Chapter Text
This was not the first time Gus had dreamed of dying, and it would not be the last time. Matt knew that. But every time he watched his friend wake up, screaming, he couldn’t help but hurt a little bit inside.
Mattholomule knew he had gotten very lucky, as far as people could be on the Boiling Isles. He had left the Collector’s reign (and Belos’s, for that matter) much less traumatized than he could have left. But Gus hadn’t been so fortunate
.
Gus was like that, though. Gus was stronger than him, and yet so much more ready to break. So much more resistant, but as soon as someone hit him in the right spot, he would crack.
Matt remembered when Luz had told him about “chicken eggs”. They were a geometrical masterpiece. Yes, their material was fragile, but unless you cracked them in the right place, they were incredibly strong. No matter how hard you pressed on the top and bottom of the egg, it would never break.
Matt liked—no, he loved— construction and architecture. The human realm had figured it out much faster than him, though. Maybe they had more inspiration. Things on the boiling isles were much better for inspiring weapons than for inspiring buildings. But the more Mattholomule could find from the human realm, the more he could use to rebuild the Boiling Isles.
That didn’t change the fact that Gus was screaming in his sleep. He was afraid. Matt kicks himself for not doing anything yet— if he woke up Gus, he’d nearly always get a hit to the face, but it was worth it to help him.
He shook Gus’s torso, and sure enough, a brown hand whacked his nose. “Ow,” he said, rubbing the bridge of it. Gus’s eyes were wide open, and he was breathing wildly. But he had said before that he preferred to wake up rather than endure the nightmare.
“I’m sorry,” he said quickly, staring a bit. It wasn’t a real apology, but Matt didn’t mind. Gus could barely get words out with the rate at which he was breathing.
“Look for something red,” Matt said, rather than responding to him. He had been through this routine before, and he had already cast a light spell.
“The ruby from the award I won in the spelling bee,” Gus answered immediately. To be fair, he couldn’t really see the award. They were on the floor of a temporary shelter Matt and some others from the old construction had built— both of their houses had been destroyed. But all that really mattered was that Gus thought of something red. Mattholomule continued all throughout the rainbow, then got to the neutral colors. He usually didn’t have to go to the neutral colors, but if the nightmare had been really terrible, Gus needed longer to calm down.
“Black?”
“My cloak.”
“White?”
“The stars.”
“Grey?”
“Floor.”
“Brown?”
“Your eyes.”
Matt paused. “Can you breathe steadily right now?”
Gus nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, yes, I think I can.”
Matt nodded slowly, fighting a frown. “Do you want to talk about the dream this time?” Gus didn’t say anything, which Matt took as a firm ‘no’. He squirmed a bit closer and started to rub Gus’s back in slow circles, the way Steve would do when he was little. “You know that you’re okay right now, right? Nothing’s going to hurt you. Not the Collector, not Belos, not anything. Nothing.” He puffed out his chest as he added, “And if it tried, it would have to go through me first.”
Gus huffed, a pathetic excuse for a laugh. Not the Gus laugh you heard before the war. “Yeah, right. Belos could snap you like a twig.”
“He could try,” Matt said, getting up to strut around the room and flex, “But do you really think he could go through this muscle? Through this mustache?” He touched his thumb to the peach fuzz he had recently started to grow. He was proud of it, even if there wasn’t much. It made him look like Steve, right before Steve left. He liked that version of Steve best.
Matt turned to his side, to see Gus’s smile. It was finally breaking into a real smile, a Gus smile, one of those smiles fixed so wide with teeth that you could have almost believed he had never had to cry in his life. Matt loved when he smiled like that. It reminded him that Gus had been a kid once, too. Even if he should have been one now, it was too late for that.
Matt always felt angry at the Collector, even though he knew he shouldn’t have been. He knew the Collector hadn’t understood what was happening, but still he couldn’t help but want to kill him. He had watched his friends and family be enslaved. He had watched, helplessly, as his school was turned into a safehouse against the people he loved. All for the sake of some cosmic kid’s fun. And he had done this to Gus. The real Gus smile was here, though, if only for a minute. There were even a few tears of laughter, but then Gus’s face went slack as he asked Matt, “What’s wrong?”
At some point, Mattholomule had stopped smiling, just so he could watch Gus’s face light up with joy. “It’s been so long since you’ve been this happy,” he answered honestly, starting to frown. “I just… I wanted to soak it in.”
Gus started frowning, too, and in that moment Matt hated himself more than anything else for ruining that moment. For inspiring that frown. For taking away that once-in-a-blue-moon Gus smile. “I don’t want to be a chore to you,” Gus mumbled.
“Chore?” Matt looked at Gus, trying to see what he was seeing. “Chore? How could you ever… You’re not a chore, Gus. You’re my friend. My best friend, at that. I’m not going to leave you to flounder on nights like these, especially not when I know you would do the same for me.”
Gus smiled, but it wasn’t his smile. It was the smile of a tired fourteen-year-old, not the smile of an energetic illusionist. It was the smile of the unconvinced, broken puppets. It was the smile of those who were in pain. If there was some magical band-aid Mattholomule could have pressed on Gus in that moment, he would have. But there was no fix for what had been done to Gus. What had been done to the Boiling Isles. Matt’s home.
Gus sighed. “It’s late, we should go to sleep.”
Matt nodded, wiggling into his sleeping bag, but pushing himself closer to Gus. “Good night, Augustus.” He laid his head in the crook of Gus’s shoulder and heard Gus sigh. Maybe he would fall asleep, maybe he wouldn’t. Maybe Gus wouldn’t either. But one day, they would have the Boiling Isles again. And they would have it together.