Chapter Text
You didn’t know how to explain to Leo your need to leave, much less four days early. There were tickets you reserved, meals you’d planned, a whole stack of clothing you’d bought for the sake of the trip.
Leo didn’t ask, didn’t need clarification beyond your teary begging to please, please get you home. He stayed silent, sniffing at you for whatever fucking reason and wordlessly cut open a portal straight to your dorm room. You fell down to your knees the moment you stepped through. The raucous noise of the festival cut out the moment the portal closed, leaving you only with the sounds of the city.
You thought about leaving a note. You thought about sending a text. A fucking carrier pidgeon would’ve been an option if you could get yourself to move a foot off of your bed.
You were in… shock. Probably. Your therapist would probably have a fancy word to describe what you were going through if you could manage to schedule a session.
What kind of person goes fucking comatose after a kiss that didn’t even happen? What kind of person falls in love with their best fucking friend without knowing?
Spirits, the whole damn act with the fake relationship and the weak, idiotic excuses to put you that much closer to Donnie. How long had you felt that thrill when his skin touched yours? How long have you had the exact planes of his face mapped out in your head, knowing exactly where you wanted to kiss? When did you start aching at the mere thought of being near him?
When was the last time you hugged him sincerely and not out of some twisted facsimile of your friendship?
Donnie was just wiping dirt off your face and you were being indecent.
You felt gross. Guilty. Some undercurrent of sheer panic and nausea you’d never experienced before.
Spirits, you didn’t know.
There weren’t words to describe how you were feeling.
You were stupid.
—
QuarkedUp: ixnay on the onnie-day
ROCKabillygoat: What?
QuarkedUp: dee is persona non grata
QuarkedUp: please refrain from the jokes for the time being
MayDay: ILL FUCKING KILL HIM
Ponds: Are you okay?
ItsBeter: I have the rope and knife
HelloooSailor: dibs on getaway driver
QuarkedUp: dont
—
You didn’t know when you started crying, only figured out that you were when your tears hit your phone screen.
—
QuarkedUp: i don’t want to talk about it
QuarkedUp: I don’t need anyone to defend my honor or fucking whatever
QuarkedUp: can yall just chill the fuck out for a fucking /day/, christ
ROCKabillygoat: theyre just trying to be comforting, hon :(
QuarkedUp: and doing a shit job of it!!!
ItsBeter: :(
QuarkedUp: fucking
QuarkedUp: forget i said anything
—
Spirits, you were so fucking stupid.
You sent the last text and threw your phone across your dorm, feeling May’s absence more than ever. It pinged a few more times, muffled by the beanbag that it landed on.
You didn’t need to be mean. Not to your friends. Not for them giving a shit about your wellbeing. The guilt and anger and outright misery swirled in the bottom of your stomach, landing in that place that you thought you’d abandoned back in high school.
You would apologize later. They would forgive you, of course, with a promise to buy the pizza for the inevitable group reunion and a rout explanation that you’d have to conjure up about how it just wasn’t working out with Donnie.
Maybe that made it worse. How easy it was to redeem yourself. The guarantee that they’ll still love you.
You felt wretched.
You rubbed your necklace in between your fingers, finding yourself still unable to take it off. The phantom touch of Donnie fastening it ghosted around your neck.
He was so worried about you staying safe. That was his love language, if Donnie could ever admit to having an actual emotion. You’d witnessed the hours he’d spent improving his brother’s gear, updating the Lair security systems, building the world’s most advanced AI to keep even the most hushed whisper about his family’s existence off of the internet.
Your heart clenched tightly as you flipped onto your back, hand still clasped around the charm. Uncomfortable buzzing took over your body, gripping your heart with anxiety.
You hadn’t talked to him since that night. Two days, and the only text you’d sent was to your friends, and even that took up every last bit of courage you had.
(The slightest buzz from your phone made you nauseous. It was only due to Donnie’s upgrades that it still had enough charge to stay on this long.)
What were you supposed to say to him? ‘You make my heart go doki doki’? ‘I wish you would’ve kissed me’? ‘Sorry for ghosting you, I’ve actually realized that I’ve been fostering some deep-seated feelings for you and approximately sixty percent of our homie cuddles have been less than platonic’?
Yeah, no fucking way.
You couldn’t risk it. Not when it came to Donnie.
He was one of the most important people in your life, full stop. The two of you were so intertwined, you quite literally didn’t know what to do with yourself if Donnie got weirded out and the two of you stopped being friends. You couldn’t bear your dynamic changing because you were the dumbass who got a crush.
You wished you could talk to May about this. Or anyone, really. The only people you were remotely close to and hadn’t spent the last six months believing you were madly in love with Donnie was Donnie’s family. So. Nonstarter.
Roh and Lynn were a viable option for crying your eyes out to. They knew everything, barring what just happened on the trip. You’d just have to buck up and get your phone and apologize and…
Fuck.
You were tired. A bone-deep, achey tired that fogged up your mind. You didn’t know what to do.
So you stayed. And you forced long, calm breaths into your lungs. And you held that necklace so tight that you could still see the indent in your palm when you woke up.
—
BootyShaker9000: Leo said you had an emergency. Why didn’t you wake me up?
BootyShaker9000: The Mayor is going to insist we come back to use our vouchers. I’d free up a weekend within the next few months.
BootyShaker9000: You are /definitely/ missing out on the natural history museum.
—
BootyShaker9000: Sweets?
—
BootyShaker9000 deleted a message
—
In your preparation for the beach trip, you’d already lined up your absences for your few summer classes. You were uncharacteristically ahead on homework, too, having finished any for the next week before you even finished packing.
So, in short, there wasn’t much to do. Showing up to class now required an explanation you couldn’t give. Your phone was still banished to the corner of the room and the allure of your laptop wore off by the second day of your… whatever this was. Hibernation? Self-imposed quarantine?
Normally, when you were this bored, you’d send Donnie a text and get caught up in a new project or game or show for the following ten to forty-eight hours. You felt empty in his absence. You felt scrubbed raw after glancing at the enormity of what you felt for him, like you caught sight of a biblically accurate angel in your periphery.
You couldn’t separate the two feelings.
Lovesickness felt like an apt descriptor for what you were experiencing. You were sick of it, sick from it, so full of it that it threatened to bubble up from behind your molars like a bad drink.
In your haze, you decided to clean.
—
BootyShaker9000 sent an image
BootyShaker9000: Your lack of attendance is noted.
BootyShaker9000: I wish you could have stayed.
BootyShaker9000: Good luck with… whatever it is you’re doing.
—
This was your second year in a row that you had taken a summer semester. The nature of your degree demanded it; mechanical engineering was already a five-year program without your added minor.
But because you had been living in the same dorm for two, going on three years, you never had to pack up and, consequently, sort through your stuff. You were finding wrappers from candies that the student market didn’t even stock anymore, prized pencils from discontinued brands, and a million pieces of clothing shoved in the back of your wardrobe that you had presumed missing.
Half of your bounty didn’t fit anymore, which was the nature of growing into an adult body. The other half may have fit, but they didn’t suit you either.
Your old, nerdy graphic tees were neatly stacked in a corner, set aside for a quilting project that Lynn had been talking about. A few shirts and pants immediately needed to be deposited in your trash can given how torn up they were, casualties of your machining projects.
You snorted at the skimpy pieces of fabric you adorned with pride your freshman year of college. You were so young, so eager for any party with free drinks and endless strangers you could lose yourself in. You and May had convinced yourselves that you were living out your rebellious youth through plastic cups of watered down alcohol and miniscule shorts, just a few years late.
A tiny shirt that was really nothing more than a silk handkerchief with a bit of string had you pause, frozen in between your stacks of ‘to wash’ and ‘to donate to May.’ You traced your thumb along the edge of it, noticing the bright pink lipstick and flecks of glitter staining the fabric right where it would have sat at the base of your throat.
A hundred faceless strangers. A handful of mistakes with mouths you could only vaguely remember the shape of. Not a single person that made you feel a quarter of what was rolling around in your stomach right now.
You let the shirt fall out of your hands and stumbled to bed.
The haze was better company.
—
BootyShaker9000: You do remember that I can see your location and health status, right?
BootyShaker9000: I’m going to assume you’re in the middle of some class project and leave you alone.
BootyShaker9000: For now.
—
BootyShaker9000 deleted a message
BootyShaker9000 deleted a message
BootyShaker9000: Can we talk?
—
Maybe you could work it out of your system. Maybe you could crack open the floodgates, just a trickle, and titrate the feelings into a reasonable dose and then go on being the bestest best friend you could be.
You stared up at your ceiling, wrappers from stale vending machine food surrounding you like the world’s most depressing halo. The popcorn texture yielded no answers. The flaking vermiculite just goaded you to get on with it.
His tech was a safe topic to start with. Safe enough to examine in the confines of your mind without folding into the fetal position from the sheer force of butterflies in your stomach.
Donnie was a brilliant engineer. You admired his knowledge of material design. Hell, you admired his knowledge of everything. You loved–
–No–
You… appreciated how good of a teacher he was. His tendency to talk down to others completely evaporated once you showed an honest to goodness interest in learning. For a guy who otherwise struggled with communication, he knew the exact mix of words to shove a concept into your head.
You liked how Donnie always tried his hardest. To learn. To master. To win at a video game even when he’s truthfully not that great.
You liked his snorting laugh. You liked laughing with him. You liked being able to meet his gaze across the room when someone said something dumb and know that the two of you were thinking the same thing.
You really liked his eyes. Golden in a way that betrayed everything you knew about genetics and a clever glimmer in them that indicated when Donnie was up to no good. You were always kinda mesmerized by them, even back when you were threatening to hit him with a textbook and he was mildly concussed in your dorm room. You liked how they crinkled when you said something particularly clever. You liked the softness in them, the kind of face he made when the two of you were waking up next to each other and–
Fuck.
–his expression as he held your face in his hand, like you were delicate, like he was a moment from leaning in–
Stop.
You put your hands over your face, Chekhov's gun firing straight up your spine and leaving you a curled up mess. There was no willing your body to untense, not with that image of Donnie threatening to unravel the fibers of your being.
You’d just have to ride it out again.
(And shove that thought so far in the back of your mind that it hits bone.)
—
BootyShaker9000: Whatever I did, I’m sorry.
BootyShaker9000 deleted a message
—
You needed some air.
—
BootyShaker9000 deleted a message
—
“Come around here often?”
You squeaked from shock, toppling over with your folding chair and hitting the concrete with a grunt. It was your first time outside your dorm in days, having been avoiding in-person contact. You’d been on the roof of the music building for about five hours at this point, seeing no one else but the stray quartet waddling through the doors to practice together.
Safe to say, seeing Donnie hovering just beyond the edge of the roof was unexpected.
“Give a guy some fucking warning, fuck,” you wheezed, getting yourself off of the ground and righting your chair. It was a miracle you didn’t crush your speaker when you fell. It was still crooning out some old, cheesy love song by the time you sat back down, a fact that you did not fail to miss.
(Maybe not so much a miracle as you thought.)
“I’d offer you a seat, but I was only able to carry the one up here,” you said.
“I am nothing if not prepared,” Donnie said, his jetpack powering down as he stepped onto the roof. The top covering of his battle shell detached, wheeling over next to you and morphing into a stool. He was quick to sit down, slow to talk again.
The two of you sat in awkward silence, listening to the tinny sound of your speaker.
You hadn’t powered up your mp3 player in years, only bringing it out of hibernation because you still couldn’t bear to look at your phone. It cycled through the stored songs at random, some familiar, some you had all but forgotten about.
“Well, if you want to make me cry, that won't be so hard to do. And if you should say goodbye, I'll still go on loving you.”
(Dion Delmucci, your days were fucking numbered.)
“Rooftop hangouts?” you asked, because you were allergic to staying quiet, “Is this our thing now?”
“Depends on why you’ve been avoiding me,” Donnie said flatly.
You would’ve fallen out of your chair again if every muscle in your body didn’t seize, leaving you frozen where you sat.
“I…have not,” you started, feeling the weight of Donnie’s gaze on the side of your face, “been avoiding you, that is.”
It was a lie, of course it was. Donnie knew that. You knew that Donnie knew.
What else could you say?
“Okay then,” Donnie said, getting up from his stool and walking back towards the edge of the roof. The piece of metal slotted back into his battle shell and folded to the side. He reached into that seemingly limitless storage of his battle shell before tossing something gray and fluffy at you without even looking.
It was a stuffed shark, you realised, noting the sharp teeth that now appeared as if they were about to eat the speaker.
“Why must I be a teenager in love?” it sang out, the sound slightly muffled now.
“I got it for you, after…” Donnie trailed off, still not looking at you. His fists were furled as the wings of his jetpack unfolded themselves with a snap that didn’t feel solely mechanical, “Anyways. I have to go. Work. On… something.”
You didn’t feel yourself get up from your seat. You didn’t hear your feet hit the ground. You didn’t know you were moving until you felt Donnie’s wrist in your hand, your knuckles turning white from how hard you were gripping it.
“I’m sorry,” you choked out. Your eyes were full of tears within seconds, a sob threatening to break free from your chest, “I didn’t– I’m sorry!”
Donnie’s arms were around you just as quickly, holding you tight against him as you tried to swallow back your tears. You froze, feeling your body go rigid as you resisted the urge to melt into him.
This wasn’t fair, you weren’t being fair to Donnie. A week of hiding from him like a petulant kid and now he has to comfort you? After torturing him with your uncertainty?
You needed to run away. You needed to be as far away as possible. You needed to tear yourself away from his hold and hop on the next one-way out of New York. You needed to strap yourself with fireworks and take a trip to Mars.
You did none of those things.
Because you’re awful and selfish and so terribly in love with this asshole that it made each breath hurt. Your muscles went loose as he held you, your sobs making any hope of resistance futile.
Spirits, how you’d missed him. You grabbed at him, fisted the fabric of his shirt, pressed your face into his chest. You loved Donnie… and hated yourself for it.
Some fucked up reasoning convinced you that you were doing him a favor by staying away. That you couldn’t possibly ruin your friendship if you weren’t there to do so. The way Donnie’s shoulders shook as he held you made your heart hurt even more, the sting of regret filling your body.
The two of you ended up sitting, at some point. Donnie was still holding onto you like he was afraid you’d fall apart, even after you’d gotten your breathing steady and wiped the tears from your face.
(Jokes on him. You were halfway there already.)
“Um,” Donnie tried, looking wildly unsure, “So…”
You would’ve laughed if you weren’t so wrung out. You managed a smile, at least, and pulled back so your head wasn’t leaning against his chest.
(Selfish, stupid–)
“I’m breaking up with you,” you said, once again blurting words out without meaning or wanting to.
“Uh, what?”
You clenched your eyes and waved your hands in front of yourself, “Fake relationship. Fake break-up. Well, technically real breaking up of the fake relationship. But. You know.”
“I don’t?” Donnie said, his expression growing even more concerned, if that was possible, “I… am still confused.”
“You’re a hot commodity, Donnie!” you said, the hot feeling on your cheeks now too present to ignore. You hated this conversation. You couldn’t stop the words coming out of your mouth. You felt like you were losing your mind.
“Pardon?”
“Fucking,” you slapped a hand over your forehead, “I have been unfair. To you. Trapping you into this fake relationship thing.”
(Half-truth.)
Donnie blinked slowly at you, “Um…okay?”
“And lowkey kinda specist? If you think too hard about it?”
“Sweets, what–?”
You waved your hands in front of yourself again, stopping Donnie from continuing, “Just. Let me. Please.”
Donnie slowly closed his mouth, looking like he was making a concerted effort not to speak.
(It was a stupid-looking expression. You wanted to kiss it.)
“Okay. Let me start over,” you said, taking a moment for a steadying breath, “I don’t want to keep up the fake relationship act. I feel guilty for using you as a– as a prop.”
(Because it’ll hurt too much to pretend, because you didn’t know when you stopped needing to–)
“And like, we never figured out an endgame for this?” you dragged your fingers through your hair, “At what point were we going to stop? And be normal friends for once?”
(You were clinging to that, holding on for dear life for the promise of your friendship.)
“And you!” you pointed your finger at Donnie, who had an indecipherable mix of emotions on his face, “You deserve so much better–”
(--Than me–)
“--than to be a pretty thing on my arm! The very existence of this arrangement is the ultimate cockblock. You’re never gonna be a real boy if you don’t have a few disappointing makeouts and I can’t have that on my conscience.”
You stopped ranting, finally, feeling your chest heave as you caught your breath.
Donnie’s mask was on. You knew the look of it, the set of his jaw and the tense line of his neck. You hated not knowing what he was feeling, that he was put off enough that he couldn’t show you.
It made your chest hurt more than it ever had in your life.
“You ghosted me for a week… because you were worried that the Blue Fairy wouldn’t touch me with her wand?” Donnie asked, his voice tinted with a humor that just failed to convince you.
You wanted to pound at his chest, push your forehead against his collarbone, shake him, tackle him, anything.
You stayed put, moving only to give him a practiced grin and a tilt of your head that you hoped he couldn’t see through, “It seems dramatic when you put it that way.”
Donnie rolled his eyes, “You are dramatic.”
“And butter wouldn’t melt in your mouth, Donnie-boy,” you quipped back, the feeling of falling into that familiar rhythm almost like whiplash.
Donnie smiled at you, but his face immediately fell when he looked away.
It was starting to get dark. Your speaker had finally issued its last ‘low battery’ warning and fizzled out into silence. You weren’t sure how long it’d been since you’d eaten.
“I was worried that I did something wrong,” Donnie said, two notches quieter than he was before, “I didn’t– I couldn’t figure it out. I was gonna come find you earlier, but I…” Donnie’s gaze flicked to your face then back at the ground, “I was scared.”
“No, Donnie–” you pushed yourself into his arms, hating yourself for not stopping while you still could, hating the way your entire body relaxed at the feel of his chin at the crown of your head, “You didn’t do anything. Seriously. This was all my fucked up inability to process things.”
Donnie’s arms immediately went back around you, holding you so tight that his body was shaking underneath you again.
If you were a better friend, you would’ve told him the actual truth right there.
If you were a better person, you wouldn’t have stayed there like that, all intertwined like the lovers you’d wished pretended to be.
But you weren’t. And you stayed. And you let Donnie hold you as the sun melted away.
Tomorrow, you'll be better. You couldn’t bear it otherwise.