Chapter Text
He feels nauseous.
Trey and Cater are sitting now in the backseat of a taxi, having departed from the airport only a short time ago. The ride so far had been tense, pregnant with a sort of anxiety that Trey can't quite place. Drawing in a breath, he chances a quick look at Cater. The redhead's leg has been bouncing anxiously since they left the airport and, with no sign of stopping, Trey's eyebrows knit together with concern. His eyes follow the path up Cater's body, and Trey takes stock of how pale his face is as he stares out the window at the passing traffic— his expression unreadable. Trey swallows thickly, licking his dry lips. He feels like he should say something, do something— anything— but... he's not even sure what the correct thing to do would be.
Cater had seemed excited about the trip right up until their flight was called for boarding. He'd even spent the better part of the morning gushing about his "#flightfit" and posting story after story to Magicam about heading to the airport.
But once they were properly on the plane, Cater had fallen silent, distant, and Trey could feel the anxiety dripping off him like rain off a gutter during a downpour.
Drawing another deep breath and holding it for a moment before exhaling, Trey sets a gentle hand on Cater's bouncing knee.
"You okay?"
Cater jumps at the sudden contact, startled, and whips his head around to look at Trey. Trey offers him a thin smile and notes how the wide-eyed panic, framed by his black cap over pulled-back hair, makes him look almost like an entirely different person.
But a heartbeat passes, and Cater's face softens, expertly washing his visible panic away with a wisp of a smile.
"Yeah, I'm good. It's just been a long time, you know?"
They stare at each other for a long moment, neither of them speaking, breaking only as Cater's face dips into a pout. It's obvious that Trey doesn't believe that the passage of time is the only thing bothering Cater, but the redhead isn't keen on turning their trip sour before it's even really begun. Instead, he releases a strained sigh and goes back to staring out the window. "I'm just…trying to make sense of everything, I guess."
Trey hesitates before he asks. "What do you mean?"
“I mean… this? Us? Coming here. You're sure you don’t have some freaky ulterior motive?”
Trey breathes out a laugh that dies as soon as he notices Cater doesn't join him- or even break his gaze out the window.
"Cater, I'm— really sure. I genuinely just thought we could maybe… Reconnect, I guess."
It's not the whole truth, but neither is it a total lie.
Cater manages to tear his eyes from the window and peek over to Trey. A long silence follows, where Trey can practically see the cogs in Cater's brain churning, before Cater smiles tightly; he's either been convinced by Trey's weak reasoning or resolved not to dig any deeper at the moment. Either way, Cater shrugs, and his whole mood seems to lighten— as if the act itself was literally shrugging off his negative emotions.
“Sooo… not an elaborate booty call, then.”
Trey barks a sudden laugh that makes their driver jump. “Ah, sorry— Um, definitely not.”
Cater pouts, miming disappointment. “Tch, at least that would’ve been fun.”
Cater settles back into his seat and returns his attention to the scenery outside the window, but it feels a calmer action than it had just a minute ago; the tension— while not dissipated entirely— has eased off of his shoulders, and his knee has stopped bouncing beneath Trey's hand. Against his better judgment, he decides to leave his palm where it lies— it feels natural and, besides, Cater doesn't even seem to have noticed.
As Trey settles back into the seat of the car, he turns his focus to the rolling scenery outside the window. The familiar countryside just outside Crimson City greets them with rolling green waves that give way to a smaller, charming-looking township. As they roll through the lightly populated neighborhoods, Cater seems to take notice that they're outside the City proper and, as they turn down a street, he twists to give Trey a scathing look.
"Quaint… Y'know, only the first few scenic shots do well on Magicam before they start falling off."
"We'll be in the city tomorrow," Trey reassures him with a soft laugh. "This is just where I live."
Cater purses his lips in response, expression unreadable, and Trey finally withdraws his hand from Cater's knee. He wants to probe into Cater's state of mind, but… ah, they're pulling up to his place now, so it'll have to wait.
The car rolls to a stop, and the pair exits. While Trey moves around to the trunk of the car to retrieve their luggage, Cater meanders to the front of the house and just stands there, staring at the exterior. It's a small domicile, but genuinely nice— a single-story, brick cottage with a small yard that houses an herb garden.
"You live here," Cater mumbles as Trey approaches— more of a statement than a question. "What— no white picket fence?"
"My rent is high enough," Trey shrugs, laughing softly and moving to unlock the door for them both. "What do I need a fence for, anyway?"
When Cater doesn't immediately respond, Trey ushers him inside so that he can get a better look at the interior. It's quaint, but ultimately simple; the furniture is unpretentious and sparse, and the room gives the vibe of a house that's being staged for sale, rather than a lived-in home. Cater steps into the middle of the room and stares everything down, as if he's looking for something.
Trey hovers in Cater's peripherals, unsure of what to do. Offer him a drink? A tour? He admittedly doesn't entertain guests very often— even visits with his family are usually done at his parents' place, rather than his own.
"What… d'you think?" He asks finally.
"It's nice," Cater responds simply. It sounds like a genuine compliment, but for Cater, it's almost insultingly basic. "Good to see your sense of style is the same."
"Boring—" they say simultaneously.
"Yeah, yeah, I know," Trey laughs in response, feeling a little lighter. "It gets the job done, though. And— honestly, I don't spend much time here anyway, so I haven't had much time to settle in and make it my own."
"Mm-hmm, it's kiiiinda giving 'Suburban Dad' right now— are you sure you're not hiding a wife and 2.5 kids somewhere in here?"
"I'm positive."
Cater crosses his arms, seemingly unconvinced. Trey looks off, further into the interior of the house, when something crosses his mind.
"I've actually got something better though, c'mere."
Trey grabs Cater's hand abruptly and pulls him from the living room, through the kitchen, and towards the back of the house. The duo passes through the sliding glass door and into the only part of Trey's house so far that actually feels like a home— the backyard. A shining oasis in the desert of drab, the covered patio houses a cute little sitting area, and the yard is afforded ample privacy thanks to the bright shrubbery that follows the property line. Further into the back garden are well-cultivated plots— full to bursting with fresh fruits and vegetables. He finally releases Cater's hand and moves to pose proudly— expectantly, even— next to what he thinks will grab Cater's interest, and for the first time since they left the airport, Cater's face lights up with his signature smile.
"A PIZZA OVEN???"
Trey beams in response, his cheeks growing warm, and Cater gasps, instantly enamored.
"Oh my GOD, Trey— talk about a hidden gem! This whole backyard situation is sooo picturesque, but the pizza oven is…" Cater gasps again and smacks Trey's arm playfully. "You HAVE to make me a homemade pizza while I'm here!"
"You don't even have to ask."
"And you have to do it shirtless!"
"What?" Trey laughs again, but, for once, it's not an embarrassed sort— he's mostly just surprised.
"Yeah, yeah, it'll be totally steamy. Like— I come out here to find you shirtless, making me a homemade pizza, with crust you rolled out yourself, and a handmade sauce— Mmm, and peppers! And a little basil leaf like they add on TV."
"I'll make you the pizza," Trey scrunches his face playfully. "No promises on what I'm wearing."
"Or not wearing."
Trey only shrugs, teasingly noncommittal, which seems to satisfy Cater for the moment.
But something about the moment passes too quickly, and Trey notices Cater's face fall slightly— his elated look melting into melancholy. Into something somber. Trey's brows knit together, and Cater, noticing that Trey's picked up on his sudden mood shift, smiles wearily.
"It's a really cute place, Trey."
For what feels like the millionth time, Trey wants to push, unsatisfied with Cater's placations. But (now) he knows better than to push, and opts to pivot instead.
"Hey, um. I know it was a long flight; you must be exhausted."
Cater latches on in an instant, which Trey makes a quick mental note of.
"Oh, yeah— totally beat. Show me to my room?"
He offers his arm to Trey, who instinctively weaves his arm around Cater's. Gently, he leads him back inside, deeper into the house, and to the only spare room.
"Here we are. Uh— make yourself at home. Whatever you need."
"Sure, thanks," Cater confirms, but in that same distant, placating way he had spoken earlier. The redhead untangles his arm from Trey and enters the room proper, closing the door behind him and leaving Trey standing alone, staring at the space where Cater had only just been. A heartbeat, two, three, passes, and Trey sighs.
Maybe it's better to just give Cater some space while he settles in.
A yawn escapes Trey, surprising him, and he checks his watch— it's not terribly late, but it would seem that the time difference between here and the Shaftlands is enough to be getting to him. He opts to leave his unpacked luggage for now in favor of heading to his room; shutting the door behind him, he kicks off his shoes and collapses unceremoniously onto the still-made-up bed.
Another yawn, and Trey fishes into his pocket to retrieve his phone, swiping through it to open his messages with Riddle.
"Hey, made it home in one piece."
R. Rosehearts: "Glad to hear. How are you both?"
Trey hesitates, frowning at the message for a moment before responding.
"Not sure, honestly."
"He's being Weird."
"Distant."
R. Rosehearts: "Perhaps the change in location is jarring. Give him some time to adjust; there's no need to rush anything yet."
"Yeah, you're probably right. Talk to you later?"
R. Rosehearts: "Yes, anytime."
R. Rosehearts: "Unless I am speaking with a client."
"Got it, thanks."
He smiles as he closes the messaging app, but something inside him still nags. With a huff, Trey flips onto his back and navigates to Magicam, opening it and immediately finding Cater's profile. Trey scrolls and scrolls and— God, there is so much to sift through here.
Trey scrolls, and the further back he gets on Cater's timeline, the worse he feels about everything he's missed out on in Cater's life. But as he's moping, Trey gets distracted by a pair of selfies- side by side on the feed, but clearly taken some time apart from one another. He clicks on one, then the other— noticing the weeks between posting dates— and it hits him: this is one of the content dead-zones Riddle told him about.
When you look at Cater's profile as a whole, and look at the daily— at minimum, (more often than not, Cater is posting multiple times a day)— posts, it does stand out as odd, even to someone as un-tech savvy as Trey. Curiously, he scrolls to the comments on the newer of the two selfies, and it seems that other people were just as confused as to where Cater had been. Trey wades through comment after comment— "missed u"… "where have u BEEN"… "were you shadowbanned????" and, though he doesn't have the slightest inkling what "shadowbanned" means, it seems serious. He frowns and returns to Cater's main feed.
He scrolls further back in time— into a time of Cater's life he knows nothing about— and Trey notices a palpable shift in content. Cater's travel pics, sponsored ads, and memes turn jarringly into a sea of party pictures and videos. He clicks on a set of photos depicting Cater DJing, and Trey wonders distantly when Cater started that, and subsequently, when he stopped.
Photos of Cater with stranger after stranger after stranger scroll by— and Trey notices most faces only appear for a photo or two, with fewer still only appearing for about a dozen photos before disappearing. There are photos of Cater drinking, of brilliantly bright mixed beverages, of Cater looking… Trey can't even really say. All he knows is this Cater hardly looks like Cater now, and even less so than the Cater he used to know.
With a deep sigh, Trey sets his phone screen-side-down on his chest and removes his glasses so he can rub some of the tiredness from his eyes.
It's weird to think of how much more mellow the current Cater is compared to the old version, and even stranger still to imagine there was a version of him out there even more wild than the Cater he married. Back then, Cater had always joked about Trey being most of his impulse control, but he had never really considered that role in earnest. The more he thinks about it, the sicker he feels; he has more questions now than he had before his deep dive, and he can feel the spiral of overthinking begin to consume him.
What bothers him most, though, is how very little he knows about Cater now, and how little he's likely to learn if he asks.
He lies in the dark, spiraling and thinking, thinking, thinking… until he falls into an uneasy sleep.
Trey wakes up suddenly in a cold sweat.
By now— whenever now is— it's too dark to see in his room, and so he gropes around, blindly trying to feel for his glasses. In the process, he flings his phone off the bed and sends it flying to the floor, where it lights up and illuminates the dark space with far too much artificial light. Groaning, Trey finds the frames and shoves them unceremoniously onto his face, and then rolls stiffly out of bed to grab his phone as well.
The screen of the cursed thing lights up again, blinding him with incandescence and the knowledge that it's currently 2:30 in the morning. He groans again, still more asleep than awake, and tries to stretch the ache in his back from sleeping stiffly in bed for so long. As he rolls the twinge out of his shoulders, two things dawn on Trey. Firstly, he hasn't heard at all from Cater since they arrived, and two— oh God, he didn't brush his teeth before passing out.
He makes a quick detour to the en-suite to brush his teeth thoroughly and emerges from the bedroom into the silence of the darkened house. Using his phone as a flashlight, he peers towards Cater's door and notices it's been left ajar. He pokes his head into the room, careful to let as little light as possible in, but finds that Cater is nowhere to be seen.
Trey swallows thickly, a primal sort of panic rising in his chest. Quietly, he begins a manic search of the house— quickly eliminating places Cater could be. Not the living area. Not in the kitchen— oh. He notices the sliding glass door is cracked open, with a dim, eerie white light coming from outside. His heart skips a beat, and the panic is gone just as quickly as it had arrived.
"…Cater?" Trey speaks softly, his voice more hoarse than he's expecting, as he pokes his head outside. Cater is there on the outdoor sofa— knees pulled tightly up to his chest, with his phone mere inches from his face. The redhead doesn't look up or even really acknowledge Trey, and so he steps outside. "I, uh— can I come sit with you?"
After an eternity that spans the length of a heartbeat, Cater finally looks up from his phone. His face is mostly shrouded in the darkness of the night, but there's something about it that Trey's too tired to put a name to.
"Yeah."
Apprehensively, Trey makes his way over to the sofa and sits beside Cater, his discomfort tangible in the way that he sits. He softens slightly as he peeks over to Cater's screen and sees that the other man is simply scrolling Magicam. A quiet moment passes, and Cater shifts— revealing a vape in his other hand. He takes a long, crackling hit, and all Trey can do is stare at him, frowning and unsure of what to do or say. 30 long seconds pass, and Cater finally exhales, a steady stream of sour-smelling smoke falling from his lips. With a sideways glance at Trey, he sets his phone face down, leaving the two of them in the natural light of the sky.
In the darkness now, without the harsh artificial light on his pale face, Cater looks considerably less ominous, and Trey can finally put a name to what's written all over Cater's face. He looks deeply, achingly sad.
"Why did you invite me here?" Cater asks suddenly, his voice unnaturally even.
"I-" Trey blinks at Cater, struggling to search for the answer Cater is looking for.
"Why did you bring me back to the Queendom?" He asks again, insistent. "Honestly."
Trey takes a moment, breathing in through his nose and catching the tail end of the vapor from Cater's pen.
"I missed you." Cater frowns in response, and Trey can feel the confidence in his honest answer begin to waver.
"Do you want to divorce me?"
A tense, uneasy silence falls between them, and Trey swallows the nerves that begin to set in at Cater's question. Cater stares at him, blank-faced, waiting for an answer that won't be correct no matter what. Trey considers the tightrope Cater has set him on: he could lie, but Trey is a terrible liar, and Cater is intuitive in a way he could never hope to be. Plus… this isn't the first time Cater has posed the question, which means there's a very high chance that he already knows the answer and wants to hear the truth from Trey himself.
But if Trey admits the truth— that he only sought out Cater to divorce him…
He takes another deep breath, settling his nerves— lest he fall into the metaphorical chasm below. Why does every conversation with Cater feel like a trap?
"That's… why I wanted to see you, originally. I figured— maybe it would be better for us both." The inevitable admission is like the weight of the world off of Trey's shoulders, but he watches the way Cater's expression shifts darkly, the way his entire body tenses. And when Cater looks away from him, it feels like a knife in his gut. "B-but things are different now! I couldn't— I didn't want to ask. I… wasn't ready to lose you again."
His confession falls into silence and Cater only wraps his arms around his knees, hugging himself tightly. He doesn't say anything— doesn't even look at Trey— just looks despondently off into space. The guilt all but crushes Trey, and it's then that he realizes he has no idea of what to do. Ever since they were dumb teenagers in love— it's never felt like Trey has known the right thing to do with Cater, never known the right things to say. And even now, over ten years and a lifetime later, Trey still doesn't know.
He thinks he should say something— anything— but the words get stuck in his throat and die on his tongue before he can say them. He's afraid. Afraid he'll only make things worse, afraid of… something he can't even articulate. He's just…afraid. Of everything and, most pressingly, of losing whatever game Cater is playing right now— the one rigged for Trey to lose, no matter the move he makes.
Trey tears his eyes from Cater, sinking into his embarrassing defeat, and stares a hole into the ground.
The quiet they sit in creeps by, and ages pass in miserable silence. Neither of them move, and neither attempt to speak. It's deafening, the void between them, and before Trey can stop himself, something in him breaks.
"What happened to you those times you stopped posting on Magicam?"
Cater's head snaps to look at Trey, eyes wide and body stiff, as if he'd been electrocuted by the question.
"What?"
Trey winces at Cater's voice— small and taken aback— but he knows he can't not follow up now. Trey licks his lips and searches Cater's face for any hint of a clue— but finds instead that Cater seems, for the first time, to be wearing his emotions plainly. He looks… embarrassed, maybe. Verging on mortified. Trey swallows nervously.
"Sometimes... Um, you wouldn't post. For weeks at a time. I just… I guess, understand what—"
"Stop." Cater warns, his expression darkening further as his grip tightens visibly on his vape. "I don't want to talk about that."
Trey withers beneath Cater's gaze, and he acknowledges the nerve he's struck must still be incredibly raw for Cater. He's… not sure if he should feel glad to have won a bit of genuine emotion from the other man, or feel like an idiot for it. Right now, he feels more an idiot than anything.
Cater untangles himself and stands suddenly, snatching his phone off the sofa, and casts a downright lethal look at Trey.
"I don't know why you'd even care, Trey," his voice cracks with a painful mixture of anger and hurt, and Trey wonders if Cater has ever spoken to him directly with this level of measured anger. "You didn't back then. Why start now?"
It feels like a swift punch to the gut, but Trey ultimately has nothing to say in response. He doesn't know why he bothered to ask, or even what kind of response he was expecting from Cater. Certainly not this.
Cater stares at him, expectant of an answer, and Trey knows that every lifetime-second he doesn't answer is another guilty verdict for his sentencing.
Another disgusting moment of silence passes, and Cater exhales sharply though his nose before disappearing back inside, once again leaving Trey alone.