Chapter Text
Mat has always liked Brian best like this: hazy, evening sunlight gleaming in the golden flecks of his eyes, and tree branches casting shadows on the slopes of his face and neck and arms, no sound between them, save for the gentle lapping of water against the shore of the pond. They’ve been coming here since they were kids; it almost feels like a third home, because, of course, the Sella house is Mat’s second. They bike the distance from their respective houses, pedaling until they eventually skid into the underbrush and are forced to continue on foot to their little oasis, hidden away in the thick of the woods. There, they sit cross-legged on the shore, sometimes talking, sometimes smoking, but always together. It’s a slice of heaven in their otherwise dull lives.
Some nights, when summer seeps through their clothes and makes the fabric of them cling to their skin with sweat, they strip to their underwear and run off a dock belonging to one of the surrounding houses, splashing into the cool and forgiving water, but tonight’s different. They’re watching the sun go down in silence, and Mat’s not even bothering to swat away the mosquitoes as they bite at the exposed skin on his arms, and he’s still thinking about how beautiful Brian looks, all lit up like this and glowing, when he suddenly passes the joint in his hand to Mat. It makes him jump.
“Tomorrow’s going to be so fucking weird, man.”
The words roll off of Brian’s tongue lazily as he lies down onto his back, and Mat silently thanks the smoke in his lungs for allowing him a few seconds before he has to respond. He sounds nonchalant, but Mat knows that he means what he’s saying; Brian’s careful with his words, in spite of the stupid shit they both know he does. They’re just about the only thing he’s careful with.
“Good weird, though, right?” he asks, but he can feel his heart rising into his throat as the words come out of his mouth. Normally, he would’ve laid down beside Brian, fitted himself against the curves of his body, arm against arm, hip against hip, endless points of contact running all the way down their sides, but he’s motionless now. He ignores the way he can feel Brian staring at him and focuses instead on how the water of the pond moves towards them, then away, then towards them again, over and over and over.
It jolts him back to reality when Brian says, “Guess so. D’you think so?”
“It’s your last first day of high school, Bri. ‘Course I think so. It’s about as ‘good weird’ as you can get.”
Brian laughs, and Mat doesn’t know if it’s with him or at him, but he thinks it sounds holy. He tries to sneak a glance back at Brian, but all he gets is a smile, and then Brian’s gripping the sleeve of Mat’s t-shirt and pulling him, and they’re both sprawled on the sand, limbs tangled together and their joint dropped and lost in the commotion. He calls him an asshole and elbows him in his ribs, but he doesn’t mean any of it, and Brian knows it, too, because he just keeps laughing. Please, God, Mat prays to the sound of his laughter, find me a way out of this tonight. He doesn’t get a response, and the feeling in his chest doesn’t go away; it never does.
Eventually, his laughter subsides, and then, it’s just the two of them, lying there, Brian’s arm looped around Mat’s neck, Mat’s foot hooked around Brian’s calf. It feels a little bit like home. Once the silence has hung thick in the air for a minute (or maybe two, he’s not really keeping track), Brian says, “You don’t have to be so weird about it, y’know.”
“It?”
“All of it.”
He doesn’t have to ask what Brian what he means.
“I’m not being weird about anything,” he mumbles, and he knows he’s lying through his teeth when he does. Hell, he knows Brian knows he’s lying. They know each other a little too well, and that’s almost to be expected after seven years of friendship, but he always feels so exposed when it comes to his best friend. There’s a special type of vulnerability that the two of them share with each other, and Mat’s never known what to do with it but bury it under layers of shitty jokes and cheap beer and smoke rising in their lungs. Never acknowledge it, never give it the dignity of being brought it out into the open, he thinks, and everything will be okay; he can keep pretending Brian doesn’t know him better than he knows himself.
“If you say so.”
He feels Brian sigh before he hears it, his breath warm and familiar on the skin of his neck, and then, a split-second later, the sound of something tired and just a little bit exasperated hits him. In the time they’ve been there, the sky has darkened from blue to orange to dusky pink to a deep purply-gray, and now the first stars are glittering behind the clouds. The longer they lay together, the bigger the lump in Mat’s throat grows, and he knows that they can’t stay there forever. He’d like to, sure; he’d love to never leave, to carve out their own little forever in the place between the trees and where the water laps against the shore, but all they’d be doing then would be prolonging the inevitable, and he knows they can’t do that. He knows he can’t do that.
They untangle themselves from each other a little while later, their footsteps heavy as they clamber blindly through the woods to where they left their bikes. All Mat thinks about the whole ride home is the way Brian skidded to a stop at the opposite end of the street, grinned back at him, and shouted, “You’re my best friend, Mathew Uychich!” before taking off again. He’d stood and watched him pedal away until he wasn’t sure anymore which speck in the darkness was Brian.
He hopes the whole neighborhood heard him.
-:-
Nothing remotely memorable happens until Mat’s second period. Like any other school day, he’s mostly focused on just getting through it until lunch, when he can see Brian again and they can ditch the cafeteria and hide out under the bleachers together, but then his English teacher—young and perky and obviously new to her profession—forces everyone into a ‘getting to know you’ game that they don’t really want to play, and it throws off everything. They’re supposed to find a partner and ask them a series of questions, then tell the class their answers. He’s always hated the way these games work, no matter the subtle differences among them, so Mat makes no movement to pair up with anyone, wondering idly if the teacher would object to him partnering up with someone in a different class entirely. Then again, as he glances over the questions, he figures he could probably answer every last one for Brian without asking him any at all.
He keeps thumbing through the packet of questions, occasionally mumbling one or two of them to himself, until finally a tall boy bounces up to the desk in front of his, sits himself down, and says, “We’re going to be partners. ‘Kay?” From the looks of it, he’s not particularly interested in the assignment either; if anything seems indicative of that, beelining for the one kid actively trying not to partner up with anyone does.
Mat doesn’t respond, verbally or otherwise, but the boy just steams right ahead. In a matter of seconds, he learns that his name is Jack, and that he’s pissed off that his best friend, a boy named Alex, isn’t answering his texts, and that he’s supposed to be a senior, but he failed a couple of grades, so now he’s stuck with ‘little baby sophomores’ in ‘little baby sophomore classes’. Mat tries not to feel offended over that while Jack tries to reassure Mat that he’s not stupid—just lazy. Part of him wants to ask what the difference is, but he stays quiet. In all of his fifteen years, Mat doesn’t think he’s ever heard one person say so much in so little time, never mind the fact that it’s not even nine in the morning yet.
Truthfully, Mat just wishes Brian was there. Then again, Mat always wishes Brian was there.
Finally, somewhere around three or four minutes into his chatter, Jack finishes, and Mat thinks he might have whiplash. There’s a moment of silence, of reprieve, before a look of confusion dawns on the other boy, and he asks, “What’s your name, again?”
“I never said it in the first place. It’s Mat.”
“Oh, right. Hi, Mat. I’m Jack. Barakat.”
Mat can’t help but snort a little bit before he says, “Yeah, I know. You already told me.” Jack starts babbling about their assignment then, obviously embarrassed, but he’s stopped paying attention to him altogether. He doesn’t even bother to check if the teacher’s watching before pulling his phone out of his pocket to see if Brian’s texted him yet. English just seems trivial and unnecessary when he considers the fact that he wants to spend the rest of his life making music, not… reading books, or whatever the hell it is that English majors actually do. School itself seems trivial, and when the screen of his phone shows that he has not one, but three, new text messages from Brian, it seems even less important.
From: Bri Bear (3 minutes ago): How’s english treating ya bud??
From: Bri Bear (1 minute ago): I forgot I have fiorello for gov and it’s killing me lol
From: Bri Bear (just now): sos!!!!! :(
He’s starting to type out a response—something vaguely poetic and clearly stupid and optimistically flirty about them rescuing each other from their shitty classes—when Jack interrupts him, “Why are you smiling like that, dude? Is that your girlfriend or something?”
There’s part of him that kind of wants to laugh at the notion of him ever having a girlfriend, but he knows that Jack doesn’t know any better. Really, Jack doesn’t know him at all, and normally, a stranger—especially one as annoying as this one—asking him personal questions like that would bother him. Right now, though, he just glances up at him and shrugs as noncommittally as he can bring himself to, the ghost of a smile still on his mouth.
“Yeah. Or something.”