the tunnel wall — there was nowhere else to go, as the tunnel terminated at this crystal, and had been filled back up all the way to maybe ten feet back. He had time; even if he didn’t, now that he could hear Andrew, he would know exactly what to do if the government came after him again.

<Okay, uh— so, you know the first crystal we found?> When Matt nodded, he said, <It was, uh, this organism, basically, like an animal, or a plant, I guess. Uh, and so it comes up to feed, like, burrows upwards through the ground, right? And…>