#/ backstreets back ALRIGHTTTTT

[felixferitas]

@ourpretender: inside a single bathroom of a place of service; restaurant,  store,  club etc. ( ollie & felix / older!au ? where felix lives and they went their separate ways and some ? 15 year reunion dinner for oxford graduates pulls them back together and it's . sparks all over again ? the place of service could be a restaurant near the campus and the nostalgia could hit . . . )

to everyone's disbelief, his parents in particular, felix grows up. when he fell back into old self-destructive patterns, blowing through girls and drugs and money, it seemed as if he might never. but he lives to learn from his mistakes. some more life-altering than others, he thinks, absentmindedly rubbing over the pale strip of skin where his wedding band used to sit. tying the knot with the first girl to make googly eyes at him after graduation had not been a smart choice, but an honest one, with his ex-wife trying and failing to take half of his assets with several rounds of meetings with the divorce lawyer his family had on retainer. the whole thing had left him feeling a bit jaded on the concept of love, a mere juvenile thing to forego now that he's had an artificial taste of it after entering adulthood. casual flings always suited him better, always struggling to commit to things, his inattention a perpetual problem that plagued his past and his present. nostalgia obscures the full picture, always makes things seem better than they actually were when looking in the rearview mirror, but as nightmareish as that summer had been, felix wants to delude himself into thinking he maybe had a taste of the real thing once. that's why it had been so fucking frightening. because it was terrible and true, unconditionally all consuming, felix had to flinch away from it. he had to send oliver reeling away like a kicked dog. seeing him again here at their reunion dinner, felix has to admit that he looks far from kicked or down on his luck. oliver looks polished, like he's finally settled into the skin he was always trying to slip out of, and heat prickles at the base of felix's spine with trepidation. felix pretends not to notice him and instead waits to be noticed, because that's how it's always been, it's how felix needs things to continue to be. for all his fine english pedigree, all that nobility has afforded him in life, there are still some things that have escaped felix's grasp. some things he's let slip through his fingers like wistful grains of sand.

"hiya, mate. you look well," felix greets, unpolished and clumsy. it's possible his charm has eroded with the natural passing of time, along with the distance between them creating a rift, and felix no longer knows how to bridge that gap. especially now that there was more of an even playing field, with oliver no longer looking like the poor welfare case who got all his clothes from oxfam. felix wonders if they would've ended up in the same place if they'd met as equals, if their tale would be a little less tragic and painful. "got even more jacked than the last time i saw you. you know there's room for more than just protein in a healthy diet, right?" felix offers a tiny breadcrumb to defuse the tension, because although he knows he's skilled at playing the fool, genuinely inquiring after oliver's wellbeing throughout the time they haven't been speaking would be a ghastly mistake. i think you need to see someone. you need help, okay? felix smiles, but it doesn't reach his eyes. all the lights are on, but nobody's home.

[johnnyjsuh]