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Owen is sitting on the couch behind him, plucking out some Nirvana song at a snail's pace, pausing, adjusting, and replaying the same chords over and over.
At the beginning of all this, they had thrown around the idea of Owen playing this really awesome guitar solo, making that the whole climax of the movie, framing it as the impetus for the violence. He hasn't told Owen, but being able actually to shoot that ending is starting to feel less and less realistic. Matt doesn't know much about music – his only experience with an instrument had been slamming his fists onto the keys of his cousin's piano as a child until his mother told him, in essence, to shut the fuck up and knock it off – but even he can tell this is bleak.
"Dude, look, I'm about to do the Rainbow Road skip," he says, finagling the joystick and shoulder buttons of the controller just so. On screen, Toad leaps off the edge of the course into space. Matt lands it perfectly, naturally; but when he glances behind himself to gauge Owen's reaction he finds the seam of Owen’s lips pursed tightly, eyes glued to his fingers glued to the neck of his guitar: the picture of concentration.
Matt drums his fingers on the controller. There’s this sticky feeling he gets when Owen isn’t paying attention to him. It makes his fingers itch.
He finishes out the race first, of course – can't let a successful Rainbow Road skip go to waste – but then, sitting there on the floor, Matt picks up his phone and angles the screen so that it can't be seen from Owen’s viewpoint. He thumbs through his photo app, and says, as believably as he can, “Oh shit, Chrissy texted me.”
Owen either isn't listening, or refuses to take the bait.
“Oh my god,” he tries again.
A beat. Owen huffs out a small sigh, fingers stilling on the guitar. “She doesn't even have your number, man.”
“We exchanged numbers to share chem homework – Owen, you are not gonna believe this.” Matt keeps his eyes on his phone, ricochets his eyebrows up to his forehead, really sells it.
“What?” Owen finally says. He's doing that thing where he's trying to sound casual and not let Matt know that he's fooled him. “Let me see.” Hook, line, and sinker.
He leans down to close the distance, but Matt scoots further back as he does. He can't help it, he's smiling now. “I dunno, she says it's like private, or whatever, but this is really crazy–”
Guitar forgotten, Owen makes a lunge for the phone, flying off the couch and wrestling Matt to the floor.
Owen’s always run colder than him, preferring sweaters and turtlenecks and that dumb windbreaker he's always wearing, but right now his hands feel searing hot against the thin skin on Matt’s wrists. It’s shocking enough that Matt almost forgets to fight back.
He remembers to make a token show of resistance, eventually, playing keepaway with one hand and slapping away Owen's attempts to grab the phone with the other. Owen is taller than him but Matt is sturdy and strong and would definitely win if this was a real fight, which it isn't. He winds up pinned to the floor, in the end, and gets a pretty good view of Owen’s face when he unlocks his phone.
“What the fuck! Dude, are these your fucking balls?” He's wrinkling up his face and throwing the phone back at Matt like the object itself is contaminated, and Matt can't hold back his laughter any longer. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
“I told you it was private!”
“Matt.”
“How do you know they're even my balls? They could easily be Chrissy’s – you're just mad that your girlfriend is sending me nudes.”
Owen fixes him with a stare, deadly serious. Kubrick couldn't direct it better himself. “Matt,” he says, “I've seen your balls more than I've seen my own.”
Yeah, that's probably true.
“Okay, let's do a thought experiment. Let's say they are my balls–”
“Oh my god. You're doing that thing where you get mad at me because I didn't watch you do a Mario Kart skip for, like, the hundredth time.”
Oops. That obvious? Well, he’s recovered from worse.
"And you haven’t seen the sunset a hundred times? Are you above its breathtaking beauty, too?” Not Matt's best work, but he rolls his eyes, makes a real show of it anyways. “Very mature, Owen!"
"You cannot be comparing Mario Kart 64 to the beauty of – of mother nature.” He sounds incredulous.
"You know what? I think Mario Kart is more beautiful. I think there's something to be said about the ephemeral beauty of the Rainbow Road skip."
"Look, Matt–"
"It's too bad you'll never see it again. You don't deserve it."
"I'll just do it myself–"
"You don't know how!"
"I can learn–"
"You could never do it the way I do, you don't have the – the technical panache."
"Matt–"
Owen says his name a lot. It's nice; nicer still now that he's smiling and his brow has evened out and he's doing his little Owen laughing thing where his eyes squint up and he tilts his head forward like it's the funniest thing he's ever heard, so funny he can't even stay upright, and Matt can't help but join.
It’s nice that Owen is looking at him.
Matt breaks him out of his guitar-induced misery to watch a movie, eventually. They settle on Midnight Cowboy – an old favorite. Owen is fast asleep by the time Jon Voight and Dustin Hoffman make their way onto a bus to Florida, but that's okay, Matt forgives him. The ending always makes him cry, anyways.