Work Text:
December, 2025, Budapest.
The grand finals of the Budapest Major start in twenty-something minutes, and Dumb, amongst blank white hallways with gray concrete floors, is having a panic attack.
Probably a panic attack. Maybe a meltdown. Maybe both. Either way, bad, bad and horrible fucking timing. They’re supposed to be ready for walkout ten before the hour, and they’re not going to have enough time to get makeup to cover the tear tracks on their cheeks, and the entire MVM Dome is going to know that they spent their precious pre-game moments sobbing in some corner. Their hands are going to be shaky for the whole first map. Fuck. The lights are still so fucking loud, and their head still fucking hurts. Fuck.
Distantly, they’re aware of their breathing getting faster, gasping desperate breaths that still don’t bring enough air into their tightening chest. Their throat feels like it’s closing up around their sobs. If they thought about it, they’d probably realize they can’t feel their feet anymore, and that it’s well past time to sit down, but their world narrows to the buzzing fluorescent lights and the glare on the polished floor and the distant thudding of music and crowd energy. On the far end of the hallway, someone cracks open the door to the arena, and voices-cheers-synth cacophony pierces straight through their temples. They can’t breathe. They can’t breathe. They can’t breathe.
Blink, flash-forward in time, and they find themselves on the ground, knees curled close to their chest. The concrete holds onto the mid-December chill, seeping through the too-thin fabric of their uniform pants; it is cold, cold, cold. Suddenly, the pattern of his pantleg becomes fascinating, and their eyes trace the lines, crimson, wisteria, charcoal. Blink, flash-forward, and the tips of their fingers are going numb from the cold, cold, cold where they brush against the floor at their sides. Blink, flash-forward, and there’s a shadow—a figure—
Through tear-blurred eyes, Dumb lifts their gaze from the floor, squinting against the bright-light assault of the walls and the pounding in their head, and—
For a moment, Dumb’s back in their childhood garden, back pressed against the rough wooden fence as they peer up at a face through the blinding sun, and they blink—
Crouching in front of him, concern raw on his face, is Stormz, all black-white-neon-green haze.
+---+
Summer, 2019.
Stormz is seventeen when the professional scene finally comes knocking.
Dumb knows he’s in talks with an org long before they’re pretty sure they’re supposed to, a brewing secret held in late night games and quiet whispers in the high school cafeteria. When the deal goes through in the middle of summer break, they’re the first number he calls, and they both slip away from their PCs to the swimming hole in the woods the next day to celebrate. Amongst the crystal-blue waters and emerald forest, Stormz talks all about the future, about Europe and Belgrade and LAN and bootcamps and teammates. Dumb soaks in the sun on the rocks beside him and pretends not to be stuck on the implications for them, the emptiness their own future suddenly seems to hold.
Stormz deserves it more than anyone in the world, tens of thousands of hours poured into the game they both love. To have his talent recognized as the revolution it could be is the least the professional scene could do for him, really, and Dumb’s unendingly proud of him for all of it. And still—well.
His welcome package arrives exactly a month before school starts again. Dumb’s sleeping over the night it’s delivered, and wakes up to Stormz shaking them awake with a sleek white box clutched in his other hand. They open it together before breakfast, pull red from pastel purple from eggshell white of scarves and socks and whatever other merch until finally, at the bottom of the box, they uncover the jersey. Smooth fabric, perfect print, vibrant colors; seeing it in person is unreal, feeling it shift beneath their fingers even moreso. Stormz tries it on on the spot, and, naturally, it fits perfectly.
Grinning, he does a slow spin for Dumb, offers them the chance to really admire it in person at least once. The bright white QU4RTET printed on the left breast seems to glow in the early morning sun against the black and red swirls. On the back, IAmStormz stretches proudly between his shoulders, that same blinding white outlined in gentle purple. Seeing it there feels surreal, feels like the most proud Dumb’s ever been, feels a little like dying.
Once they’ve stored all the merch and uniforms away in Stormz’s bedroom, they make toaster waffles for breakfast, and stain the corner of his welcome letter with butter grease.
A month later, Dumb is sitting in class on their first day of junior year, trying to hide their phone from their teacher’s view. On its screen, Stormz is shouting and pumping his fist in the air, celebration for making it to the playoffs of his first ever LAN event.
Lingering, the camera zooms in on Stormz’s face, on the grin glowing there as people Dumb’s never met cluster around him in hugs and cheers. In the hall, the first period bell rings.
Dumb shuts off their phone.
+---+
The night before Stormz left, he all but forced Dumb into sleeping over. Under the covers, they’d curled in close, forms illuminated only by the diffuse moonlight seeping through the pale duvet. This isn’t leaving you behind, Stormz had said, very serious. In the low light, his eyes seemed to shimmer, iridescent, as he made a promise: I’ll never leave you behind. Never.
Now, looking up at Stormz from their curled-up spot against the wall, Dumb thinks about that promise, thinks about days in those crystal-blue waters, thinks about summer and childhood and bliss. Dumb thinks about white walls, cold concrete, the crowd roaring somewhere above their heads.
+---+
February, 2021.
In the dead middle of an early February blizzard, Stormz finally keeps his promise.
Dumb has known, obviously, that Q4 is looking for a new player – a new rifler, for positions they already know how to play. Dumb has been privately, quietly, secretly hoping, since the transfer was officially announced and the end-of-season date set, that it would finally be their turn. It was a long shot, even with everything in their favor; Stormz had quickly made himself into their star rifler, but it had still only been a year and a half. Influence only grows so fast.
But still, privately, quietly, selfishly, Dumb hopes.
And somehow, miraculously, luck – or maybe Stormz and his assertive stubbornness – answers.
At three in the morning – a very normal nine AM in Belgrade – Dumb gets the email of a lifetime. Stormz is, in all likelihood, still asleep.
They hit the call button anyway.
By the time they’re confirmed for graduation in the spring, Dumb’s signed a three-year contract and has one-way flights booked to Serbia in June.
+---+
Stormz, for his part, takes one good look at their expression and drops straight to his knees.
His hands find their shoulders a beat later; Dumb blinks. Touch reminds them—right—can’t breathe, can’t breathe. Instinctively, they gasp for air, and Stormz instantly pulls back, looking a little spooked. As their breath starts coming fast and heavy, deep and desperate, they think they see his mouth moving, but their ears are still just cotton and the buzzing of the lights, just noise and pain.
Loosely, their legs unfold onto the floor and a hand flies to their chest, and they can’t breathe, they can’t breathe, they can’t breathe. Fingers scrabble at their jersey, fabric too smooth to find a hold, and they can’t—
Blink, and Stormz has pulled their hand away, is pressing his thumb hard into the center of their palm. Diverted, their sensory attention shifts, finds concentration in the depth of the pressure and the barely-there pain. Stormz’s other hand snakes in to rest gently on their chest – lungs, ribs, breath – and, on that next heavy exhale, presses lightly into their sternum.
Like muscle memory, the well-trained patterning of a coping mechanism slips into place. Under the dual pressure at palm and sternum, their exhale pushes deeper, longer. When the inhale comes, Stormz slowly releases the pressure, and their breath lengthens with it, following the cues. Exhale, pressure; inhale, release. They know this. They know this.
After four, five, some number of rounds, Stormz pulls back just enough to get their gaze to follow his face again, and says, “Okay, now can you hear me? Please say yes.”
Mind pain-fragmented and lagging, they just stare at him for a long moment, then, slowly, they nod.
“Dear god, you’re out of it. And your pupils are dilated to hell,” he comments, then sighs heavily and readjusts his legs. “Well, whatever. Hearing is better. Better is good.”
As he looks them over and decides his next move, Dumb’s eyes catch again on that jersey, the midnight black, the neon green detailing that tumbles down his shoulders in harsh geometric shapes, and has just enough awareness to glance away before the ache can hit.
+---+
June, 2021, Belgrade.
Living on their own for the first time is weird. Doing it in a foreign country around a language they don’t speak is much weirder, and scarier.
Landing alone in the Belgrade airport, exhausted and surrounded by Serbian and strangers, with three suitcases containing everything they owned that matters in hand, is terrifying. It gets significantly worse as they slowly learn that it isn’t impolite to stare in the same way it is in the States, primarily by way of noticing more and more and more people doing it to them as they struggle their way out of the terminal. Some of them are much closer to glares, some involve old women clutching their bags tighter as they pass by. It’s awful. It’s awful.
Until Stormz crashes into them with a hug the second they step through the doors to the pick-up area, chattering words Dumb can’t make out through their own laughter. It gets a little less awful, then.
With his first year and a half of salary and prize money, Stormz has bought himself better clothes, a nice little sports sedan, and a year’s lease for a quaint little two-bedroom apartment in the city center. Dumb doesn’t ask if, when he had signed the thing back in February, he’d had them in mind. They also don’t think it’s coincidence they arrive to a fully furnished bedroom, décor perfectly suited to their tastes.
They still get homesick, of course. They still nearly have a panic attack the first time they have to go to the grocery store. They still cry about fucking up a grilled cheese sandwich because they set the heat wrong.
But Stormz is there, always, one call away, one room away. He doesn’t always have answers, but he has levity, stories, perfect comedic timing. Doing it with him makes it easier, even if he’s still figuring all this out, too.
---
Two weeks after they move in, a sleek white box arrives on the doorstep.
Like a mirror of summer two years ago, Stormz is right there beside them as they pull out that jersey, all vibrant ruby and pastel purple, and trail their fingers over the letters of DumbIsDumb printed neatly on the back.
+---+
“Okay, um, fuck,” Stormz says, very eloquently, “Do you have water?”
Dumb shakes his head, and becomes suddenly aware of the fact that there’s tears in their eyes, globs of blurriness in their lower lashes that lag behind the rest of their vision. As Stormz drops his backpack off his shoulder and starts rifling around, they instinctively sniff like they’re crying.
Then it becomes a real, actual sob, and the way it shakes their body sends the tears rolling. At their sides, their arms feel like lead, hands too heavy to lift up to their face to wipe away the tears, and it makes them sob again, helplessness creeping in. Squeezing their eyes shut just makes it worse—
There’s the sound of a backpack falling to the floor, then Stormz breathes in fast and says, “Woah, okay,” as he turns back.
Dumb cringes instantly at their tone, trying to turn their face away. It strikes them that he shouldn’t even be here, that they’re playing against each other in twenty minutes, that they haven’t been this close in over a year. Even so, Stormz’s touch holds no uncertainty when it finds their jaw, turns their face back to face his. “Hey, hey, it’s okay,” he half-whispers, voice gentle and deadly, “You can cry, I don’t care. You don’t have to hide from me.”
Fuck you, Dumb thinks instantly, you don’t get to say that anymore. Not to me.
Thumbs brush across their cheeks, collecting the tears as they fall. He’s careful to press only as lightly as he has to to keep the saltwater from falling further, cognizant of the makeup dusting their face in a way only he could be.
Fuck you, Dumb repeats, like a mantra, like a prayer that could save them, Fuck you.
+---+
August, 2021, Cologne.
After an hour waiting at baggage claim, Dumb finally accepts it.
Losing their luggage is, in general, one of their worst fears about traveling, and maybe just in general, too. Losing their luggage that has their jerseys and basically all their uniform stuff three days before IEM fucking Cologne is literally their worst nightmare.
Media day starts in fourty-eight-ish hours. If they had been flying on a normal, functioning airline, they’d just call customer service and probably have it by the next morning, or get it the morning of media day at the worst. Unfortunately, they decided to risk it on Lufthansa for this one, which means they are completely and utterly fucked.
They call customer service anyway, and get about ten minutes into a hold before they get physically sick of their hold music, leave an extremely passive-aggressive voicemail, and calls Hazel instead.
Hazel is very, very patient with them, and very kindly and gently talks them through all the many solutions to their problem they have without even interrupting them even once. Hazel is also smart enough to hand the phone straight to Stormz once she realizes they’re spiraling.
“Hi, Dumb,” is the first thing he says, sing-songy and purposefully goofy, an obvious attempt to try to get them to laugh.
“Stormz, I think the world might be ending,” is what they offer in return, audibly on the verge of tears.
“Oh, okay, we’re there,” he replies, and gets to work.
---
As soon as they slide into the backseat of Hazel’s rental car, Stormz grabs their hand closest to him and starts, “Okay, here’s the plan.”
Despite their state, it makes Dumb laugh a little, wet and kind of pathetic, and they nod for him to continue. At the sound, Stormz smiles, hope visibly sparking in his eyes, and squeezes their hand tight. “The only thing we have tonight is team dinner now that you’re back, so you’re gonna sleep until then – don’t tell me you’re not tired, you literally just flew here from Chicago – you’re gonna sleep until then, and then you’ll borrow some of Gop’s clothes for that, since we’re pretty sure they’ll fit you best.”
He pauses, raises his eyebrows in a quiet check-in. Tiredness slowly settling in, Dumb just nods as they sink into the seat, and Stormz continues. “Okay, good. Then tomorrow, Hazel gives us the company card, and we go shopping – thrifting, mostly, yes Hazel I know – and get you new clothes and your basics, toothbrush and deodorant and shit, back. Until then, you can just use mine.”
From the front seat, Hazel chimes in, “Keep it under three hundred dollars or you two have to fight management when they come for my ass.”
“We will, I promise,” Stormz says with only a tiny bit of snark at the same time Dumb mumbles, “I’d kill them all for you, Hazel, don’t worry,” words blurry with exhaustion.
With a giggle like windchimes, she replies, “Thank you, Dumb, I appreciate your loyalty.”
Stormz snorts at that, half scorned scoff, then turns his attention back to Dumb. As he begins to rub circles into their palm with his thumb, Dumb lets their eyes slip shut and mutters, “Of all the fucking flights for it to happen on. I haven’t slept in almost a full day, and we have a match in, like seventy hours, and it happens now.”
“That hotel bed is going to feel so nice…” Stormz sing-songs, drumming on their knuckles.
“God, yeah, it is,” they sigh, and follow the sound of Stormz’s laugh right to the edge of sleep.
---
Peeking out from behind the curtains, Dumb prefaces with, “Okay, listen, you aren’t allowed to laugh. I know it’s bad, but be nice, yeah?”
Very aware of the light blush on their cheeks, they watch Stormz’s eyes brush over it as he smiles at their request. “…Yeah, okay,” he agrees after far too much hesitation for their liking, with an innocent nod.
Stepping out from the dressing room, Dumb fights for their life against the smile that threatens to give themselves away. They’re wearing, undeniably, a horrible outfit, vibrant rainbow striped shirt over leopard print shorts and a belt with far too many rhinestones covering every inch of its leather. It’s awful. It’s so bad it’s good. They hate wearing it, and absolutely adore the bit.
Stormz lasts exactly a second and a half, most of which is raw and pure shock, before he bursts out laughing. He’s quick to get his volume under control for their sake, but he’s fully on belly laughing, nearly instantly going red in the face. To their credit, Dumb lasts a little longer, just long enough to do a show-off spin that sends Stormz onto the floor before they also break, muffling their bark of laughter into their hand.
“That is,” Stormz wheezes out between fits of giggles, “maybe the worst thing I have ever seen you wear in my life.”
Nodding in agreement, Dumb fights to control themselves before they attract the attention of the shop owner – middle-aged, German, scary-looking, might kick them out if they’re too loud – and lightly smacks Stormz to get him to do the same. After a long moment of deep breaths interrupted by more fits of giggles, they finally settle down, and Dumb reaches a hand down to get Stormz back up off the floor.
In the middle of standing up, Stormz tips his head to one side and says, all too casually, “Well, except maybe that skirt from before that I could see your whole ass through, I guess.”
Fighting down another round of laughter behind a grin, they shove at his shoulder hard, and flips him off as they duck back into the dressing room.
---
Somehow, it takes until the morning of media day for Dumb to remember quite possibly the biggest problem at hand.
Halfway through pawing through their brand-new-to-them pants collection, Dumb freezes and says, with a distinct tone of horror, “Fuck, Stormz, I don’t have a jersey.”
“Oh,” Stormz replies, like it’s actually not a problem whatsoever, “You’re wearing mine. Hazel already told the media people yesterday, so they shouldn’t give you any problems about it or anything.”
Dumb blinks at the pants, then turns and blinks at him. “You—what?”
“Yeah.” He shrugs, not even looking at Dumb from where he’s sorting his own clothes. “I carry around an extra with me to every tournament just in case, and, I mean, I think you need it more than me.”
“Right,” Dumb says, and wonders briefly why this is catching them so off-guard. “Yeah, okay, that, um—that sounds good.”
Five minutes later, Dumb is staring at themselves in the mirror, in an obviously but kind of endearingly oversized jersey. Everything about it is the same as normal, except the extra few inches it falls down their arms; still, somehow, something about it feels very special, significant in a way they can’t name.
Over their shoulder, Stormz is grinning, clearly getting a kick out of all of this. Rapping his knuckles twice on their back where they know their gamertag – or, well, his, they guess – sits, he meets their eyes in the mirror and, mischief gleaming in his gaze, quips, “God, is Twitter going to get a kick out of this.”
+---+
The tears run dry quickly, even if their body refuses to let go of the harsh sobs ricocheting through their ribcage. Stormz is there the entire time, gentle touch and soft words Dumb doesn’t make out, keeping that perfect stage makeup as intact as he can.
At some point, his hand goes back to their chest, gives just enough pressure for Dumb to feel it. His other hand stays at their cheek, achingly patient, horribly patient, as they fight to kick their breath back into gear. Through the whole thing, Stormz keeps talking, saying words that mean nothing but somehow still mean something to Dumb’s panic, something else to hear than the lights and the distant crowd.
Finally, after what feels like an hour, Dumb finally takes in a full, proper breath, even if they’re still a little shaky on the exhale. For three breaths, they fall back into their rhythm; release and inhale, press and exhale. Slowly, they come back down.
When they open their eyes again, Stormz is far closer than they’re expecting, close enough to see the strokes of the foundation powder someone had brushed over his birthmark. Close enough to feel his breath on their neck, their lips.
He lingers just a moment too long to be natural before he pulls away.
+---+
February, 2022, Sydney.
The bootcamp going into IEM Sydney is brutal. Though maybe to be expected after getting booted out of Katowice in the groups not two weeks ago, Dumb is not having a good time. Fate scares them when he’s serious, and Bear hasn’t left coach mode to be chill and fun and normal a single time in the past five days. Every time he sends a glance to Hazel to try to get her to save them, she just shrugs and tips her head in the direction of his monitor. This is their first bootcamp that feels like it really lives up to the title, and they do not like it.
They know it’s important, and they can see the improvement happening in real time, yes. But still.
Stormz, on the other hand, should absolutely be used to this after two and a half years in this team. Dumb’s pretty sure he’s just trying to get out of doing his match review homework.
But, frankly, they don’t really care about the reason, because whatever it is, it means Stormz is out here on the beach with them, and they are not stuck in that horrible evil hotel conference room. No one knows where they are other than Gop, and he’s under a strict no snitching contract. Hazel’s been told they’re too tired for team dinner, and that’s all.
Maybe they’re running away, just a little bit. Dumb doesn’t think they mind, though; it reminds them of when they were kids, sneaking out to catch fireflies at midnight in Dumb’s sprawling backyard.
From where he’s run ahead, Stormz kicks a massive chunk of washed-up seafoam at them. It doesn’t go far, too light to get the momentum, but they still yelp and flinch away, only to be left glaring as he doubles over laughing. As revenge, they kick a different seafoam clump back at him, and instantly break into their own laughter when it hits true, slopping right onto the back of his calf. Cackles dying off instantly, Stormz looks up at them with a face of abject horror, then starts running to find another bunch of seafoam further up the beach.
Naturally, it devolves until they’re both laying in the sand, shoes soaked, bits of seaweed and foam clinging to various parts of their bodies and the reset absolutely covered in sand. Both of them are breathing hard, still vaguely batting at each other’s hands in the space between them until that gets old, too. The sand, even as the sun dips towards the horizon, is delightfully sun-baked and warm.
“I,” Dumb wheezes out between breaths, “Think I really needed that.”
“Yeah,” Stormz replies, “Yeah, I think I did, too.”
For a while longer, they just lay there listening to the waves and the occasional sound of people passing by. Above them, the sky lights up, gentle puffs of white turning to bubblegum and flame; with the way the clouds are drifting by, it almost looks like something out of an animated film, idyllic. Dumb breathes out long, and feels some of the stress of the week sink down into the sand and wash away.
Once the sun goes down, they sit back up, huddle into each other against the relative chill of the night, and start talking again. It’s about nothing, at first, random things they’d seen on Twitter and HLTV happenings and their personal pick-ems for Sydney.
Then, slowly, the ocean begins to light up, gentle blue finding hold in the waves. When they first spot it, they turn to Stormz wide-eyed only to find him already softly smiling at them, and oh, that’s why he suggested the beach even with the walk, they realize. Their heart does a funny little flip at that, and the affection behind that smile; in their laps, Stormz captures their pinky in his, and it does another.
After that, they start really talking. Dumb finally lets the dam break on dozens of things they’d felt they didn’t have the right to be upset about, homesickness and the neverending grind of the tournament schedule and media days and living life in the public eye. Stormz listens to all of it, trades most of them back with stories of his own from his early career, and gives really, really good advice about all of it. Somewhere along the way, they have the distinct realization that, right, Stormz is on his third year of this. As much as he’s their best friend, he’s a mentor, too, if Dumb would only let him be.
They stay out late, much later than either of them really meant to. Conversation just flows and flows, until finally one of them checks their phone and gawks at the time. Even so, they linger until the back-and-forth dies out entirely, and they return just to the sound of the waves and their breath.
Overhead, the clouds have cleared to allow them a view of the night sky. The light pollution blots out most of it – there is a city just up the hill, after all – but even so, Dumb picks out constellations they used to just read about in books, Centaurus and Crux and at least Canopus from Carina.
In the ocean below, the algae catches another wave, light flaring, and Dumb thinks about the Milky Way, bands of starlight so think they look like clouds. Right at the crest of the wave, the bioluminescence cuts a line of electric blue straight across the horizon, and comes crashing back down.
Beside them, Stormz shifts, tugs on the point of connection at their pinkies in the process. Glancing over, they find Stormz watching him, meet his eyes without really meaning to. In them, the bioluminescence and the faint starfield reflect together in the same plane, dazzling brilliance.
Dumb, though is looking through all of that and finding red, crimson and ruby, and thinking of red giants and nuclear fusion and supernovas.
+---+
Dumb’s glad to have the excuse of adrenaline to cover for the way their pupils undeniably must dilate as they watch him go. Seemingly unaware, Stormz picks up a water bottle from where he’d dropped it onto his backpack and offers it out to Dumb.
“Water,” he says simply, considerately, then tacks on, “As long as you’re sure you won’t choke on it.”
Their gaze turns to a glare as he meets their eyes again, but they don’t think they manage to get any real heat behind it. Before he can shake it at them – and they know he will – they reach out and snatch it from his hand.
Stripped of its labels, the clear plastic flashes iridescence into their eyes as they tilt their head back and drink. In a way, they’re grateful for it, if only so that they can’t see the expression on Stormz’s face as he watches on.
+---+
April, Dallas, 2022.
Two hours before their semifinals match is scheduled to start, the arena goes dark.
Quickly, they learn that it’s not just the arena but a quarter of downtown Dallas, some key part of the power grid taken out by the thunderstorm battering the city. After some asking around, they get a vague estimate of four to six hours until it’ll be back up, at the earliest. Hazel delivers the news looking simultaneously exhausted and relieved, and tells them they’re free to do whatever on the condition they can be back at the arena in an hour whenever she texts.
From across the locker room, Stormz catches Dumb’s gaze with a barely suppressed smile, and they nod back with one of their own.
Fifteen minutes later, once they’ve confirmed it’s not a hurricane and no one’s expecting the storm to get tornadic, they bundle up in two layers of raincoats each, put on their least favorite shoes, and hit the streets. Giggling the whole way through the lobby, Dumb thinks they both feel a little insane for going out in this, but Stormz had nudged their shoulder in the elevator and asked him if they remember running home in the pouring rain in middle school, and—well. Everyone needs little whimsy in their lives, right?
So, that’s how they end up running down the streets of Dallas looking like crazy people, one arm up to block the rain from getting in their eyes and their other hands intertwined between them. Stormz is leading, tugging them along behind him, and they hold onto his hand with a death grip, fighting against the precipitation to keep hold. Occasionally, he glances back over their shoulder to shoot them a grin, glorious and glowing against the storm-dark. Dumb grins right back, and thinks they haven’t seen either of them smile like this in years.
They’re laughing the whole way through downtown, joyous and free. The rain drowns it out, but they’re pretty sure Stormz is, too.
Once they make it to the not-dark part of town, the few people that are out and about look at them like they’re out of their minds, but Dumb really doesn’t care. For a brief few minutes, they feel like they’re a kid again, dashing through Midwestern streets and trying to make it home before their bag soaked through.
Eventually, Stormz slows and ducks under a canopy. Beginning to take his outermost jacket off, he nods at the sign on the door as they come in behind him. “I saw it on my walk with Hazel and Jelex the other day and was hoping we’d have the chance to come.”
Catching their breath, they glance up at it. All they really glean from the initial glance is the logo of a cat in a coffee cup and the words “cat café” somewhere in there, and that’s really all they need. With an overjoyed gasp, they turn back to Stormz. “You are the fucking greatest. I could kiss you right now, like, actually.”
He shrugs, smiling sheepishly. “I figured this might be the only chance we get to actually stay for more than a few minutes, so, yeah.” Shaking out his jacket, he puts a hand on the door and nods at them. “Take off your jacket so you don’t bring the rain in.”
---
Inside, it’s heaven. Warm air tinged with cinnamon and coffee, they feel like they’re stepping into a dream, entranced by the strings and strings of fairy lights that almost turn to stars overhead. The staff are incredible and the furniture soft, and Dumb quickly discovers they make a hot chocolate that’s damn worth the six dollars they pay for it. Though mostly laying low from the thunder rolling heavy overhead, the few brave cats who are out and about settle in around them quickly, all purrs and leg rubs.
Somewhere between having the tuxedo named Newspaper settle in for a nap on their lap and nearly moaning over a cinnamon roll, Dumb vows to get Stormz back for this somehow or another, in whatever secret way they have to.
For the first hour, they chat, play with the cats, do some half-hearted pre-match strategizing so they can brag about it to Fate later. As the storm stretches on, though, and the warmth settles into their bones, the conversation fades out into a comfortable silence, punctuated by coffee shop ambience and the occasional meow. Lovingly working around Newspaper, Dumb fishes their crochet out from their pockets, and alternates between working on it and watching Stormz’s antics with a couple of kittens he managed to bring out of hiding.
It almost feels domestic, like a vision of a future beyond their professional careers where things get slower and simpler.
Dumb smiles at the thought. Watching Stormz dramatically woosh a feather toy over the floor with a goofy grin on his face, kittens zipping after it, they reckon they wouldn’t mind a life like that at all.
+---+
As they hand the water bottle back, plastic crackling in their too-tight grip, Stormz very casually asks, “When did you get that tattoo?”
Arm halfway outstretched, they pause, catch his eyes again on the other side of it. The question catches them so off-guard it instantly knocks the panic down a step, some of the tension in their jaw letting go. It must read as confusion on the outside, because after a beat of silence, Stormz clarifies, “The one going down the back of your hand, I mean.”
“Oh,” they say without really meaning to, voice finding its footing again. The word comes out rough and a little blurred around the edges, but Stormz either doesn’t notice or doesn’t care, finally taking the water bottle from their grasp. As they pull their hand back, they stretch out their fingers and look at it themselves, despite knowing each of its lines by heart. The delicate branches and apple blossom flowers stare back up at them, unchanged as usual.
“It, um—” they start, then shake their head, trying to knock the fog over their thoughts loose. “After we won Shanghai, Hazel took us all out to get tattoos on org budget as, like, team bonding, or something?” Stormz laughs a little at that, and they can’t help but smile along with him, despite themselves. “I don’t know, you know how her mind works sometimes. Everyone else got cherry blossoms and shit like that, cliché stuff – Sans got his own signature, for some reason – but I wanted to do something a little different, and the apple blossoms kind of remind me of home, so.”
At the last remark, something in Stormz’s expression changes, gets a little softer, and it hits Dumb right between their ribs. They don’t mention that the memory of home they’re talking about is that trip to New York when they were kids, that orchard where they ran around under the trees for hours playing wizards and fell asleep on each other’s shoulders on the car ride home. They don’t tell him the part about sitting in the tattoo parlor paralyzed by decision, scrolling the Wikipedia list of flower meanings until they caught the words “better things to come” next to apple blossoms and instantly made their choice.
They’re about him, and they’re an attempt to get over him. They’re the past, and an attempt to convince themselves of a future.
Stormz is still looking at him, gaze unreadable. To him, they’ll just be apple blossoms punched into skin.
“That helix is new, isn’t it?” Dumb offers back without really knowing why, gesturing vaguely towards his ear, “Must’ve been a bitch to heal, with the headphones and everything.”
“Yeah,” Stormz replies, voice distant, and doesn’t elaborate.
+---+
November, 2021, Belgrade.
One of the advantages of signing to a mostly-American European org is that everyone gets Thanksgiving off, even thousands of miles from home.
Belgrade, for its part, is not celebrating much of anything, and so Stormz and Dumb’s first Thanksgiving together in three years begins with a very mundane grocery trip. Without the typical holiday staples they’d find in the States, they have to make do on a lot of things – ham instead of turkey, regular beans instead of green beans, a distinct lack of a substitute for cranberry sauce. Some Serbian staples join the fray, too, zimnica and cabbage sarma and all the ingredients for a beautiful gulaš.
Outside, the weather is miserable, cold and foggy and misting just enough to get them appreciably wet by the time they get back to the apartment. The wind throws the last remnants of autumn leaves at their faces, damp and slimy and horrible, and those that have already fallen make the ground a minefield of slippery spots underfoot. Not for the first time this fall, Dumb thinks, at least in the Midwest, it just fucking snowed.
Inside, though, is a whole other world, one of warmth and soft light and an episode of Survivor Srbija paused on the TV in the living room. While Stormz sets up the kitchen, Dumb goes about lighting the candles they’ve laid out on the windowsills, some sort of greeting of the holiday. As the stove comes on and the pots come out, they hit play on the TV again, and linger in the archway between kitchen and living room until Stormz calls them in to season the ham and steals their spot.
Until the evening, they go on like this, trading spots between the threshold and the stove. It’s achingly domestic, simple in the way Dumb used to dream about during those claustrophobic high school years. They stir the soup and check the minced meat, then tag out Stormz to catch the next challenge before the ad break. Somewhere in the midst of it, they realize they’re actually starting to understand some of the Serbian without the subtitles; somewhere in the midst of it, they realize they’re starting to carve themselves a life.
Eventually, the show needs to be paused again for sarma-wrapping endeavors, which they quickly discover to be significantly harder than the old ladies in the markets make it seem. Even after two YouTube tutorials and half an hour, both of them still just keep ending up with sloppy, falling-apart things that end up looking more like cabbage-y soft shell tacos than sarma.
About an hour and little more success later, they decide that’s exactly what they’re going to be, and admit defeat.
And by the time they do that, the gulaš has deconstructed in their negligence, and most of the ingredients have been quietly burning onto the bottom of the pot for far too long to save.
They exchange one tired glance, hope drained from their hearts, and dejectedly start cleaning the kitchen. Dumb, thank god, remembers to blow out the candles by the windows, lest that turn into it’s own disaster.
The ham survives, along with the half-assembled sarma. Given that they didn’t even open its package, the zimnica, too, makes it out alive. Once the kitchen’s in a reasonable enough state, they take their meagre not-total-failues to the couch, and turn the stupid TV back on.
Twenty minutes into picking at edible but not really even that good of food, Dumb tips their head back to look at Stormz, question in their gaze. Before they can even ask it out loud, Stormz sighs, and mutters, “Yeah, let’s just order from the kafana down the street.”
“We probably should’ve done that in the first place, really,” Dumb reasons, “though I guess cooking together is in the holiday spirit, or whatever.”
“Yeah, well, unfortunately,” he replies as he opens a familiar website, “I think I care about the eating part more.”
They shrug, quiet agreement. “I mean, look, I’m not complaining if it means we can get uštipci. Since we’re ordering anyway, and everything.”
With a massive nod, he looks at them with a smile and an expression of yeah, obviously and says, “Uh, yeah, we’re getting the fucking uštipci.”
+---+
Left without a follow-up, Dumb can only wait and watch Stormz tuck his water bottle back into his bag, zip it back closed.
He takes a second too long to look back up from it and doesn’t quite meet their eyes, and a second too long to speak. When he does, it’s stilted, a little distracted. “So, um. You guys are kind of on an insane run right now.”
It’s a weird thing to bring up, given the context and who’s saying it. Stormz, star rifler of the team on their way to seal off the winningest season of Counterstrike in history, complimenting someone who was at risk of dropping out of the VRS invite pool three weeks ago on a good event. It had been a good event, that much is true – a miracle run, really, in the context of the rest of their year. But why bring it up, why here and now?
If Dumb was in the business of wishing, they might wonder if it’s a quiet bid for connection, a plea he’s too cowardly to say out loud. Of course he knows – even if Disciple’s all but undefeatable, they’d proven they could take at least one map off them back in groups, and they’re sure to come to the stage meticulously prepared in the wake of that. That, and it’s all anyone could talk about in the lead up to this, if QU4RTET would finally be the ones to vanquish the tyrants to cap off a climb from the very bottom. Of course he knows the story.
But something about the way he won’t meet Dumb’s gaze even as the gap between speech becomes true silence makes them feel like he knows the whole story, knows it better than he should. Knows it like someone that cares deeply, beyond the due diligence of a tournament opponent. He fiddles with the zipper pull on his backpack, and Dumb thinks, you never stopped watching at all, did you?
At just that moment, Stormz finally looks up and meets their eyes, and it feels almost like confirmation.
But Dumb has been trying to quit wishes, recently.
“Yeah, we’re kind of the story of the event, I hear,” they say, with just the right amount of levity to make it seem casual. “’Cinderella run’ is what they keep calling it, I think.”
“They have, yes,” Stormz responds too quickly, flashing one of those signature media grins. “I guess tonight’s the ball, then, isn’t it?”
His public persona hits Dumb like a slap across the face. Abruptly, the nuance leaves their expression for fake brightness and a firm wall down over their emotions, and they’re left on the back foot, door slammed in their face.
It’s a defense mechanism, probably, though they can’t imagine what against. Regardless, the awful, horrible familiarity of the feeling steals away any words they might’ve had to say in response.
+---+
December, 2022, Antwerp.
Hazel has joked before that the two of them are cursed by the travel gods. Delayed flights, hotel bookings that never seem to go through right, visas that never get accepted without contest. They must’ve done something particularly atrocious in a past life, she tells them, to deserve this kind of punishment.
Neither of them really believe her until the heating in their room goes out in the dead middle of the night before quarterfinals. In December of the coldest year Antwerp’s had in two decades.
Dumb wakes up to their feet, kicked out from under the covers at some point in the night, being so cold they hurt, and curse, “Oh, what the hell,” out loud before their context awareness catches up.
Before they can cringe at the faux pas, Stormz laughs, pained, from the other bed. “I was wondering how much longer it would be ‘til it got you up, too. Morning, sleepyhead.”
“What—fuck—even time is it?” Curling in on themselves, they find that the thin hotel blankets really offer very little protection against the cold, which is a much, much bigger problem.
“One thirty in the morning, bright and early.”
“Oh, perfect.” The sarcasm bites for all of two seconds before a shiver runs down their spine and through their entire body, and they ask through chattering teeth, “Dude, what the fuck do we even do about this?”
“Fuck if I know,” he replies, “I already called the desk and no one answered, so. I guess we’re on our own.” Dumb sighs, beginning to resign themselves to a frigid, sleepless night, until Stormz snorts from under his covers and says, “I mean, we could, like, cuddle for warmth or some shit, if we were really desperate.”
It’s half-sarcastic, half-joking, but in the moment, they’re miserable enough that they consider it seriously. Listing their head to the side to look over at him, they mumble, “I mean, we could. And we could double layer our blankets, that might help, too.”
As though sensing their gaze, Stormz turns to meet it, eyes gleaming with streetlight reflections from the window. For one, two, three beats, they just watch each other’s eyes through the dark and consider. Strangely, it feels like a negotiation of some sort, like gingerly breaching uncharted territory.
Then, finally, Stormz breaks. “Yeah, fuck it, get over here.”
Not needing to be told twice, Dumb wraps their blanket around their shoulders and stands up, all but running over to the other side of his bed. By the time Stormz is pulling the covers back to let them in, they’re both giggling, caught up in the absurdity of the situation. With a grandiose toss, they spread out their blanket on top of his and dive under the covers back into the warmth.
He drops the blanket over them as soon as they’re under, their momentum sending them careening into his chest. When their bodies collide, all bony angles and discoordination, the giggles become cackling, quickly muffled into their hands for fear of waking their neighbors. Curling into each other from the laughter, it feels like a middle school sleepover, trying not to wake their parents up with their antics, and Dumb kind of loves it.
“Your feet are so fucking cold, oh my god,” Stormz yelps, though it turns out more like a wheeze as he laughs through it. They don’t even attempt words, just nod into his chest, then reach out with their feet on a hunt for the backs of one of his knees.
This, naturally, turns into a wrestling match, which is quite good for generating body heat but quite bad for keeping the blankets on top of them to keep it in. Neither of them really care, though, competitiveness temporarily blinding their senses to the bite of the cold. At some point, as Dumb is pretending to WWE slam him into the mattress, the bed creaks loud and the headboard hits the wall, and Stormz barely even has to look at them with a raised eyebrow before they collapse into a laughing fit, stomachs aching.
At some point during that, the cold creeps back in, and Dumb reaches back to tug the blankets back over their bodies. The temporary distance is enough to quell their giggles, and when they fall back over him, Stormz is just quietly looking up at them, ghosts of a smile still tugging at his lips.
Dumb’s heart skips a beat. Suddenly, they become very aware of their position, the way they effectively have Stormz pinned to the bed below them, the way their hair is falling to block out the rest of the room as they look down at him. Their hands on either side of his head tighten instinctively and crumple the sheets beneath them, and that—that does something to them, intoxicating.
Below them, something in Stormz’s expression shifts, almost yields, and—well.
Undeniably, the two of them have gotten closer since Dumb signed to Q4. Their relationship has adapted, as it must, to the new contexts of being teammates and living together and spending basically all of their time around each other. But Dumb is confident, insistent, that no part of that evolution has involved falling in love.
So it’s rather inexplicable, really, when they find themselves leaning down to kiss him.
It’s just instinctive, they’ll tell themselves later. It was just following social cues, just doing what they thought they were supposed to, just, just, just. In the moment, though, Dumb looks into Stormz’s eyes and sees roses and carnations, sees crimson and fire, sees a glimpse of heaven, and falls straight in towards it.
At some point, their eyes flutter shut, maybe out of anticipation, maybe fear. Below them, Stormz lets out a shaky breath that ghosts along their neck, sends a shiver down their spine, and god. They’re not in love with him, but—well.
Just before contact, when Dumb can almost feel the brush of his lips, Stormz’s hand finds their cheek. Giving just enough resistance for them to pause, he runs his thumb lightly over the line of their jaw. Naturally, their eyes blink back open, still blown wide; when they do, Stormz raises his eyebrows, a silent question.
It’s not a no, not even really a request to stop. Just a simple check, an are you sure? before they do something they’ll regret.
Dumb crumbles under it anyway.
Falling away from his hand, Dumb’s head hits Stormz’s collarbone hard. As they hide their face in the crook of his neck, his hand shifts to the back of their head, scratching lightly into the hair at the nape of their neck. He doesn’t say anything, and Dumb doesn’t either.
Eventually, Stormz’s other arm comes around to rest over their back. Ten minutes later, Dumb falls asleep to the sound of their shared breath and the bitter taste of a missed opportunity in the back of their throat.
---
It’s not supposed to become a regular thing, but when the heat in their apartment goes out over the player break, it’s the solution that naturally comes to mind. Besides, they both admit to each other, they sleep better when they’re with each other, anyway. They can ignore the strange feelings in their chest, that impulse to roll over and kiss Stormz until neither of them can breathe. It doesn’t mean anything, anyway.
(When summer comes around and they keep doing it despite the heat, Dumb knows they’re well and truly fucked.)
---
June, 2024, Belgrade.
On a perfect, beautiful summer morning, right at the beginning of the player break, Dumb opens the door with the intent of getting groceries and finds a sleek black box sitting on their welcome mat.
QU4RTET, to their credit, at least tried for subtly with their welcome packaging. Simple white, clear tape, nothing identifying past the return address on the shipping label to indicate what it meant.
If the name and logo emblazoned across the front of this box in vibrant neon green is anything to go by, Disciple doesn’t seem to give a shit about any of that.
As they pick the thing up in both hands and deliver it to the entryway table, two things begin to trickle into their chest: first, dread, dark and cold and withering, and then betrayal, fury and fury and fury.
+---+
With the simple chatter dead to a wary silence, Dumb looks at Stormz – really, actually looks at him, like they mean it – and ask, “Why are you here?”
Instantly, his show smile weakens, his brow furrows, and he looks at them like they grew a second head. “Because I’m playing in the finals in fifteen minutes? In this arena?”
Despite the initial burst of old affection that flares in their chest, they bite their tongue to keep themselves from punching him. “No, Stormz, why are you here,” they repeat, gesturing around at the empty hallway around them, “In a deserted hallway, helping me, when stage call is in 15 minutes?”
Their tone seems to take him off guard for a second, a blink of genuine surprise crossing his face as though he’d forgotten who they were now, where in time this moment lay. Then his expression does something complicated, something Dumb doesn’t know how to read – and isn’t that a treat. “Well, forgive me for seeing someone obviously having a panic attack alone and wanting to help them,” he replies, still talking like he would in an interview, “And, I mean, I would prefer the match to be interesting, at least.”
Shooting him a sharp glare at the unsaid implication about their teammates, they snip back, “Oh, so you make small talk with all your opponents about their performance before the Major grand finals?”
Stormz comes up short at that, more than Dumb expects. Like a kid caught with a fake ID, he looks simultaneously caught red-handed and shocked that someone had managed to figure him out. There’s three, four seconds of wide-eyed hesitation, then his gaze slips to the side, and his expression becomes something softer, less guarded by confidence and brashness.
Dumb sees it coming from the second he bites at his lip. Still, somehow, the words manage to hit right home when Stormz mutters, “Is it such a bad thing that I still care about you?”
“Yeah,” they whisper breathlessly, before they can stop themselves, “Maybe it is.”
+---+
July, 2024, Belgrade.
Dumb can count the number of times they’ve been alone in an airport in the past three years on one hand.
During the season, they travel in a pack, bootcamps to events to brief dispersions back to home before they do it all over again. Sometimes, they flew just with Hazel to sponsor events, trailing after her like a lost puppy to fulfill brand deal requirements. And, for basically anything else, they were with Stormz.
Flying home, leaving again, travel for leisure, et cetera, et cetera, Stormz was there for all of it. From apartment to hotel room, seats booked next to each other in first class, clothes sometimes stored in the same shared checked bag, it was always the two of them, Dumb-and-Stormz, inseparable. The rare occasions they went alone were to visit family, and even half those trips back to the States had Stormz right there with them, too, heading to the same town.
And now, at a random gate in the Belgrade airport, they sit and wait alone, and realize they’ll be doing this for the rest of their career.
Not all the time, of course. They still have Gop and Jelex and Sans, still have Hazel, still have Fate and Bear. They still have their team, their team, and that hasn’t changed. They have the newcomer – Pinity, is maybe his name? – and maybe that’ll be something, too.
But they won’t have Stormz. Wherever they go, they won’t have him.
Even amongst the bustle of the concourse, silence settles in heavy over their shoulders. Despite themselves, they still keep checking the gate area, quick scans for a familiar head of silver-white, and they can’t quite tell if they’re hoping against logic or searching for ghosts.
They don’t find either, of course. Disciple’s bootcamp started three days ago, somewhere in Poland. They saw the Instagram post of it, of Stormz laughing vibrantly with one arm slung across Squid’s shoulders, and wanted to reach through the screen and strangle them both.
The silence settles in, suffocating. Folding under the weight of it, they look out the windows at the golden summer sun and wonder if he was the only part of this that really mattered at all.
Three years to the day after their first bootcamp with Q4, Dumb boards the plane for another and finds their seat next to a stranger in first class.
---
July, 2025, Cologne.
At midnight, Dumb announces they’re going to get drinks, and doesn’t wait for Gop’s answer before they’re slamming the door shut behind them.
Two hours later, drunk and alone in a bar with too-loud music and not very good alcohol, Dumb kind of wishes they hadn’t. In the same breath, they also suppose this is what they deserve, for the absolute lack of anything they’d brought to their match today.
For the third tournament in a row, Q4 are out in the group stages. They haven’t seen a playoffs stage since before the player break. Everyone says it’s not their fault, but they know better than that. They’ve seen the stats, seen the way they crumble in every clutch they would’ve won without a second thought a year ago. They can slough words of comfort at them, but their culpability sits deep, deep down in their bones.
But that’s only half of what they’re thinking about, really. Between thoughts of stats and responsibility, flashes of silver-white hair sneak in, ghosts of red eyes haunting them from the dance floor lights.
At first, they try not to think about it at all, try to push the images from their mind. It works, mostly, right up until an attempt to drunkenly lose themselves to the crowded dance floor that ends in them standing frozen in the middle of the throng, staring after a head of pale hair on the other side of the room. The way their heart shatters when the person turns and has blue eyes instead of red is devastating in a much, much more real way than it should be, more they can handle this deep into the night.
Which is how they end up here, alone at a table in a quieter back corner, nursing a whiskey they don’t like and thinking about Stormz.
He’s going to win this tournament, they’re pretty sure. It would be Disciple’s third notch in their belts on their way to a Grand Slam of their own, in making Stormz the first player to win two. They want to be proud of him, really. All they feel when they try is an open, gaping pit in the bottom of their stomach, and bile in the back of their throat that tastes suspiciously like grief.
Over by the dance floor, those red lights flash again, crimson and rose. They’re the exact color of his eyes, and Dumb can’t help but wonder if they’re being haunted.
On the train ride over here – seventeen hours in cabins of four people each, which was evil and horrible and fucked-up in its own right – they had a dream they’re trying to forget. They were back in that hotel room in Antwerp, with its broken heater and too-thin blankets, and back in that bed. Hands on either side of Stormz’s head, they were faced with that impulse again, that magnetism, that tantalizing gravity.
Stormz stops them just inches from rapture, still, asks the same question, faces Dumb with the same choice. Except Dumb knows what comes after, now.
This time, they don’t hesitate.
When the train had jolted them awake, they’d nearly let out a yelp like a lost kitten, desperate and yearning. When they brought their hands to their face, they found their eyes wet, hair above their ears damp with the remnants of tears.
The lights on the dance floor flash again, ruby and carnation. Haunted is the only explanation, they think. How else could someone they hadn’t spoken to in a year still be lodged so deep in their chest, sore spot right next to their heart?
+---+
“What?” Stormz breathes, attention jumping back to them.
And—well. Dumb doesn’t really want to talk about it, has been avoiding confronting it in any meaningful way since that cold December night, but their nerves are already frayed and emotions already running high. For one single moment, they hesitate, consider letting it drop and moving on like it doesn’t matter.
“Maybe it is a bad thing that you still care,” they start, adrenaline spiking back up in a new form, “When you don’t fucking act like it a day in your life.” Stormz blinks, clearly not expecting them to double down. “At events, you only wave at me when the media’s not around, and you never—you never call, you never text, you never do anything to actually try to stay in my life or keep me in yours. I went from living with you to keeping up with your life from hyper-curated fucking Instagram posts.”
Rearing back a little, Stormz’s hands float up, hovering and unsure. “I’m sorry,” he starts, audibly taken aback, “I didn’t—"
“Of course you didn’t fucking realize, or know, or whatever! You left me to find about your transfer by finding a package on our doorstep. Of our apartment.” The tears threaten to come back, pricking at the corners of their eyes. “That we lived in together for three years.”
Eyes somehow still wide, Stormz murmurs, “I left you with everything when I moved out. You didn’t have to leave.”
“That’s not the fucking point, Stormz!” Uncontrollably, their voice pitches louder, desperation slipping in. “Did none of it mean anything to you? I slept in your bed for months and you couldn’t even find it in yourself to tell me you were leaving before you had both feet out the—”
“Lower your fucking voice,” he snaps suddenly, with enough force that Dumb shuts up immediately. Furtively, he glances both ways down the hallway, and they can see the tension release from his shoulders when he finds both directions empty. “Remember where we are, Dumb.”
“Oh, what, is Stormz the unshakeable suddenly worried I’ll put his game off before the big match?” they snark, long-held ache turning cruel in the moment. It feels good. They’re not sure how to feel about that.
To their surprise, though, he doesn’t take the bait. Instead, he leans closer to them, a kind of fear-anger behind his own eyes Dumb has never seen in him before. “Do you know what would happen to us if some of the shit we’ve done ever went public?”
It’s Dumb’s turn to be on the back foot, blinking wide-eyed at him. When the hesitance turns to non-response, Stormz grins cynically and shakes his head. “Yeah, you’ve never thought about that, have you? And now that I say it out loud, you know too that they’d destroy us. Never let us do anything meaningful in the game again.”
And there, in a bland hallway in the middle of Budapest, the man in front of him is painted in an entirely new light. Confidence becomes protection, masculinity something to shelter behind; all of those hidden, quiet moments become things stolen from a world inhospitable to them. All of a sudden, Stormz becomes someone who’s been scared, deep down to his core, for years.
“So that’s why?” Dumb replies, voice barely above a whisper, “That’s why you left? To give yourself a future free of the threat of me?”
“I did it for your future, too,” Stormz replies softly, instead of answering the real question at all.
+---+
February, 2023, Katowice.
The entire arena is dead silent for the last thirty seconds of the final round.
That’s how it feels to Dumb, anyway. Maybe it’s the bloodrush in their ears turning everything blank instead, that last burst of adrenaline drowning the rest out. The world narrows to the width of his monitor and their fingers on keyboard and mouse, to Stormz’s voice in their ears as he tells them, “One backsite, watch library.”
They mutter back confirmation, take a steadying breath. No util, and they’re down to the 2v3 without the bomb down and with Stormz on a pistol. It should be impossible. It has every right to be.
But it’s Dumb and Stormz, Dumb-and-Stormz, duo of the decade, and they don’t believe in impossible.
Stormz’s countdown brings their focus in, crosshair placement locking into muscle memory. No one else says a word.
Then they swing the corner and are instantly met with return fire, sharp sound of AK spray and Deagle shots cracking open the silence. Dumb’s shots find body but not quite head, and they go down in a blur of flash and black body armor; at almost the same time, Stormz trades them out, takes down Wyll with a clean headshot.
“Nice,” Dumb whispers, and Jelex tacks on, “Bomb is pit,” and then it all goes silent.
The tension is palpable, static in their fingertips, as they watch Stormz shelter behind the box, reload his Deagle. He peeks library once, spots a body, misses, falls back. As soon as he gets vision on that far corner again, he shoots, and the placement is perfect—bang, headshot, sound echoing off Inferno’s tiled walls. One more, Dumb thinks, voice in his throat, you know where they are. You know.
Stormz pushes back up to the box, jiggles just enough to catch sight of a shoulder, and before their adrenaline can even jump, swings again, and his Deagle strikes true.
Dumb doesn’t even wait for the victory screen to flash before they’re jumping out of their chair, tossing their headphones off and pulling their in-ears out. As the roar of the crowd comes bursting back into perception, they turn blindly to their right, to where they know Stormz is waiting. In the light of the screens plastering QU4RTET’s name across the stadium, he meets them right there, sweeps them up into a hug that takes them off their feet.
From there, everything becomes a blur, group hug and flashing lights and shouted words between laughter none of them can really make out. Handshakes, consolations, a walk down the runway to that beautiful silver trophy, mark of excellence and testament to all they’ve done glimmering in the spotlights. At some point, they end up with an American flag over their shoulders. Up close, the crowd is deafening, surreal, ascendant.
And then they’re there, at the trophy, just inches from it. It’s a dream and it’s reality, it’s what they’ve been working towards for as long as they can remember; it’s here, in front of them, in the palms of their hands.
Form behind, hands coax them and Stormz forward. As their steps slow, they look over at Stormz, and he looks at them with the same expression: pride, humility, deference. For a split second, Dumb’s thoughts skip, and then Stormz laughs, and then they’re laughing, and by the time they get themselves back together, one of each of their hands has ended up on the trophy.
Between them, hidden by the podium, their hands brush, knuckle to knuckle. Dumb finds Stormz’s pinkie, catches it in their own.
As soon as the trophy leaves the stand, the arena lights up, spotlight and confetti and pyrotechnics sparking behind them. Blinding light, glittering gold, deafening roar, and all Dumb can think is supernova, is the moment of nuclear collapse and rebound. As the confetti comes to rest on shoulders and in hair, Dumb thinks it only makes sense that it’s gold, one of those things that only forms in those vibrant final moments of colossal stars.
Amidst the reinvigorated cheers of the crowd, it finally really hits that they did it. Redemption against Brotherhood for the 3-0 at Katowice last year, redemption for themselves after a slump in performance since the major, and winning Katowice. And, to top it all off, the Grand fucking Slam.
After the initial trophy lift is over, it gets passed around the team, and Dumb lets themselves get lost in the euphoria of it. Eventually, the gold bars get brought up onto the stage, all velvet-wrapped and beautiful; the trophy gets passed off to Fate, and the heft of solid gold finds their hands. With the rest of the team, they raise that up, too, to another surge of deafening applause.
Medals come next, the traditional honor, then the less exciting task of taking down their setups. As they unplug their keyboard and wrap up the wire, they find themselves staring at that gold sitting on their mousepad, remnants of a star made to fit in their hands.
---
That night, Dumb doesn’t dream about raising the trophy, or of golden confetti or gold bars, or of glorious stellar implosion.
Halfway through setup takedown, they end up on the floor with Stormz, pulling cables out from deep under their desks. When they emerge back out from the dark, he catches them by the shoulder before they can stand back up, gaze intent with something they can’t read. When they look back at him, curious, he wordlessly shifts his touch to their hand, brings it up to his mouth, and kisses the back of it, light and fleeting. In their shock, Dumb can only watch as they switch to their other hand, cables still in their fist and all, and does the same.
“Just giving them their honors, too,” Stormz says as he pulls away, like it’s the most normal thing in the world.
That night, Dumb doesn’t dream about winning. Dumb dreams about that moment, small and gentle and hidden from the world, and lives it on repeat again and again and again.
---
April, 2025, Shanghai.
Against their better judgement, and maybe for a little taste of self-destruction, Dumb decides to check the odds for their upcoming match on the betting apps.
It, predictably, doesn’t make them feel any better. Their opponent is world rank 21, and should be no challenge to their world rank 4. Still, everyone’s betting against them, everywhere they look.
They close their browser, open Instagram on muscle memory. The first thing that greets them is a post from Stormz, with stunning pictures of the national park and photos from a team dinner where everyone is laughing so hard their faces are red.
They close Instagram, open Twitter on muscle memory. Twitter is a lot easier to get lost in, especially once they search up their own name and just scroll the results. For the most part, it’s reiteration of what they already know; they’re falling off, they’re putting up their worst performances since their rookie season, they need to be benched. They’re nothing without Stormz. Et cetera.
It’s mindless agony, digging themselves deeper into a pit—until they stumble across something else, something interesting.
It takes them a few reads of the tweet to understand that it’s a shipping thing, with their and Stormz’s names and a link attached. They know they shouldn’t click on it, shouldn’t interact, should just move on.
They click the link, watch it open in Chrome. It’s a little over six thousand words.
Long after they tell themselves they’ll stop, they finish it, and find tears in their eyes and a deep, twisting ache in their chest.
+---+
“So that’s it, then?” Dumb can’t keep the hopelessness out of their voice, tired in too many ways. “We just go our separate ways and pretend to hate each other forever?”
Stormz gives them a quietly tortured look. “I don’t hate you, Dumb.”
“Well, you sure as hell act like it,” they mutter, half just out of stubbornness and the hurt aching in their ribs
Sighing heavy, he half-heartedly throws up a hand. “I have to, don’t I?” Gaze escaping to the ceiling, his face catches new, deeper shadows as he turns it towards the brilliant light. For a second, he just stares at it, surely blinding—until he shakes his head, drops his eyes back to his lap. “We would’ve flown straight into the sun if given the chance.”
Dumb looks at him for a long, long moment, and knows he’s right. Knows they almost did, almost were, time and time again.
“…I almost wish you did hate me. Like, for real,” they murmur, so quiet they’re not even sure if he’ll hear, “It would be easier, wouldn’t it?”
“It probably would. But I could never.” Like a confession, Stormz breathes, voice barely even a whisper, “I could never really hate you.”
+---+
March, 2023, Belgrade.
A month and a few days after they win the Grand Slam, a friend tells them they should check out the Japanese garden while they’re in town.
She gives them a suspicious lack of detail, but they’re home on specific orders to rest before IEM Rio, and the only other thing they would be doing is binging Survivor for the third time over. So, when they wake up and the sun is shining, they go.
Very quickly, they discover the surprise: the cherry trees are in bloom.
The garden feels like a snippet of another universe, all gentle trickling streams and fluttering pink petals. They wander for ages, exploring every little side path and reading every plaque; with the warmth of the sun gracing their skin for what feels like the first time in weeks, they start to remember what it feels like to be human.
Near the end of the walk, as the sun begins to dip towards the horizon, they find a little stone bridge, quaint and cliché, deep into the maze of paths. As they come to the top of its arch, Stormz slows his steps, glances around while Dumb stops just behind them. Once the coast is certifiably clear, he turns to face them, takes their face in his hands, and—
And kisses them on the forehead, light brush of a touch.
At just the moment he pulls away, a breeze sweeps through, sends petals dancing through the air. For one barely-there moment, Stormz just looks at them, and Dumb looks back and thinks, god, you look like an angel.
Then the moment passes, and Stormz pulls away, leaves Dumb standing there in the golden sun feeling like that meant more than either of them will ever say.
---
March, 2025, Belgrade.
Nearly nine months after Stormz leaves, Dumb walks into a bubble tea shop in downtown Belgrade and the first thing they think of when they see the menu is how excited Stormz would’ve been that they have brown sugar boba.
Even now, he’s in everything. They’re starting to wonder if they’ll be in everything they do forever.
(Outside, the cherry trees are blooming.)
+---+
Far down the hallway, the arena door opens and music-voices-synth cacophony blasts down the space. Someone calls for places; they both know it, even if they can’t hear it.
Dumb feels the moment slipping through their fingers. This is the most the two of them have talked since Belgrade, the most honest they’ve been with anyone since the transfer went through. So many things push at the confines of their ribs, a torrent of words and not enough time to say them; Stormz glances over at the door, gaze calculating, and they’re losing him, and they’re losing him.
So, impulsively, on a raw heart and rawer nerves, they grab his shoulders before he can make any kind of decision and pull him into a hug.
They’re ready for him to push him away, or for it to be stiff and awkward and objectively horrible. What they aren’t expecting at all is for him to melt into it immediately, for him to wrap his arms around their back and squeeze tighter than even they are. In an instant, under the touch of Dumb’s desperation, Stormz’s own seems to rear its ugly head for just a single, vulnerable moment, and they feel some part of him shatter there against their chest.
Dumb knows they should just leave it at this, leave the unsaid things unsaid and start the process of accepting they’ll never get to say them at all. But, well. Stormz is in their arms, and they’re in his. They’re talking, and they’re realizing just how much they’ve missed his real, non-interview voice. Stormz is breathing into the crook of their neck, and maybe crying without tears, though they’re sure he’d never show it.
Deep down in their chest, they know this is it. Maybe this is an olive branch of some sort, a clearing of the air, but they know the two of them are leaving this with a firm boundary between them and there’s no going back. They might text. Maybe they’ll call every so often, if they’re lucky. But they’ll never be this, never be what they were, ever again.
So, against their better judgement, Dumb shifts and murmurs into Stormz’s shoulder, “I think I loved you, probably.”
Under their touch, the brush of the words on skin, Stormz stills. Instantly, Dumb’s instincts tell them to run for the hills, but they don’t; aside from the fact they really can’t, they find that they don’t want to. There is no fallout to avoid, no awkward conversations for some later time. And at the moment, Dumb thinks they’d rather stay, breathing in lingering traces of familiar cologne and tracing the lines of his spine one last time.
With a heavy, heavy sigh, Stormz affords them one last moment of bliss, pulling them in even tighter and letting their fingers find purchase in the back of their jersey. Maybe it’s for him, too, in some way.
When he pulls back, Dumb lets him go easy. Every inch of distance aches, aches with grief and aches with finality, but they let him. In return, Stormz gives them a smile, quietly devastated and a little pitying, that tells them he’s known for a long, long time.
Letting one of his arms fall back to his side, Stormz pats them twice on the shoulder. It feels like the fall of a gavel in a courtroom; the second they feel it, Dumb knows their body won’t let that touch go for a long time.
Verdict given, it should be easy to break the connection and get on with it. Still, Stormz’s hand hangs there on his shoulder, lingering.
In the end, it’s his eyes that goes first. It leaves Dumb staring numbly at his side profile as he says, all too casual, “Good luck with the game.”
For a brief moment, reality seems to hang in the balance, one last second of hesitance before the blade comes down.
And then Stormz turns, drops his hand, and, as always, leaves. Back to the stage, back to his team, back to the future he’s carving for himself.
Amongst blank white walls and cold gray concrete, Dumb, as always, just stands there and watches his back as he goes, left to pick up the remnants all on their own.