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“MATT,” Chris booms, bursting into Matt's bedroom and causing his brother to nearly jump out of his skin.
“Holy-! Jesus– fuck, Chris, what the hell?”
“I have an idea for this week's video!” Chris announces excitedly.
“Uh- alright? Whatcha got?”
“We should do a motorcycle vlog!”
Matt's expression drops and he tilts his head knowingly. “Chris. Is this just about your new bike?”
“...No! It's about this week's video.”
“Really. And you just happened to have this ‘brand new’ video idea conveniently after getting a new bike.”
“Oh…kay, sure, the new bike is where I got the idea from. But that doesn't change the fact that it'd just be a motorcycle vlog. I'm not trying to steal your spotlight or anything.”
“...Alright, what are you thinkin’?”
“Well, the fans don't know we ride yet, right? So we could just do a kind of intro video to how we ride so they can see how they feel about it! And then from there we can consider doing another video where we do some other more ‘interesting’ stuff.”
“So it's just a video of us riding.”
“Yeah, basically.”
“How are we gonna film that? The GoPro?”
“The GoPro is actually a good idea– I didn't think of that– but my idea was for you to drive the car and Nick films out the window and then you and I switch.”
“Both is an option.”
“Both is an option.”
“Have you talked to Nick about this yet?”
“Not yet– since it's a motorcycle thing I thought starting with you would be better, y'know.”
“I gotcha, I gotcha. I'm in, let's get Nick.
“I'm sorry, when did this become the Matt and Chris Sturniolo YouTube channel?” Nick questions, his usual dose of attitude leaking into his voice.
“The video's not gonna be all about us.” Matt contests.
“Seems pretty you-centered, if I'm being honest.” Nick narrows his eyes at Matt.
Matt starts a sentence but Chris wastes no time talking over him. “Nick, come on, you got the whole wisdom teeth video about you. This one is just like– evening it out, you know?”
“...Okay, what this idiot means is that you would still be participating in the video. We need a cameraman anyway, plus you could contribute your… amazing… commentary!”
“Oh yeah, bring the funny guy triplet along to be funny. And do all the hard work.”
“Nick, come the fuck on.”
“I'm kidding, I'm kidding. I'm totally pulling your tail. That's fine by me. As long as I don't have to get on a bike… I don't have to get on a bike?”
“Absolutely not,” Matt assures him.
“Not unless you want to,” Chris tacks on.
“Okay. Good. I am not getting on one of those death machines.”
“It's not a death machine,” Chris counters, walking backwards towards his gear hanging in the hallway closet.
“You say as you approach your suit of armor that you must don every time you want to operate your death machine.”
“Wait– before we break– I need to say one thing,” Matt cuts in. All bodies sit still, all eyes landing on him. “Nick. The saying is ‘pulling your leg.’ Not ‘pulling your tail.’ Please stop saying ‘pulling your tail.’ Nobody says that.”
“...Fuck you, Matt.”
Nick stands in the well of the open car door like he's hiding behind a shield, pulling out the vlog camera and aiming it at Chris, who's fixing his glove straps.
“Hehehe, you look stupid, kid,” Nick teases, his giggle emanating from behind the camera.
“You look stupid,” Chris throws back, flipping the visor of his helmet up so his eyes become visible. Nick giggles again.
“Don't die.”
“Yeah, I won't,” Chris replies absently, suddenly becoming deeply interested in his gloves again. Nick ducks into the car. A few moments later, Matt joins him. Matt slams his door behind him and buckles himself. Nick moves the camera to an angle where it can see both him and the younger.
“I just don't understand how you guys enjoy riding those things,” Nick states in a tone that's almost joking.
“It's not that hard, once you learn,” Matt explains, patting down his pockets to check for his necessities, including the keys.
“Right but…” Nick watches Chris mount his motorcycle a few feet ahead and to the right of the car. He starts it, revving a few times just for show. “...Does it not get scary?”
Matt pauses right before starting the vehicle to think for a second. “Sometimes it does, I guess, yeah.”
The car engine roars to life.
Nick yaps to the camera, telling it all kinds of things that the audience will probably not hear in the end result, while Matt carefully follows Chris away from their home to a nicer place to film.
Nick is in the middle of shit-talking a trend he doesn't like when Chris glances over his shoulder at his chase car momentarily, then waves to them behind him. Matt assumes that to be the signal that he's where he wants to be, and is ready to actually film.
Matt takes note of the cars around them, not a lot but enough for Matt to be a little bit uncomfortable. That's fine, though. He has faith in his own driving and Chris's riding that a few extra cars won't make too detrimental a difference. Plus, it's a multi-lane road. Plenty of space. In fact, he is more worried about the camera being able to see Chris than he is safety.
“Nick, Nick, shut up and film, look,” Matt urges, nudging Nick's left arm and pointing ahead into the lane to their right as Chris picks up speed.
Nick turns the camera around and focuses on filming steadily and keeping the youngest in frame.
Christopher leans forward on the bike, his chest dipping towards the dash, the purring of the brand-new engine sending electric energy up his arms and filling him with that familiar thrill.
Nick just doesn't get it, he thinks.
The rush and the fact that there's an audience today makes him confident and cocky. He starts weaving in and out of lanes, riding the painted dashed line and threading his bike through cars, gaining speed every second.
“What the fuck is he doing?” Nick asks, his question half-curious and half-concerned.
“It's called lane splitting,” Matt explains. “You would know that if you ever went to driver's ed.”
Nick rolls his eyes. “It looks dangerous,” he comments cautiously.
“It can be if you don't know what you're doing, but Chris does this all the time.” If Matt was being fully truthful, he would have said, ‘we do this all the time,’ but he decided against it. “Besides, it's really popular around here.”
Having clearly decided he's had enough, Chris settles into the far right lane, two lanes from Matt's car. He's also a decent distance ahead, due to the fact that you can, in fact, not lane split in a car.
Nick continues filming, turning the camera to face Matt.
“Matt, if I ever get on one of those with you, please never lane split.”
The car to Chris's left turns on their turn signal with Chris in their blind spot. Matt giggles nervously, his attention alternating between Chris and the road ahead. Surely they'll check.
“Yeah, no way. I would never–”
The world slows down the moment that the car starts turning. Directly into the side of his brother's vehicle.
“–Camera off,” Matt orders, his right hand shooting out in an attempt to either cover the lens or lower it. He misses, still focused on the scene on the other side of his windshield, but the gesture gets his point across. Nick is lowering it into his lap confusedly before the car even makes contact with Chris.
And then it does.
Matt watches, his face contorted into pure shock and horror, as the car shoves its way rudely into Chris's lane, forcing his brother into the concrete barrier at the edge of the road. Everything happens so fast that Matt hardly catches anything in the middle, but he hears the screeching of metal on stone, cars honking and swerving, and the crash. Everyone around him brakes to avoid the incident, and he does the same, stopping his car haphazardly at the side of the road. He glimpses the body of a motorcyclist sliding across the asphalt on its side, which is when he turns his head and squeezes his eyes shut. Nick gasps beside him.
“Please get up, please get up, please get up…” Matt repeats under his breath like a mantra.
Nick sits in unbelievably tense silence as he stares, terrified, out his window, camera shut off and forgotten in the foot well. But, lo and behold, at almost the same moment that Chris stops sliding, he quickly pulls himself to his feet.
“He's up,” Nick announces. The middle triplet releases his knuckle-whitening grip on the steering wheel, instead using his hands to cover his face.
“Thank God,” Matt mutters, eyes still shut. He takes a moment, then slides his hands off his face and goes to open the car door.
He looks out through the windshield before he does, watching as Chris walks down the side of the road, past pieces of torn metal, his arms up in the air in frustration as he slowly approaches the wreckage of what was once his new bike. Then, that slow approach becomes slower.
And slower.
And then he stops.
He doesn't stumble. He doesn't trip and catch himself at his knees. He falls, his whole form collapsing in on itself as his head tilts skyward, his arms slump to his sides, and his legs buckle, the back of his glinting helmet hitting the ground with a plasticky crack.
Matt processes the scene, and then pulls the handle and slams his bodyweight into the door. “Chris?!” he shouts over the roof, halfway out of the car. His brother gives no response, the limp form of the youngest triplet strewn across the blacktop like a discarded doll. “Chris!”
Matt makes his way around the side of the car, slamming his door shut as Nick starts to fumble with his door handle. Matt runs across the road, through the stationary cars, to Chris, and drops to his knees at his brother's side.
“Chris? Chris? You with me?” Matt urges, nudging Chris's shoulder firmly. He flips Chris's visor up, seeing his brother's eyes closed. “Oh my God– Oh my God.”
“What? What? Matt, what's going on? Is he okay?” Nick questions as he runs up.
“How should I know?” Matt retorts, panicked.
Nick takes one quick deep breath, then another. “Okay, okay uhm… What can I do?”
“Uhh, call someone. Call Mom. No, call an ambulance- call 911.”
“Okay, okay, doing that,” Nick accepts, pulling his phone out of his pocket and tapping rapidly at the screen with shaky fingers. While Nick paces and gives the operator as many details as he can about the crash, Matt tries to coax Chris back to consciousness.
“Chris? Chris, kid, you gotta look at me, say something, tell me you're okay.”
Chris remains unresponsive, and Matt starts to panic. He continues to nudge and shake his brother, attempting to rouse him as Nick watches nervously over his shoulder. Chris was just standing, walking even. How did it all go to shit so fast?
“Okay… Okay, right.” Nick pulls the phone phone from his ear momentarily and addresses Matt. “The paramedics will be here in 3 minutes.” Nick huddles around the phone again like it's his life source.
Finally, finally, Chris awakens, his eyelashes fluttering tensely against the bright sky above him. His eyes open ever so slightly and drift over to focus on Matt.
“Oh my God,” Matt mumbles.
Chris squints hard and presses his elbows into the pavement with the intention of sitting up. Instantly, a piercing pain shoots through his right shoulder, causing him to collapse and dragging a strained, pathetic scream from his throat. Matt recoils slightly in surprise.
“Woah, woah, careful, are you okay? What hurts?” Matt questions.
Chris rolls onto his left elbow, groaning. His right arm is still limp and useless due to how much stabbing pain his shoulder is in. “M-my bike– we were filming, r-right? I got it on camera! I caught it all–”
“Chri… Chris. I couldn't give any less of a fuck about your bike, are you okay? What hurts?”
“...Okay, y-yeah, my– my shoulder. The right one. And my… ribs.” He only then realizes how difficult it feels to breath and speak as a dull yet powerful ache pulses against his ribcage. “And my neck.” He attempts to wriggle the aching stiffness out of his neck, but it doesn't help.
“Okay, gotcha. Try not to… move too much. I need to tell Nick that. The ambulance will be here soon.”
“W-wait, ambulance?” But Matt has already jumped up to relay Chris's complaints to Nick and the emergency services.
Chris's gaze drifts absently down to his feet and what he sees shocks him so bad he has to double-take.
His big toe. That's what he sees. His left boot is missing, God knows where it ended up, and his sock has torn in such a way that he can see his big toe. Seated neatly on the blacktop next to it is an unidentifiable piece of amorphous shrapnel. Chris is hit with the jarring thought that the torn-up scrap could have very well been him.
He got lucky.
“Lucky” quickly becomes the word used to describe Chris's accident. “Lucky” he got pushed into a barrier and not another lane of traffic. “Lucky” his whole body didn't get pulverized into dust between the aforementioned barrier and the car. “Lucky” he didn't hit his head too hard, or twist his neck too far.
Well, for how supposedly “lucky” he'd been, he sure doesn't feel it. If he had really been so lucky, he wouldn't be sitting in the backseat, nursing a dislocated shoulder and three bruised ribs, dozing off on Nick's shoulder as a combination of pain meds and the gentle vibration of the engine lull him to sleep.
When Nick is sure that his baby brother is snoozing, he says words for the first time since they got in the car.
“Well, I learned something new about myself today.”
Matt glances in his rear-view mirror but gives no verbal response. Nick takes that as a reply.
“I never want to be anywhere near someone with a dislocated shoulder ever again.”
A smile pricks at the corners of Matt's lips. Encouraged, Nick continues.
“I mean, seriously, that was freaky as shit. They just– pop it back in place? Remind me to never dislocate my shoulder. Matter of fact, remind yourself. I don't want to have to witness that ever again, especially if it's my brother.”
Matt smiles, albeit briefly, and huffs out a laugh, adjusting his sitting position and his grip on the steering wheel. Nick is energized by his ability to lift the mood, even now. “I'm so serious right now, if either of you pull a stunt like that again, I will never let you ride again.” Despite being ‘so serious right now,’ Nick's tone is entirely joking.
“Mmm,” Chris groans. Everyone pauses.
“...Is he saying something?” Matt asks after a moment.
“Is he awake?” Nick adds.
“Mmnick– you… are so loud. ‘n’ you talk with your hands. It's impossible to fall asleep on you,” Chris mumbles, slightly changing his posture but never once opening his eyes.
“...Oh.” Nick politely moves his hands to his lap and shuts up.
…Temporarily.
“Okay, now you're cutting off my circulation,” he complains, pushing Chris gently.
Chris moves around grumpily and mumbles another unintelligible sentence. Nick and Matt both pause and wait to see if the other understood it.
“What was that buddy?” Matt asks.
Chris blinks slowly, his voice small and raspy. “I said… I'm still gonna ride. Just… not for a while.”
Nick huffs, a little surprised. “You. Are a stronger man than me. I would never be able to look at one of those things again.”
“I'm not stronger than you,” Chris states plainly, shutting his eyes now that he's comfortable again and no longer preventing all blood from reaching Nick's hand.
“Awwhh, Chrissy,” Nick says endearingly, ruffling Chris's hair with his free hand and leaning into him slightly. “But seriously, dude, if you don't go back to that thing with like, a full suit of armor and like, 6 helmets, I'm gonna lose my shit.”
“6 helmets seems excessive,” Chris replies, smiling a little. “...But I'll consider it.”
“Yeah, you better, kid,” Matt interjects. His attention alternates between the road and the mirror, watching in real time as Chris's smile slowly drops and is replaced by a slack, drooling expression indicative of sleep.
Truthfully, he probably won't ride his motorcycle again for a long while, either. He really only ever did it when Chris wanted to, anyway.
But drive home while his brothers fall asleep in his car? That, he can do. And he'll do it as many times as is needed, and as many times as he can.