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English
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Published:
2026-07-09
Updated:
2026-07-09
Words:
719
Chapters:
1/?
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Second Movement

Summary:

Things don’t become easier after you’re cured. The smiles you give the cameras are fake. Sometimes the smiles you give each other are fake, too.

A look into the psychological trauma that follows a near-death medical situation.

Notes:

(See the end of the work for notes.)

Chapter 1: Sul Tasto

Chapter Text

Uncertainty is worse than certainty, even when the latter promises ill. At least with certainty, you know what to brace for.

With uncertainty, anxiety doesn’t end after you’ve been cured.

It’s exacerbated.

To be clear. It’s daunting to lose your strength. It’s surreal. It’s uncanny. Pick your adjective: it’s bad. But when you’re in the thick of things, when all is at its worst, you know what to do. You must survive. It's your one duty and you are doing it.

There are moments of uneasy quiet, of questions, of fears for the immediate future. Your mind also blocks you from the worst: you float through, numbed, drifting between fogginess and sleep, emotions dampened through illness, through heavy medication, shuffling on automatic, passing through the worst unknowns with guided routines—you won't know the outcome, but you and the doctors are on it.

The issue is being pursued.

The solution is being pursued.

And in that, at least, you can take grounding. Not that it’s good grounding. But it means you know where you are.

The unease is different once it’s over. Unknowns remain and they’re more nebulous than the unknowns of treatment. Your fear remains but there’s no clear entity for it to latch onto; your brain neither knows what to target as a danger, nor does it know what to grab onto as a stabilizer. The stakes are no longer concrete. Taking action is like trying to lean on the wind. You’ve lost your foothold, you’ve lost your agency, and you’ve lost your status quo for what can and can’t happen to you.

Now you have to resume the old life: all the while the back of your mind asks, “What if it comes back?”

What if it comes back?

It may be irrational, but it’s often true: the hypothetical of could come back feels worse than the reality of living it now. Everyone around you is relieved. They might be watching you more cautiously than before the incident, but they’re letting themselves relax. Not you. You have to be on guard against an invisible threat you can’t even know exists—forever. It’s not a short-term survival quest now. It’s a long-term loss of safety.

Maybe Eddy knows. He’s been watching you. It’s been subtle, but you can feel his eyes following you, even for something as simple as walking to the kitchen and back. You weren’t walking before.

But then, his stability had always rested on you. That’s been knocked from under him. You’re both wobbling. You’re both reaching out to each other for stability, but it’s a toss-up about whether that’s been steadying you or imbalancing your position further.

Probably both. And it changes by the hour.

Not something you’d usually mull over—you wouldn’t need to pick things apart—but all balance had been disturbed, and you’d been jailed in the prison of your thoughts, forced to think things through. There was still a heavy stack of half-sorted thoughts weighing on you, and you weren’t sure how to shove it off.

It’d be hard to describe how today was faring. The filming equipment had never been put away, no mind it hadn’t been touched since Christmas, no mind it’d barely been touched in the last two months. Maybe Eddy, if he could’ve read your mind, would call it a symbol. You didn’t have concrete securities to latch onto, so you two subconsciously built a physical monument to normalcy, reassuring normalcy, even if there was nothing normal about its lack of use.

But, if you were going to be honest, if you were going to actually put your thoughts into words:

There was nothing to say to Eddy here.

There was nothing more to say. Things had already been said. Not everything. But. Things. You could feel his eyes on you, you could even feel the stiffness in the air between you two, but that was a natural result of everything that’d happened. You just needed time to refind your footing, and everything would be normal again.

Your imbalance would be rightened faster if you didn't throw more deadweight on the scale.

Time to turn the camera back on, tell the audience you were better, and return to your old life.

You hoped you could refind your old life.

You hoped you were actually better.

Notes:

I’d written this in April 2025. Then sat on it. I didn’t want to post without knowing where I’d go next. I was torn on how I wanted the story to move, subsequent drafts in late 2025 and early 2026 putting me at a narrative split between two options, deliberating which wordings and implications I liked best (thanks to @ginger_coke for helping me escape with a beta read, giving input on which paragraphs worked from each draft). As this was Baby’s First RPF and my first fanfiction in seven years, it took longer than it should’ve to recognize writing fic doesn’t need to be “what would make an easier or more conventional narrative structure.” The heart of fanfiction isn’t about arc. It’s about heart. What’s important here is expressing the truth and rawness of what we need to feel.

Second Movement is centered on the sober reverence of how hard it is to recuperate from near-death ailment, knowing that any life you live hereafter is a second life you might’ve never had. You’ve just doubled your life—but it’s so fragile now, innit? And while others may check on your physiological recovery, some of the hardest wars are fought in the mind. I’ll make it clear I come at this with the highest respect. At twenty-eight I was diagnosed with cancer. I felt prepared for surgery, chemo, radiation, pills, shots, and afternoons spent sleeping off drugs. The post-treatment hypervigilant “what-ifs” were rougher and harder and took years more. This fic, in Brett’s perspective, is respectful care to whatever all he went through, and acknowledgement that healing mentally hurts; recovery happens in the very shadows we jump at.

In each our own ways, we all must recover mentally; and I think there’s reason I saw members of the fandom look uneasily at Brett in 2024 when he was quiet, and why TwoSetters rushed to confirm he was well after TwoSet went silent in October 2024, and why multiple people asked Brett in the December 2024 AMA livestream about his health. Uncertainty is hard, and when “medical condition” is the only phrase used to explain something that happened in 2020, fans, too, had coped years with “how close were we to losing him?” and “is he truly okay now?” and “is it chronic?” or “what if it comes back?” And while I think reassurances were had at the end of 2024, there’s still much to say about the residuals that dwell.

Here’s to all of us, coping in our own ways.

I’d written every word before the interview dropped with Suzie Collier. When Brett detailed his psychological struggles concurrent- and post-illness, a pit sunk in my gut. It’s one thing to suspect he went through a similar psychological situation as oneself; it’s another to hear it voiced, so clearly, so similarly, proven. I’ve always wanted to post this. Hopefully it does a little justice to the demons we face.