Work Text:
Free Day // Happy Birthday, Gravy!
Low, angry stormclouds had rolled over the normally bright LA sky. It reminded Alex terribly of the home that he had left so that he could avoid just that. His boyfriend was supposed to live in the city of endless sunshine and temperate weather, not the city that created pressure changes so bad that he felt as though his back had just broken.
The pain was searing, echoing from the one place where it had snapped years ago when he was in highschool. It made the muscles around the affected area spasm with discontent until he felt like the only option was to flop back into the pillows behind him. It made getting up and walking around basically impossible, even laying on his side or his stomach would result in a twisting feeling that was so horrific he almost cried from it. He knew that half of it was the memory of the break in his head, reminding his body what it had been like when he had been in a hospital bed while doctors made sure that none of his nerves were affected. He had long since healed from the break and while left with some life-lasting pain, it wasn’t nearly as bad as the immediate injury had been.
He had been laying in the guest room all day, varying from the bed and the floor as the pain ebbed and flowed with the winds of the storm above them. Nothing had really been able to soothe the active pain that he had been in and he was beginning to resign himself to the fact that he would just be miserable until the end of time.
“You still alive under all that fluff?” Matt’s voice rang through the despair that was sinking heavily through is head. He tossed his most recent blanket, he kept getting overstimulated under one and then resorting to another, away from his face so that he could see his partner.
It seemed as though the vicious storm outside had also gotten to Matt as he was wearing his wrist brace, something that he usually made elaborate lies about whenever he had to wear it. It wasn’t that Matt was ashamed of his disability, he just knew that a guy like him would get made fun of or taken less seriously if he presented to the public with something obvious and unstudied like Hypermobility Spectrum Disorder. He tried to avoid wearing his braces when they were in public but would concede for the ones that he could easily hide, which meant that his wrists went almost entirely unprotected when they were on the road.
Here, in the privacy of the home that they basically shared at this point, he could done them and keep his joints where they were supposed to be on his bad days. It warmed Alex’s heart to see him accepting that part of himself in the privacy of anonymity. Sometimes when they stopped in the smaller towns while on tour, Matt would even allow himself his cane while they walked around thrift stores and gas stations. It was enough to keep his knees more in line than they usually would be and provided him with some extra exercise since the muscles didn’t get as tired as they did when they were acting on their lonesome.
Despite the brace that was a stark black and blue against his wrist, Matt had his hand craned around two comically large pill bottles and a packet of higher level painkillers that Alex recognized from when he had pulled a muscle last summer. “Is that good for your hand?”
“Probably not. Nothing’s really good for my joints, though,” Matt shrugged. He settled the pills down on the bedside table and then handed Alex the packet.
He took the offered item and flipped it over so that he could read the expiration date and figure out what kind of meds it was. He let out a sigh, “These are muscle relaxers. Not going to help with the kind of pain that I’m having,” he sighed as he tossed them towards the floor.
“Dude,” Matt huffed. “Why did you do that?”
“Wasn’t gonna use it, didn’t want it to be up on the bed,” Alex shrugged at him like it should have been obvious. It wasn’t like either one of them was going to use it or be moving from the bed very much today. “Come lay down?”
“I gotta get the fucking pill packet you just threw onto the floor of my house like I live in a god damned dumpster. Pain makes you cranky,” Matt teased him. He leaned down so that he could press a kiss to Alex’s semi-sweaty forehead. The blankets provided him with something that was kind of like a full body weight to reset the nervous system that was freaking out and making him tense up more, but it also made him too hot for the California mid-fall.
“Makes you cranky too, usually something like that would have gotten you to laugh,” Alex pointed out. Matt may not have been as affected as Alex was when it came to pressure changes since his joints were always loosey-goosey instead of having arthritis caused by a break, but it still caused flare ups more than half the time.
“I’m not in pain, and I have a perfectly normal body,” Matt replied as he stuck his tongue out playfully at Alex.
“Uh huh,” Alex pushed down on the brace that Matt was wearing, which only resulted in his partner playfully ripping the appendage away from him like it was indecent for Alex to acknowledge his disability. Matt then got up from the bed with a loud ‘click’ of what after a moment of thinking, Alex deciphered as his hip. His knees were louder and somehow made a rounder sound, the hips were a sharp snapping sound usually.
“That is a totally normal sound for a body to make, sure.”