Chapter Text
The doors slide open and within a few seconds the wind is all there is. It’s up his nose, whipping his hair, driving grit between his eyelashes. He spent the entire ride up running through scenarios, but he didn't even think about the sensory hell of the open platform. It’s like going underwater but evil, a thought he remembers having last time – as long as that was real, and not a days-long, reality-shattering hallucination.
It must have been real. Why would he be so sore and exhausted otherwise? At the hardware store, he tried resting his head against an endcap for a second and when he closed his eyes it was just a series of spinning bright lights. Lightning, spotlights, a muzzle flash. The part of Faces of Death with the electric chair Matt's cousin showed them in high school that he couldn't get out of his head for weeks, the guy strapped down, seizing and bleeding from the eyes. Eventually Matt told him it was staged, it wasn't a real execution, but by then it didn't matter because it could have been. It was real to him, even if it wasn't in the movie.
On the count of three, he forces himself to move forward but turns his head so he can’t see the ledge, only Matt’s shoes on the grate. Gray static crowds the edges of his sight line. Maybe he really isn't up for this. He has a vision of himself going down like a felled tree, ruining the plan, having to listen to Matt call him a twinkle cat baby or whatever in the back of an ambulance. That wouldn't be so bad. They could go home after. He shoos away the thought that if this does all go according to plan, they'll have to play a show later.
Matt's talking to him, the same as last time, of course. “C’mere, I need your cable.” Matt’s in his element, getting a plan off, the more dangerous and illegal the better. Jay still can't believe it almost worked, how close it was. And they’re a good fifteen minutes earlier this time. The temptation to succumb to vertigo recedes.
“Bird.”
He's had a hard time looking directly at Matt, worried increasingly about what might show on his face, but he needs to say something, and he has a feeling it's now or never.
“Matt, I…” What? He’s had hours to think about it, but whenever he gets to this, it’s just all you and can't believe and please, please, until he has to stop so he can keep acting normal.
He’s already not acting normal. Matt assumes he's trying to back out. He puts his hands out. “Hey, we got this.”
“No. I- I want to be–” No, don't use be, that'll lose him. Stick with action.
“It worked, man. We're gonna get a show tonight. We got all the way up here. We're here! We just gotta do one more thing. Two more things.” Matt’s wired, vibrating, bouncing up to cut the cables. He's alive and bright and he's so beautiful, and he's fully prepared to throw Jay off the CN Tower if he won't do it himself, the fucking psycho.
“I want to keep doing this forever.”
He was right about too much showing on his face. Matt starts chuckling the way he does when something is wrong but he's trying to ignore it. “What? What do you-”
“I wanted to tell you that…” Jay raises his voice above the wind, even though this close he doesn't really need to. “I want to keep doing this with you forever.”
That's all he's got, as it turns out. Literally his throat won't let anything else out. Matt still looks confused, but he blinks a few times and his expression softens into something that makes Jay think he's getting it. Then he glances over his shoulder and Jay can tell he's getting antsy. “We gotta hit it, Bird.”
That's it. That can’t be it. Jay’s feet don't move when Matt tries to haul him by the arm towards the ledge. “Wait.” His throat’s loosened enough to get out Matt’s least favorite word. “You're not gonna say anything?”
“We have to go!”
There’s no point in trying to stop Matt from making this happen now. He’s got his arm tight around Jay’s waist, lifting him fully off his feet for a few steps (when did he get so fucking strong?) like to show him how little choice he actually has, and though Jay knows on some level that he just said he wanted to do this, he tries to twist out of his grip anyway.
“Stop dragging me!”
Matt gapes at him. “We have to talk right now? What are you- Look, we’re gonna be fine, okay?”
Of course, it makes total sense in Matt’s context that Jay told him that because he thinks they’re about to die. Why didn’t he say anything the first time, when he did sort of think that? The SkyDome is fully in view now, expanding in his consciousness along with the fact that he is about to do this a second time.
He breathes as deep as his lungs will let him. “You promise?”
“Yes.” Matt says it immediately, probably without even registering what Jay was asking him. Promise first, details later. “Yes, we’re gonna be fine. I promise.”
“Okay.”
The wind separates them once they’ve dropped, but when they go over the edge, they go hand in hand.
….
Jay unlocks the door and steps aside to let Matt cram himself through, carrying all but one of their bags. They don’t grocery shop all that often, but when they do, they get really into it. It takes hours, because they have to walk down every aisle, and make a bracket tournament for each snack category, and do ballistics tests on loaves of bread, and Matt has to talk to every other person he sees. Then they have to lug it all home on the streetcar.
It's good to be home. Jay finds himself having that thought a lot lately, not always in so many words, sometimes just as the one word that does a little contented shuffle in the back of his head – home. Sometimes, like now, he just notices himself relax by a fraction when he comes inside and sees it all right where they left it, his piano with the dusty photos, the stacks of VHS tapes, their assortment of abandoned cups on the coffee table, the pattern of afternoon window light on the floor that he'd like to lie down and stretch out in like a cat.
Matt hunches and drops the bags all at once onto the kitchen floor, and before Jay can remind him he’s broken multiple jars and bottles like that, he pops back up with a wild look in his eye. “Shit. We forgot to go to the library.”
Even as he’s saying, “Well, I'm not going out again,” Jay’s grabbing his keys. The library's doing a fine forgiveness thing, which they desperately need. It's one thing for Matt to ask his parents for money to make rent, being sent to collections because they kept a season of Criss Angel Mindfreak for eight weeks is too much. You have to draw a line somewhere.
On the 504, Matt nudges him, says, “Hey, look what I forgot to pay for,” and produces a crumpled bag of Sour Patch Kids from his jacket. As Matt’s thefts go, it’s small potatoes, sixth grade level Matt, on an off day at that. Back then, Jay might also have made a point of looking unimpressed. One thing he remembers about that age is working to hide his more open signs of enthusiasm, especially concerning Matt, especially if anyone else might be watching.
“Not good enough for you, eh?” Matt reaches into his sleeve and pulls out one of those plastic checkout dividers, waves it around like a sword. “How's that? That freak your mind?”
“Matt… They need those.”
“It's built into the price.”
“You know, you should try shoplifting something expensive someday,” Jay says, more for the rhythm of bickering than any actual objection. Obviously Matt’s in it for the love of the game. “You walked out with a bag of pork blood that's just sitting in the freezer now, but-”
“Yeah, and I told you, once I get a few more, we can use it in a Carrie scenario-”
“But you could be getting us, like, steaks or something. You ever thought about that?”
“Oh, I see. You want me to cook you a steak, Bird? We have a fucking romantic dinner? I'll cook you a steak with some fucking parsley on the side, cut it up and feed it to you?” He saws the checkout divider back and forth like a giant knife. “I chew it up and spit it in your mouth like a mama bird, Bird? That what you want?”
Jay doesn’t say anything, put out, then amused, then begrudgingly charmed as Matt keeps on going, onto their bird life, a crime spree razing the other birds’ nests, eventually flying into the fan blade of a jet together while on the run from the law. It's familiar. As long as they’ve known each other, there have been these times where it feels like they're daring each other but there's no actual dare, so it’s just useless tension, like winding up to sneeze but then losing it. Jay wonders not infrequently what they must look like to the people near them, sitting across from them on the streetcar or passing on the sidewalk.
Matt tears open the Sour Patch Kids. “Blue one?” He's already holding it out. Jay leans over and takes it in his teeth, holds in a shiver as his mouth floods with sugar.
It’s bittersweet handing over the Criss Angel DVD, Matt’s inspiration, loosely, for the CN Tower plan. Every day for nearly a month, Jay’s looked at it on his way past the end table by the door, or pointedly not looked at it. Now that it’s gone, there’s really nothing left of that plan – which wasn’t a complete bust (they did make it into the stands, and later onto the news), but no call from the Rivoli. A few days of waiting killed their momentum, like happens sometimes; Jared and Andy went on standby, and they went back to normal. The plan after that never happened. Eventually, Jay assumes, he’ll stop walking through this sequence of events in his head.
They check out Donnie Darko, which Jay doesn’t remember anything about until it’s too late, until they’re back at home in the middle of it, and the teacher guy says:
The basic principles of time travel are there; you got your vessel and your portal-
“This is about time travel?”
“Oh my god, dude,” Matt says, sprawled on the other side of the couch, “you haven’t been paying attention to any of this, have you?”
Like a DeLorean, Jake Gyllenhaal says.
“I don’t like this movie,” Jay hears himself say, feeling suddenly like he’s hovering near the ceiling.
“What, are you freaked out of time travel now? Like the concept of time travel?”
“No, I just don’t like…” He scrapes together the few strands of thought he has left, unnerved by Matt’s guessing it in one. “It’s just stupid. It’s confusing. And the… guy is creepy.”
Matt pauses it, but that’s almost worse, because now his eyes are narrowed dangerously, and the realization sets in that all Jay’s really done is draw his attention to it. Jake Gyllenhaal watches them wide-eyed on screen.
Then Matt’s phone rings, a sound so unfamiliar it makes them both jump.
Getting a call shouldn’t make Jay’s heart skip a beat anymore, considering. But it’s not like the fame came with the memory of his first big break. It was all already there, and he climbed into it like a theme park ride. The version of him that remembered it all probably would have been more at home there. He stops short of wondering what that version of him would think of the nakedly hopeful eye contact he and Matt make as Matt starts digging around in his pockets.
It’s not The Rivoli, he knows the millisecond Matt hears the voice on the other end. It’s my cousin, he mouths. They let out a collective breath. It was a long shot anyway. On another day, Jay might have been intrigued by Matt’s enthusiasm to talk to whichever cousin, but in the moment all he can think about is turning off the TV and slinking away in the window of distraction.
Muscle memory takes him through the kitchen and out the back door. He doesn't like doing this with Matt up and about; it makes it feel more like a secret than an accidental wandering, but he can’t seem to make himself turn around. His footsteps are muffled in the overgrown backyard, just barely audible over the whir of crickets. Pulling back the tarp sounds like an avalanche. Nearly every night he does it like this, approaches the dark RV like a sleeping giant, opens the door and creeps through, noting what all isn't there, sort of the opposite of how he does when he walks into the house. He never turns on the lights. Somehow it feels like if Matt came out here, he'd take one look and come up with the same idea, or close enough. The Donnie Darko time travel seemed a lot less physical, less hardware-based, than Back To the Future. Spookier, yeah, but there's no way Matt could recreate any of it, right? No way anyone could?
“Jay!” Matt’s voice comes distantly from the house. Jay barely comprehends the sprint back into the kitchen. In a panic, he almost starts to take out the trash as cover, before realizing Matt absolutely isn’t paying attention. Matt’s in Plan Mode.
“Bird, get in here right now. I fucking got it!”
….
Matt’s secret – and let it never be said that he isn't honest with himself about it – is that pitching a plan to Jay is almost always the most exciting part of the plan. If he takes some convincing, it’s a bracing game of push-pull that a lot of the time extends through the entire execution, keeps him sharp. When Jay’s on board right away it hits like crystal meth.
“Listen,” he begins, trying and failing to fight off a premature grin. “You remember my cousin Maddy?” Jay shakes his head. “We went to her high school graduation party at my uncle’s house- God, I don’t know when.” It feels like months ago, but it could have been ten years for all Matt knows. “We used his chainsaw to cut a statue in half because we thought there was a jewel inside-”
“I don't remember this person,” Jay says, finally taking his position at the piano. “You have a lot of cousins.”
“Doesn't matter. She-” he uncaps his marker, “is getting married this weekend. And we-”
There's a good five second delay between him motioning and Jay catching on that he should do an intro, but by the time Matt’s written WEDDING THE BAND, he's hitting what Matt places after a second as Tears for Fears’ Head Over Heels.
“... are gonna play.”
The music falls off as Jay turns on the bench. “Play the wedding?”
“Yep.”
“She asked us to?”
“It took a little persuasion. Actually, barely any. She was pretty into the idea.”
“But why-” Jay blinks like he just woke up. He's been so out of it tonight. “This weekend? It's Wednesday.”
“It's Thursday,” Jared says quietly. Jay looks at him open-mouthed like it's the first time he's seeing him.
“It's Thursday,” he amends. “That’s not a lot of time to prepare.”
“We’ve done more with less,” Matt counters. Jay takes the point silently. The game is on.
Matt’s other secret is that he’s felt a little pressure to top the CN Tower plan, not even because it was some of their best work yet, but because something about it made Jay – there’s no other word for it – basically propose to him. And not only does he have no idea what prompted it, he was so cranked up it didn't hit him until the moment had completely passed. If he's being really honest, it took almost three days, and made him take out a row of empty bottles in the shower. Now this plan’s just dropped into his lap. Perfect mulligan. Perfect.
“I know what you’re thinking: What’s this got to do with The Rivoli? Listen to this. Maddy’s like twenty-something. She’ll have all her friends there. We win them over, get some video of all these cool, young, hip, Gen Z kids going crazy for Nirvana the Band. We book…” He writes it down first. “An after party.”
“At the Rivoli…” Jay gets those doe eyes, so big you can almost look in them and see it all play out. “Holy shit, Matt.”
Got him. That's that Breaking Bad shit.
….
There's nothing to see out the windshield of the RV. You can't even really see the tarp. Every so often Jay catches his reflection and thinks idly that it'd look cool if he were smoking a cigarette right now. He hasn't smoked a cigarette in years.
They don’t rehearse into the small hours anymore, even when they’re excited and on a time crunch. He had plenty of night left to sneak out here and sit in the driver’s seat, where the total stillness felt unnerving at first with Matt’s voice still ringing in his ears, where there are no glowing LED dates on the dashboard, and never were. Will he ever look at that spot again and not see them?
The problem is, he doesn’t want to stop – or he wants to and he doesn’t, like pushing at a sore tooth. He wants to leave their young selves sealed in the past where they belong, and he wants to hide in their apartment and watch them goof around and stumble past each other in the hallway at four in the morning and scream at each other over Wii Golf. The memory of Matt at 23 comes to him so strangely vividly while he’s staring into the reflective surface of the windshield. To think he’ll never see him again hurts as much as it’s a relief. Jay had forgotten how scary he could be, how unpredictable, how possessive. At the time, he wasn’t thinking about what that could mean. He was busy with their plans, preoccupied with all the ways the rest of his life might turn out.
They're still here, still circling the unnamable thing they were then (It's not like he literally never thought about it. He knew, for instance, that that fight was not about Wii Golf), but the clarity he comes out of the RV with has always worn off by the time he has the chance to move over to Matt’s side of the couch and do something about it. He wants to and he doesn't. No, he does want to, so much that it’s settled into a semi-permanent smoldering feeling in his gut. He wants to, and he wants to tell himself to do it a long, long time ago.
For the second time tonight, the sound of a phone ringing startles him out of his skin. He answers right away as much to shut it up as anything, running mentally through the nearly nonexistent list of people who might be calling him after midnight.
“Jay? Are you with Matt right now?”
The voice on the other end is female, which intensifies the feeling that he's doing something clandestine. Before he can think to play it cool, he answers, “Wha- Uh… Who is this?”
There's the sound of a throat clearing. “Sorry. This is Emilia. I didn't know if you still had my number- Never mind. I need to talk to you privately, so if you're with my brother, just call me back when you can.”
His first thought is that this is somehow part of Matt’s plan. Automatically, he checks out the window for someone pointing a camera at him, but there's no one there.
“Oh. Hi.”
“Hi.”
There's a silence that feels probably longer than it is before he remembers to speak. “Sorry, yeah I can talk now.”
“Good. Okay.” This is already one of the longer exchanges he's had with Emilia in years, definitely the most friendly. If he's right, the last time was a couple years ago when she came over to borrow squash rackets from Matt. She watched over Jay’s shoulder while he failed the same mission over and over in Metal Gear, and eventually said, I think you're supposed to try to be stealthy. “So, our cousin’s wedding is this weekend.”
“Oh yeah, Matt talked to her earlier. We’re-”
“Right, I know. Her ensemble backed out at the last minute; I guess they all gave each other mono or something. This whole thing is ridiculous, but-” Emilia pauses significantly, “I have a proposal for you.”
“For me?” Of course, he did clock that this was sketchy from the beginning, but he still almost tells her to talk to Matt out of sheer habit. He should probably just say no thanks and hang up. “Okay… go on.”
Emilia takes a breath. “So, you’re a fantastic pianist. Like, that’s just true. Whatever, you know, drama happened with us forever ago, I totally trust and respect you as a musician, and I have total confidence that you can play a wedding. You'd get paid too. This could be a great opportunity for you – if you can keep Matt out of it.”
Now he’s starting to regret answering the phone in the first place. He's off balance already. “What do you mean, keep him out of it?”
“I mean don’t let him talk. Get him to lose his voice, tell him the wrong time for the ceremony, I don’t care what. It’s a wedding. He can’t be out there doing any of the shit he does. You know if he goes for more than like two minutes he’ll say something fucked up in front of everyone and their elderly relatives. I know you know that.”
He does. It’s not like it hadn’t crossed his mind that they’re a wildly inappropriate band for a wedding. For a second he’s stricken with doubt, but then remembers the plan wasn’t really to play the wedding itself anyway. Maybe he could just tell Matt about this up front and go from there. Be a double agent.
Still, he puts up a fight. “I don't think it's a good idea to try to out-plan Matt. And didn't your guys’ cousin want us to do it? That seems like it's on her to decide.”
“Maddy’s 24,” she snaps back, “and she likes you two. She wanted to do you a favor, even though you didn’t even bother to RSVP to her fucking wedding.”
“Well, why, though?” Jay asks, genuinely curious. They don’t spend much time around Matt’s family at all. In fact, he’s pretty sure their invitation to this wedding is sitting in the old stock pot in the corner of the kitchen he and Matt throw mail into when they don't feel like looking at it.
“I don’t know, Jay, probably because of the whole Frog and Toad thing you’ve got going on. You can tell her you're not actually gay if you want. Unless something's changed I don't know about.”
Jay would not be much more stunned if the airbag went off right now. He'd just take it in the face like a crash test dummy. Somewhere underneath the sensation that his ex has thrown open the door to his inner world and informed him it wasn't even locked, he does get the sense that she's just trying to get a rise out of him, that she expects him to deny it. In the time it takes for him to fully understand that, though, he's been not denying it for what must be a pretty uncomfortable amount of time.
“Are you there?”
“Uh, yeah.”
Her voice comes back gentler. “Wait, wait, hold on. I'm sorry. Did I actually miss something here?”
All he has to say is no. Instead he finds himself saying, “It's okay. Don't worry about it.”
What if they could just pick it up like that? Retcon it. Assume that at some point, ages ago, there was a moment he and Matt crossed over – maybe it was dramatic and difficult, with a big fight that broke down into confessions. Maybe they kissed in the rain. Upside down, like in Spider-Man. Maybe it happened slowly, like a gradual shifting, until one night he looked up and the details of Matt’s face came together in a way he'd never seen before, and he thought: oh, it's you. It wasn't impossible. They already did it.
“Wait, really?” She actually sounds kind of thrilled, and Jay lets his last chance to gracefully correct the record slip past. Emilia takes it from there. “Why hasn't Matt said anything? I mean, not to rush you. You can be- whatever, on your own timing. How long has this been going on? No, don’t- you don't have to say. Oh god, I feel bad. I really didn't mean it like- I didn't mean to make you... come out to me.”
“That's okay,” Jay says, swallowing around the sudden solid feeling in his throat. He wonders how she'd react if he cried right now. For some reason, he adds, “I've never told anyone before.”
She mutters, “Jesus,” quietly enough that Jay thinks she didn't mean for him to hear. “Well, I won't say anything to anyone, obviously. Like I said, I think the cousins already assumed, but I don't know how you want to handle, you know, everyone else. We don't have to get into any of that, sorry.” For an oddly intimate beat, neither says anything. “So, about the wedding….”
“Right.” He'd almost forgotten why they were talking. “I'll handle it.”
“Thank you, Jay,” she says brightly. “You're going to do great. And I’m sure our parents would love it if Matt showed up to something for once. And… I'm really happy for you two. For real.”