Chapter Text
By 2026, people talked about them in the past tense with the flat, unblinking indifference people would reserve for an old diner that tore down its neon sign five years ago.
Skeppy sat in the dark; the stream was done, and only light in the room was the cold, blue glare of the monitor and the cheap orange splash of a parking lot lamp leaking through the blinds. Outside, someone’s headlights swept across his wall. He was scrolling through old fan clips he always claimed he never watched.
“Man, they used to stream together constantly.”
“Wonder what even happened.”
The words were buried between dead timestamps and arguments that wouldn't matter by Tuesday. Nobody was angry anymore, and nobody was demanding answers or digging for drama. The internet had simply made its decision, filed them away under nostalgia, and moved on. The world had stopped asking about him and Bad, and they hadn't even noticed the silence setting in.
The clip kept looping. Bad was laughing somewhere off-mic, then Skeppy’s own voice cut in, saying something he couldn't even remember thinking, let alone speaking. Bad’s voice came back, louder, closer, and with that unbothered brightness.
Skeppy killed the tab. Opened another. Then another.
The internet loved the highlights—the screaming fits, the meltdowns, the theatrical displays of a friendship built for an audience. But Skeppy couldn't remember a single one of them. Instead, he was haunted by the scrap metal left behind, those boring seconds between the takes and things too small for a fan to clip, things that would make him sound losing his mind if he ever tried to explain them to anyone else.
It was Bad pushing a water bottle across a desk without asking if he was thirsty. It was Bad saying, “Move,” in some cramped kitchen years ago, one hand briefly anchoring against Skeppy’s hip to slide past him—a touch so casual it meant absolutely nothing, yet so sudden Skeppy had spent the rest of the night furious at his own chest for tightening up over it. It was the way Bad always looked at him first whenever someone else made a joke in a crowded room. The way his voice dropped its stage presence when it was just the two of them saying goodnight.
Then the clips blurred, and years folded in on themselves until the thumbnails looked like a hallway of mirrors. Skeppy leaned back, dragging a palm over his mouth. He stared blankly at the glass of the monitor. Outside, the rain finally started that heavy, directionless Florida rain that comes down warm and hits the windows with a strange, aggressive loudness in the dark.
His stream setup still occupied most of the room, though the LEDs had dimmed automatically now that broadcasting was over, leaving everything washed in muted color, wires trailing across the floor beside empty cans and unfolded laundry and the hoodie he kicked aside earlier because the apartment felt too warm again with the humid air slipping stubbornly through the vents no matter how low he turned the thermostat.
Usually, after streams a few years ago, there was a rhythm to things. Not planned. Worse than planned. It would go like this: he would end stream, call Bad, complain about chat, talk about nothing, then hours would be gone before either noticed.
Sometimes one of them would start watching videos while the other half-listened. Sometimes Bad cooked something at three in the morning while carrying the phone around with him, opening cabinets, running water, muttering distractedly under his breath whenever he burned himself slightly on a pan because he always cooked too fast when tired. Sometimes neither spoke for ten straight minutes and the silence still felt occupied.
Sometimes the conversations were stupid enough that neither would remember them by morning, entire nights wasted arguing over fast food rankings or terrible movies or whether some obscure internet drama mattered at all, Bad growing louder and more animated the more exhausted he became while Skeppy laughed so hard he occasionally had to pull his headset away from his ears.
Now stream endings felt abrupt in a way that almost embarrassed him. He ended broadcast, thanked chat automatically, watched the viewer count disappear, and then suddenly there was nowhere for the momentum to go afterward, nowhere for the loose restless energy inside him to land except against the walls of his apartment.
Without fully deciding to, Skeppy opened YouTube again. His recommendations had learned him too well over the years, and old thumbnails appeared instantly. 2023 meetup vlog.
He stared at it for a second too long. He remembers filming a lot of content for it that never got in.
Bad somewhere behind the camera saying, “You missed the turn again.”
“I did not miss the turn,” Skeppy answered immediately. The old version of his voice sounded brighter somehow, careless in a way current-day Skeppy found almost embarrassing to hear now.
“You literally just did.”
“No, I’m taking the scenic route.”
“The scenic route is a parking garage?” Bad laughed then, loud enough that the microphone crackled slightly from the force of it, and Skeppy felt something unpleasant shift beneath his ribs before he could stop it.
The footage itself was painfully mundane.
Blurred traffic lights bled through rain-streaked windshields. In another clip, Bad was filming random grocery store shelves at two in the morning while Skeppy complained about the price of snacks in the background. Then came a shaky, out-of-focus video of them sitting in a fast-food joint long past midnight; both looked completely tired, and Bad was absently peeling the label off a ketchup bottle while listening to Skeppy ramble incoherently.
Nothing important actually happened in those hundreds of discarded clips.
Skeppy rubbed a tired eye before reaching for his phone, which was lying face-down next to his keyboard. No notifications. It wasn't unusual, but it still stung. His thumb hovered aimlessly over Bad’s contact info anyway, and for one humiliating second, he almost called him—without a plan, without an excuse, just like he used to years ago when wanting company was reason enough. Instead, he locked the screen, opened Twitter, scrolled for a bit, closed it, and then opened their text thread.
Looking at the text thread as a whole, the conversation felt strangely formal now. There were massive gaps between replies, long stretches of silence punctuated only by isolated check-ins that somehow felt deeply intimate precisely because they were so restrained.
you alive
yeah
stream went okay?
mhm
Scrolling up, an old photo from months ago appeared on the screen. It was Bad, holding a terrible cup of gas station coffee toward the camera with a look of exaggerated disgust. Behind the camera, Skeppy was laughing so hard that the edges of the photo were slightly blurred.
There was something heartbreaking about old photos taken before anyone realized they were becoming old photos, back before every casual gesture accidentally hardened into proof of what used to be. It was evidence that, at one point, two people were so completely woven into each other's lives that neither could have even imagined a world where the other wasn't there.
Skeppy watched the reflections distort and reform over and over again until, without entirely meaning to, he found himself thinking about another thing in 2023, disconnected moments suspended strangely intact in his memory while everything around them blurred.
Even late at night, the air stayed so thick that the car never fully cooled down. Bad complained about it every single time they parked for too long, pushing damp curls off his forehead and muttering, “Why is it still eighty degrees at midnight? This state is evil,” and Skeppy would just laugh from the driver’s seat. Whenever they rolled through an intersection, the passing traffic lights would paint brief streaks of red and green across their faces. Most of their private meetups were exactly like that. Just driving nowhere in particular, and stopping nowhere important.
One night, they spent nearly forty minutes just sitting in a grocery store parking lot because Bad refused to go inside until “the weird guy near the entrance leaves.” In reality, the guy was probably just another exhausted worker buying snacks after a shift. Skeppy remembered watching Bad talk, growing more and more amused as the dashboard lights cast shadows under Bad's eyes. It lit up the constant, animated movement of his hands—expressive even when he was tired, and even when he was saying absolutely nothing at all.
“You’re paranoid.”
“He had bread.”
“You can commit crimes with bread?”
Skeppy laughed so hard he accidentally choked on his drink, then Bad reached over with his hand resting briefly on Skeppy's shoulder until he stopped coughing. The gesture was so quick it practically blended into the background, but it wasn't fast enough, because for the rest of the night, Skeppy remained hyper-aware of the exact spot where Bad's hand was just at.
As the trip went on, they fell into a predictable routine at the end of every night without even realizing it: drive around for hours, grab food way too late, and find a quiet spot to just sit before heading back. Sometimes they ended up in parking garages, other times in empty lots overlooking the water. Once, they even found their way to the roof of a half-abandoned shopping center, where a warm breeze swept through the open decks carrying the distant scent of rain and gasoline.
That night, Skeppy remembered lying back briefly across the hood of the car while Bad stood nearby drinking something iced and terrible from a plastic cup, condensation sliding slowly over his fingers while he talked about absolutely nothing, some story already half-lost to memory now.
“You ever think,” Bad said suddenly, gaze fixed somewhere beyond the railing lights below them, “that we spend more time in parking lots than actual human beings are supposed to?”
“We’re very busy people.”
Bad let out a soft laugh. Skeppy remembered turning his head just to look at him, at his loose silhouette framed by the distant city lights, the oversized sleeves swallowed up by his hands despite the heat, and that familiar, forward slouch he always got when he was tired but refused to admit it. Nothing actually happened, yet the memory of that trip remained lodged deep in Skeppy’s chest. Looking back, every ordinary moment felt like it had a hidden meaning underneath, a truth that neither of them were brave enough to face directly.
Back then, it just felt natural. It was natural that Bad knew exactly which drink to hand him without a word, natural that Skeppy slowed his pace whenever Bad fell a few steps behind, and natural that their silence never felt awkward or needed an apology.
There was one specific night from that trip that Skeppy couldn't stop revisiting. He kept dwelling on it with a sort of obsession:
It was around two in the morning. The digital clock above the microwave cast a faint green glow across the dark kitchen, and a light rain tapped against the window over the sink.
Instead of plates, open takeout cartons sat between them, half-soggy from steam and grease. Skeppy could still vividly remember the artificial smell of sweet soda mixing weirdly with soy sauce, all under the heavy blanket of Florida humidity drifting through the window by the table.
Bad was talking about something entirely forgettable. Some story about a streamer argument, or maybe a video idea neither of them would ever actually make. The subject itself dissolved completely in memory now.
Skeppy wasn’t listening anymore, or rather, he kept trying to listen and failing repeatedly in ways that embarrassed him even now years afterward, because every few seconds his attention snagged helplessly against some new detail instead: the way Bad tilted his head downward before laughing. The absentminded habit he had of tapping his fingernails lightly against drink cups while thinking. The faint shadows beneath his eyes from sleeping badly the entire trip.
Skeppy remembered just sitting there, letting his food go cold while a restless, dizzying feeling built up under his skin. It wasn't a sudden explosion of emotion, nor was it dramatic enough to ruin the mood, but it was just a slow, almost unbearable awareness of how close they were.
At one point, Bad reached across the counter to grab his drink. Skeppy’s eyes caught, stupidly, on the movement of Bad's wrist slipping out of his sleeve. The pale skin was exposed for just a fraction of a second before the fabric slid back down, but simply noticing it felt deeply humiliating. It was an absurd, totally over-the-top reaction to such a mundane gesture, because after all, what kind of person obsessively fixated on wrists, sleeves, or the way someone’s hands wrapped around a cheap plastic cup at two in the morning?
He looked away. Then looked back anyway.
Bad kept talking, “…and then he says it’s ‘artisanal beef jerky,’ which already sounds evil, by the way—”
Skeppy laughed. Too late.
Bad’s eyes flicked toward him briefly then narrowed slightly. “What?”
Skeppy blinked. “What?”
“You’re staring at me.”
“No I’m not.”
“You have not heard a single thing I said for the last five minutes.”
Skeppy smiled despite himself, dragging his straw absently through melting ice while looking anywhere except directly at him now, because being caught felt strangely similar to embarrassment and irritation simultaneously, both reactions tangled together too tightly to separate cleanly.
“I heard some of it.”
“Okay,” Bad said immediately, leaning back further in his chair. “What was I talking about?”
Skeppy opened his mouth. Paused. “…Beef jerky?”
He laughed through his nose, shaking his head once in exhausted disbelief, “See?” then, after another moment: “You’re doing the thing again.”
Skeppy frowned. “What thing?”
“The staring thing.”
“Maybe you’re just nice to look at.”
At first, Bad smiled, but a second later, Skeppy saw a tiny shift. Anyone else would have missed it entirely: a fraction of a hesitation before the smile locked back into place, his fingers freezing for a split second around his cup, his shoulders tensing up just for an instant. It was a mere flicker, gone immediately, but Skeppy felt it anyway.
Bad was the first to look away; “Yeah, well,” he said lightly, tugging at his sleeve even though it hadn't actually slipped, “I guess that’s your problem.”
And Skeppy laughed because the sentence clearly wanted laughter attached to it, because the alternative would require looking at the moment directly instead of sideways, but even while laughing he became overwhelmingly aware of everything else too: the warmth trapped inside the kitchen, the exhaustion pulling at both of them, the untouched food cooling slowly on the counter, Bad refusing to look back up immediately afterward.
Skeppy could remember the exact sound the ice made shifting inside Bad’s cup during the silence that followed.
The rest of the night continued almost normally on the surface, which perhaps was why it lodged itself so deeply beneath his thoughts later, why his mind kept circling back toward that kitchen with the uneasy fixation of somebody replaying security footage after an accident, searching frame by frame for the exact second something irreversible began.
Skeppy laughed. Bad laughed too. The conversation moved forward. Still, the air inside the apartment never seemed to settle properly again after that sentence.
Maybe because Bad suddenly became aware of things he had spent years successfully refusing to examine directly. Old things, familiar things, ordinary things that had quietly accumulated meaning while neither of them was paying attention. Or rather, while Skeppy wasn’t paying attention.
Bad had been paying attention for a while now, far longer than he wanted to admit.
He noticed it earlier during the trip in fragments small enough to dismiss individually, moments that appeared harmless until they began collecting beside each other in ways that made dismissal impossible.
Skeppy wandering barefoot through the apartment at night because he hated socks indoors. Skeppy opening the fridge without asking where anything was anymore. Skeppy falling asleep on the couch during movies with the careless trust of somebody who already unconsciously believed he belonged there.
Bad tried, repeatedly, not to think too hard about why those things affected him so strangely. Which only caused him to think about them constantly.
There was a morning earlier that week when he woke before Skeppy and walked quietly into the kitchen to make coffee, the apartment still dim with early rainlight filtering weakly through the blinds, everything muted blue and gray and soft around the edges from exhaustion, and while waiting for the coffee machine to finish dripping he heard footsteps behind him followed by Skeppy’s voice, rough with sleep.
“You made enough for me too, right?”
Not “can you make me some.”
Not “are you making coffee.”
Bad remembered standing there with one hand still wrapped around the mug handle while something inside him tightened so suddenly it bordered almost on panic, because Skeppy was half-awake, hair messy, and had a hoodie slipping loose from one shoulder slightly while he crossed the kitchen without ceremony.
Desire was easy enough to handle when it was abstract and distant and when they could twist it into inside jokes, streams, and loud online personas that drowned out their characters. But reality completely changed the scale of things. Reality was Skeppy standing just a little too close as they brushed past each other in the narrow kitchen, and reality was grabbing two drinks instead of one because he already knew exactly which flavor Skeppy hated. It was the terrifying ease of it all, how naturally their lives slotted together during the meetup, to the point where Bad sometimes caught himself speaking in accidental pluralities.
“We need groceries.”
“We should leave earlier tomorrow.”
“We already watched that.”
We.
We.
We.
After the kitchen conversation, after Skeppy’s careless “maybe you’re just nice to look at,” Bad became almost painfully conscious of his body in the room, every movement suddenly overexamined before completion, as though awareness itself had turned restrictive.
He cleaned the counter afterward mostly to occupy his hands. Threw away containers that still had food inside them. Rinsed cups already technically clean.
Behind him, Skeppy kept talking about something, but Bad found himself struggling to follow the words properly because his thoughts had narrowed uncomfortably around details instead: The reflection of Skeppy moving behind him in the dark kitchen window, the low rasp of his laughter, the fact he was still sitting there long after either of them needed to stay awake.
Bad turned on the faucet harder than necessary and cold water rushed loudly against the sink.
“You know,” Skeppy said somewhere behind him, “normal people probably sleep at normal times.”
“We are not normal people.”
“That’s true.”
Skeppy laughed again, and Bad closed his eyes for a split second at the sound. Back then, he still believed he could keep a lid on it, that he could quietly shrink his feelings down before anyone else noticed, but the problem with trying not to look at something is that your entire life eventually starts revolving around the avoidance. Every single gesture becomes so deliberate that it actually highlights the exact thing you’re desperately trying to hide.
A few nights after that kitchen conversation, they ended up back at the apartment much earlier than planned. Outside, a classic Florida storm had rolled in with its usual sudden drama.
Bad took over the kitchen, mostly because he desperately needed something to do with his hands, and Skeppy hovered nearby without actually helping, mindlessly opening cabinets and stealing chopped ingredients straight off the cutting board before they could even hit the pan. He talked non-stop.
“You know what I don’t understand?” Skeppy said from somewhere behind him.
“Hm?”
“How people cook every day.”
Bad snorted softly while rinsing a glass beneath warm water. “Most people need food to survive.”
“No, but like every day every day. That’s crazy.”
“You ate chips for dinner yesterday.”
“And I’ll do it again.”
“That explains a lot about you actually.”
“We should just get a place together at this point.”
Bad laughed instantly. It startled something inside him badly enough that laughter arrived first and slightly too loud, “What?”
Skeppy leaned lazily against the counter, completely relaxed, still scrolling through his phone while talking. “I’m serious.”
The glass nearly slipped from Bad’s hand just enough that his grip jerked suddenly against the wet surface before tightening again, water splashing lightly across the sink and sleeves. Skeppy either didn't notice or pretended not to.
“Like imagine,” he continued easily, words tumbling together beneath the rhythm of rain outside, “you cooking. Me making your life harder on purpose.”
Bad forced out another laugh. “That sounds awful.” But the words came out weaker than he intended, falling flat against the sudden, heavy atmosphere of the room. Everything felt magnified, the sink beneath his hands, and Skeppy standing just a few feet away, talking about forever with the total casualness of someone throwing pebbles at a window that was already cracked.
Skeppy grinned. “You’d love it.”
Bad immediately looked down and begun focusing with humiliating intensity on rinsing soap off a glass that was already perfectly clean. If he hadn't been so painfully over-analytical, the words could have just remained harmless.
The rest of the night passed normally enough and they put on a movie that neither of them actually watched. Skeppy kept interrupting the scenes with increasingly terrible commentary until Bad finally lost patience and threw a couch pillow at him, eventually, Skeppy fell half-asleep on the opposite end of the sofa, still stubbornly pretending to pay attention.
Sometime after two in the morning, Skeppy finally headed off to the guest room with a tired, gravelly “goodnight.”
Then the apartment went quiet.
Bad remained sitting in the kitchen long after there was any reason to stay there, one hand wrapped loosely around a mug gone cold. He stared vaguely at nothing, then at the hallway leading toward the guest room, then away again immediately.
This isn’t good.
The apartment still carried traces of Skeppy everywhere now that Bad noticed them consciously: discarded hoodie over the couch arm, charger plugged into the wrong outlet near the kitchen counter, half-empty drink left carelessly beside the sink.
What kind of person does this make me?
The question weighed heavily on him. By now, it felt almost instinctive, like the way certain childhood lessons stay buried in your body long after you grow up, absorbed so thoroughly that they stop sounding like outside voices and start acting like reflexes.
They were just friends. That was the reality. Two friends spending a little too much time together. Two friends joking a bit too comfortably about a future that neither of them should look at too closely. Nothing actually happened.
Yet, at some point during that, Bad started taking just a little longer to text back whenever they were apart.
Calls were picked up later than usual. Whenever a “sorry, busy” text arrived, it was always wrapped in enough pity that Skeppy felt guilty for ever doubting him. That was the thing—Bad still sounded exactly like Bad. He still answered the phone with that same bright energy, with a voice lifting at the start of a conversation as if nothing underneath changed at all. He still joked constantly, he still teased Skeppy for sleeping in, eating junk, and being forgetful, and he still called him “dude” in that affectionate tone that balanced right on the edge of fondness and exasperation.
Maybe that’s why the change was so hard to catch at first. It was like standing right in the middle of erosion: you don't notice things dusting away because each tiny loss seems too small to matter on its own.
First, the phone calls started getting shorter, losing that old flexibility they used to have. Conversations that once stretched effortlessly into the early morning now felt like they were on a timer from the very start. Bad always had a good reason for it too, like editing, recording, being tired, or needing an early start the next day. They were all legitimate excuses, and probably entirely true.
Still, Skeppy became hyper-aware of the exact moments their conversations drifted anywhere near vulnerability. Once he started paying attention, he noticed Bad would almost flawlessly redirect the conversation somewhere else before things could get too deep.
One evening, Skeppy admitted he was feeling incredibly burned out from streaming. He was quieter than usual, lying flat on his back on the couch with his phone balanced on his chest. Bad listened for maybe three seconds before blurting out, “Okay, but did you see that guy on Twitter who tried to microwave a steak?”
Another time Skeppy admitted he hadn't really been sleeping properly. Bad answered, “Yeah, because your sleep schedule is demonic,” followed instantly by some ridiculous story about Sam accidentally staying awake for nearly thirty hours.
At first, Skeppy genuinely thought he was just imagining things, or worse, making it up entirely, because after all, what was he even accusing Bad of? Being a little distracted? Having a life outside of their friendship? Whenever he looked at it too closely, the thought felt incredibly embarrassing and always revealed a needy side of himself that he hated to admit was there.
Still, once he noticed the pattern, he couldn't unsee it. He kept catching how quickly Bad changed the subject now and how often awkward silences would stretch between them before being abruptly covered up with forced energy. Conversations that used to drift naturally into personal territory now seemed to bounce right off the surface.
One night in late autumn, Skeppy sat alone in his apartment after a stream. Bad was rambling about something Puffy had said earlier that day, spinning the story out into increasingly unnecessary detail. Skeppy only half-listened.
Bad laughed midway through the story.
Skeppy waited for the laugh to fade.
Then, before he could reconsider it: “Did I do something?”
The silence afterward arrived so quickly it almost sounded rehearsed.
“No.”
Skeppy frowned, staring at his dark monitor reflection while rainwater distorted distant parking lot lights outside into wavering streaks of orange and white. “Then why does this feel weird now?”
On the other end of the call, Bad inhaled.
For one impossible second Skeppy thought maybe Bad would answer honestly. Instead Bad laughed.
“You overthink too much.”
And Skeppy laughed too after a second because the alternative would require pushing harder, would require admitting he already suspected the answer mattered far more than either of them seemed willing to acknowledge aloud.
“Maybe,” he muttered.
Bad immediately pivoted to something else—a video idea, a game update. Skeppy just let the conversation roll forward. He desperately wanted to believe that the easy connection between them was still there naturally, rather than something they had to manually assemble piece by piece every time an awkward silence threatened to swallow them up. But despite his best efforts, the distance between them kept growing anyway.
Bad never completely vanished, and he never gave Skeppy a real, concrete reason to be angry. He still checked in out of nowhere at random hours:
you alive
drink water idiot
stream looked good today
He still sent videos whenever something reminded him of an old inside joke. He still picked up calls, he still laughed, and his voice still sounded fond in all the familiar places.
Over time, talking to Bad started to feel like standing outside a house in the dead of winter. You could still see the warm light glowing through the windows, but the front door was closing, inch by slow inch. It was so gradual that you only realized it was happening when you looked back. Each tiny shift seemed harmless, easy to deny, and easy to survive.
But every single time, without fail, the opening grew just a little bit narrower anyway.