Content: Childhood Friends Angst, Hurt/comfort But Like 90% Hurt, Romantically Ambiguous Relationship,

content: childhood friends angst, hurt/comfort but like 90% hurt, romantically ambiguous relationship, matt holt centric

wc: ~1.8k

"I told myself, sometimes," Matt says, slowly, "that if I ever made my way back to you, I hoped that you'd have found someone else.”

The mattress creaks beneath you. His words hang still in the air — dappled by the thin starlight, tentative, solitary things, not quite themselves when out in the open. The Castle of Lions is unforgiving in its cold. Your skin prickles. Hands ache to grasp at the ghost of someone you’ve never really known before. 

“Do you still believe that?” You ask.

Matt’s eyes shift in a way that makes your heart jump, and you think that maybe it is the wrong thing to say. You amend, voice nearly inaudible through the inexplicable tightness of your throat: “Did you ever believe that?”

The silence eats you whole. It is dark inside the maw, your bodies resting gingerly on its tongue, so precarious that when you breathe it ricochets off of cavernous walls. Eventually: 

“No.”

There’s a resignation in his truth. Bereft and lonely and weightless. “No, I don’t.” His smile catches on the corner of your peripheries, aching. “Guess that makes me a horrible person, huh?”

“Of course not,” you answer automatically, although your head is still swimming. Your voice meekens into something raw. “I felt that way about you, too. You were my best friend.” 

He was, wasn’t he? You're struck with a sudden, vivid memory: winter, nine years ago. A soft shelter of mismatched blankets teetering overhead, cascading down like the walls of a heaven you thought you’d find forever in. Plush cushions. Giddy smiles. That feeling of invulnerability. You and him, pressed shoulder-to-shoulder in the warm air, flashlights pinned on planets, moons, stars, circumstellar discs, fragments of a world you swore you'd one day seize in your bare hands. You got your wish in the end, but if this is the cost–

“You were mine, too.” Matt says, just as your heart threatens to cave in. Then he shakes his head. Lets out a soft puff of air. “God, what am I saying? You’re still mine.” His elbow presses into your side. “Who else would’ve stuck with Pidge all the way through the Garrison?” 

You huff. “Hey. Put some respect on her name.” He chortles and your head slips against his shoulder. “Besides– she wasn’t the only reason I stayed. I kind of wanted a career, you know.” The levity of the moment cuts through the haunting, if only for a moment; a sudden burst of courage sparks in your veins. Lower, just a fraction: “And I wanted you back.” 

It shouldn’t be so hard to say. This is the Matt you loved – the one who used to hold your hand whenever the dark would close in on you, who taught you all the constellations as you saw them reflected in his eyes. Who was everything you could never find in all your textbooks and prizes and sleepless nights. You’d cried over him, curled up in a half-empty bed with an emptier heart, begging for an answer that only came once you’d finally been able to wrench your gaze away. Too late. Always too late. This never should’ve been something time could seize, but it is.

If you’d never left, would we have been fine? Questions, questions. All unasked. Am I still the me who could love you the way you deserved? 

Matt lingers at the boundary where your vision dissolves into the black, and you are dimly aware of the warmth of his palm enveloping yours, the quiet pulse of his blood. You think you could map out his veins in black ink blindfolded. You could model him from clay and electricity, angles and planes and geometric forms coalescing into the flickering image of your heart. You could drag your fingertips across the ravine seared hypertrophic into his cheek, chart each new valley and bound crossing the landscape of his skin, and would it be enough?

My best friend. You squeeze your eyes shut. 

You can lift a weight off your shoulders, but sometimes that does nothing more than remind you of how empty you are without it. Matt is here, and he’s alive, and he holds you with a tenderness that cleaves you open raw. What do you do now that he isn’t just a wish? Now that he isn’t the spectre you carried around like it was breathing before you drowned? You’d wanted him without thinking about having him, because the last time you got what you wanted you ended up fighting a war. 

(Scared. That’s what you are. That’s what you’ve always been. Scared of loving things — scared of losing things — how different are they, really?)

Matt’s palm closes over your own. 

“You know what I’d think of, whenever everything up here just got too…” A vague gesture. You track the movement greedily. “Too much?” He swivels towards you, eyes soft and devastating as twin nebulae. “I’d think of you. Of— of us. And Pidge, and Mom, of course— all of you, back on Earth. I promised myself that I wouldn’t give up until I said everything I needed to say to you. It kept me going.”

He exhales. “It was like breathing to me.” 

He's warm beside you, older, sharper features painted a mute silver by the rays trickling in through the window. It winds over him, wraps him up in a way that makes him look so fragile you worry that all it would take to whisk him away again is a single tug of the rope. 

“Well,” you offer him a sliver of a failing smile, “We’re here, now.”

We. Self-forgetting. An easy facade. Matt might be considering it.

“Yeah.” He mumbles, finally. “You are.”

It could be cruel, the way you look at him. It’s selfish to want when you yourself have nothing to give – and yet something tells you that to tear your gaze away would be to undo the seams of your very existence. What happens next? He could say a million things, each of which you are more undeserving of than the last. Maybe you could learn to pull him back into you again, natural as anything else that has ever existed. As if it’s the only thing that was ever really meant to happen between the two of you – no forsaken missions and no alien warships and no fabled weapons at the edge of the universe which landed you here to begin with. Just us, the dream murmurs. Wouldn’t that be nice? 

Maybe it would be. Maybe it would wreck you. Maybe you’d deserve it. 

Still, you look, and Matt’s hand falls from your own.

(It’s a pity that no amount of searching will ever yield the truth before you. You don’t know how many times Matt sat, surrounded by the Coalition’s chaos and the deafening silence of the stars, thinking to himself that maybe it all would’ve made sense if you were there. You picked things apart like no one he’d ever met before – plucked at the threads of fate until they sounded a tune you were satisfied with, unrelenting in your pursuit of something of your own. You with your quiet eyes and brittle edges you’d sometimes snap against the outside just to see if they would crumble. He would’ve given you every good thing in the world, if only he’d had the chance.

You’re sitting beside him now, sadder than maybe anything else he’s ever seen, and he thinks: his chance is here. But somehow, the good things are all out of reach.

So nothing comes. Ordinarily, the words would beat against the trapdoor of his throat, raining fists down on soft tissue in unceasing droves. I love you. You are the one part of me I never lost. I love you. You are everything to me; there’s nothing I’ve ever known more. I love you I love you I love you. He’d crafted all those beautiful words so clearly before. There’s nothing to show for it, now, but he remembers the thoughts and how they’d swarmed him in the unending night.

Matt wishes you could see into him.) 

Tentatively, your hand strays. It’s a cautious act – Matt is glassy-eyed in a way you’ve never seen; all you know is to handle it with care. Your pinky curls around his own before the warmth of him greets you, and when his fingers bloom over your palm you close your eyes and try not to think of the deeds they are nestled in. A doctor’s hands, Colleen once jested after you’d accidentally split the tip of your finger on a kitchen knife. Got to be careful with them. Would she still say it if she knew the things you’d done with a bayard lodged in your grip? If she knew how you’d let her only son drift like an hourglass run between your fingers? 

“You’re always slipping away from me.” You whisper, voice fed through a mirthless smile. 

Matt humours you again, and relief washes through you as the sheen over his gaze starts to thaw before your own. “I disappeared into space one time.” 

He knows that’s not what you meant. It’s a strange, liminal place that the two of you find yourselves stranded within — not quite friends, not quite lovers, but soulmates, definitely, maybe. The thought shatters you just a little. 

“Hey – look at me.” Calloused hands retreat from your own to fall on your shoulders. Your gaze flickers up, unsteady waves crashing against warm, fractured brown pools – the same, you think. Always the same. You know that ability to hold. “We’re gonna be okay. It’s still us, isn’t it?” The muted little glimmer of hope in his eyes is the heartrending kind. “It’s still us.” 

Matt holds you like his pleas perfuse your very being. People seem to do that a lot, these days. 

“Yeah.” You force the word past and taste salt in your mouth. “Of course it is.”

I don’t know how not to grieve you.

He has to know it. In the low light, you can see yourself swimming in his eyes, and you can only begin to conceive what stares back at him from your own. A returning prayer. Please see me, it goes. You have been searching for the right words for so very long, and your limbs are growing heavy. Please find a way to love me that I will understand. 

(Is there even such a thing?)

Steady arms engulf you. 

“We’ll be alright.” Matt murmurs into your skin, and you think that it is more for himself than it is for you. “I’ll make sure of it.”

I’m never letting you go. Not again.

You can only hope. 

end

notes: thank you so much for pulling through to the end! i will be honest, i don’t know how i feel about this one but my love for that boy transcends my lack of ability. matt holt you will always be famous