fic: tu me manques
sum: Matt/Andrew. Andrew becomes feral- focuses more on the loss of human mind and not so much the animal-part.
warning: a quiet sort of angst.
A/n: hey guys, sorry for...basically abandoning you. i posted quite a bit of Matt/Andrew on tumblr and i'm JUST NOW moving it all. I'm sorry! I'm a bit of a deadbeat author. anyway, here you go. It's a little bit blurry and obscure but I guess that's just how I roll?
Also, I feel like this style is quite different from my first fic. I realized I needed to do a lot more character exploration, so a lot of the next few posts will have less dialogue and more of...this. Yeah, Andrew's a bit nondescript...I have other things on the way as well, though! If you're so inclined, updates from now on will be on my profile.
For a little bit, things were perfect.
Matt and Andrew had gone away together, away from the world. They'd found a little apartment in some undisclosed city, where no one knew their real names or who they were.
They didn't go out much, preferring to lie in bed, tucked up away in the high-rise room with chalky white walls, like two newly-mated birds nesting together. Matt would spend hours just looking at Andrew, carding his fingers through his hair, soft as an infant's. Then he would kiss him, drawn-out and indulgent, with the sun shining through the window and Andrew's feet entangled in his.
They were making up for lost time.
Matt wasn't sure what else there was for them in this life, if there was anything outside of the long hours where the language was through touch, not speech, and the days passing by like heavy cream, all encased in the sturdy flat.
On one particularly dark night, before Matt drifted off to sleep, he felt Andrew's fingers rest on his arm and heard him say so quietly he thought he might have imagined it- if we could stay like this forever - -
Matt watches the edges of their perfect life melt on the day Andrew can't recognize him.
They'd had a small fight that day, Matt snapping at Andrew's noncommittal responses and lazy shrugs because yeah, he's tired, but they're both tired and every couple fights. Except, they're not a couple, they're more, and they should be above petty fighting but today it just happened. He spent the entire day feeling guilty about it, feeling weighed down by the knowledge that he'd yelled at Andrew with the intent to hurt. It was a gritty, unpleasant sort of feeling.
Matt barely makes it through a day of work, a menial job at some sort of gift shop store front, an odd-jobs man. He doesn't smile at his coworkers, doesn't greet customers as he should, doesn't function at all.
He wants to go home and envelope Andrew in his arms and say he's sorry sorry sorry.
Matt knows this is something like codependency, but all things considered, he wonders if they could be anything else.
-
He goes home (finally) when it's dark out, and as he advances their building he sees that their apartment light is out. A jolt of panic splinters him and he almost runs up the stairs, because Andrew is always home before him and he always sits in the living room with the light on.
When he bursts through the door, Andrew's sitting there as usual, blanketed in the dark. He's strangely still and there's a sort of strange energy around him.
"Andrew?" His voice sounds thin and strained.
Slowly, Andrew faces him, and his face looks confused. "Who are you?" His pupils are blown and his voice is sharp, rough.
"It's- What are you talking about? It's me, it's Matt-," (you love me), "Remember?"
It takes Andrew a sickeningly long time to have realization and recollection flash across his face, a ripple of waves in slow motion. His eyes clear up and his face goes slack.
"Oh,"-his voice sounds miles away-"Matt. Why are you staring at me like that?"
"What?" He can't believe it. "Dude, you just- you…you were acting like you didn't know who I am." A watery, embarrassing laugh wrestles its way past his lips.
Andrew's nose crinkles and his eyebrows shift, the corners of his mouth almost curved upwards. "Don't be stupid." He touches Matt's neck, the tip of a nail grazing his collarbone. "I could never forget you." His glance flicks down and then up again, a long look from between his eyelashes.
It comforts him, (never forget you), but there is a seed of doubt and fear planted in his mind, a malignant tumor.
-
Andrew does, though. He forgets.
It happens, again and again. Matt will turn around to see Andrew staring at him with a blank expression, he'll wake up next to a stranger, he'll come home to an empty slate. It's always Andrew, but it's an Andrew who doesn't know Matt, doesn't perceive or remember any of the love. It's an Andrew who almost seems frozen in time- he doesn't speak, doesn't feel, doesn't have any sort of personality, reduced to his baser instincts.
(Once, he reached out and clawed at Matt, nails suddenly knife-sharp and fierce, leaving three long scores down his bicep that welled up with blood and stained the bed sheets.)
He loses the ability to write, the clutching the pen awkwardly in his hand before dropping it and ripping the paper up. With time, he becomes lucid of what's happening to him, aware of what essentially is the deconstruction of his self. Layer by layer, Andrew is stripped away like an oil painting.
-
One day they're eating lunch when Andrew breaks off into a sob, a swollen sound that surprises Matt, scares him. He pushes his plate away, knocks over his glass of water, snapping his hands into fists. The dry skin on his knuckles crack, and Matt hurries to him.
"I'm forgetting," is all Andrew has to say to fill Matt with a cold dread. "I can't remember when we first- I can't remember anything." He loosens his fists. "I don't want to forget. I don't want to ever know what it's like to not be in love with you. Why is this happening to me?" His voice is strung tight and it's his but it sounds off, rough around the edges and more animalistic.
Matt stays silent and holds Andrew, but he's terrified.
-
The last couple of days pass slowly, and when Matt thinks back all he recalls is static and white noise.
They are not spent with Andrew, but with someone else who looks like him and feels like him but has nothing within. The remains of his memories have finally fallen away, molted like feathers, to reveal a skeletal mind. He no longer attacks Matt, instead clinging to him like an untrained dog, eyes blank, body pliant.
Even though he knows Andrew doesn't understand him, doesn't really listen to him or process his words, Matt spends countless hours talking to him. He tells him their story from start to finish, every insignificant and significant moment he can remember, fills the quiet air with soft recounts and anecdotes. He tells Andrew everything he knows about him. It's futile, but in the back of his mind Matt is hoping that doing this will sudden remind him of everything. He's a historian, a memorialist, an architect trying to rebuild a house out of faded ruins.
Maybe he'll say just the right thing and as if by catalyst Andrew will blink back to normal, hold his face in the shy way he's always done and kiss him, I love you.
He talks until his throat goes hoarse and he can't talk anymore, and then he just sits with Andrew and kisses his eyelids and his hands as if to communicate through contact, and these are the stories that tell the most, a thousand words with each touch.
-
He wonders if he's subject to some kind of horrible, beautiful irony. It's strange to think about it- he and Andrew's relationship started with spending too much time together in bed, treating each other's bodies like atlases, and it ends with spending too much time in bed.
If he looks on the bright side he could say they came full circle, but in reality they're just two people whose time together was cut too short.
Other times it's a punishment, a repayment of all the things they'd done in Seattle, a recounting of their past sins. It's these moments of doubt that he can barely look at Andrew or himself.
-
On the final day, Matt doesn't see Andrew. He wakes up to an empty bed, an empty apartment. He is alone, with only the dust motes floating in front of the window to keep him company.
He walks to each room, looking in carefully, as if Andrew is just going to be sitting in a chair reading a book or washing his hands in the sink or folding the laundry. He can almost hear him- Were you looking for me? or Good morning, Matt, with a smirk so familiar it hurts. Instead, his finds nothing.
He finally steps into the kitchen that has the door which leads outside, where it all began. The door is open, and when Matt inspects the handle it looks as though someone with claws and clumsy fingers tried to open and failed several times. The hallway extending from the doorway is vacant.
Matt never sees Andrew again, and he moves on.
He doesn't look for him. He burns their pictures. He moves to a new apartment, tries to start a new life with the pieces he has left.
He doesn't forget, though.
if we could stay like this forever, Matt- -
tu me manques- French for 'I miss you.'
However, it is closer to 'you are missing from me.'
you are a part of me, an essential piece.