#{ 𝐂𝐇𝐀𝐒𝐄 *// self para }

[flcnnerys]

*/ You built up a world of magic.

Chase was a notoriously horrible liar; but he was excellent at playing pretend.

It was easy, like second nature almost, for a kid who grew up with an overly creative streak to just start inventing things in his head. Some online gurus called it "manifesting", Chase called it bullshitting around. But when imagination started getting preferable to what was out there in the real world... well, it was the equivalent to a pot of water boiling over, no?

The pendulum always swung back.

With siblings older than him to the point that when he was ready to play make believe with his toys, to build a cardboard rocketship to fly around the house in, to tell scary stories by flashlight under the covers while Mom and Dad went to bed... he was alone. The girls were older, they wanted to get sleep before exams, or go out to the mall with their friends. It would have been lonely for most, but it wasn't something he realized at the time. The Star Wars reenactments-by-figurines had to continue, the shows must have gone one.

Maybe that's why he got into theater when he was older - he could play make believe, again, with other people. It always frustrated his parents, his mother specifically, the older that he got, when he still had those fantastical tendencies. Her parents weren't from this country, and when they arrived, they had to work their tails off to make ends meet. That logical thinking of practicality was ingrained in her, and she passed on that kind of working ethic at least to her daughters. Chase, too, in his own way, but it wasn't in a tangible way. The fridge was notably empty of A+ report cards from him, or trophies on the mantle for being a prized member of any sports team, a medal from a science fair. It always made it difficult for the two to relate to each other, and butting heads was common.

But it was easy then to just... pretend. Rethink over the fights they had where it ended with compassion, instead of disregard. He was his mother's son, though, and that spiteful sense of I'm right, and you're wrong, was too strong for either of them to overcome.

When he moved back home after school, the disappointment was palpable in the air. Of course it was - he did lie to them about what he was doing the whole time. And he wasn't completely stupid; college was expensive, and unless someone else was footing the bill, Chase had no interest both in wasting his time and money on something he didn't want to do in the first place. His dad was a bit more sympathetic, a quiet nudge in the directions of auditioning and getting his son away from the grungy music scene, the one that had led him to pierce his face and dye his hair green. With his mother, they were merely quiet observers of each other, a relationship one could expect with an animal at the zoo.

So it surprised him thoroughly when, a few weeks before all his good news hit at once, his mother asked if he would accompany her to a local diner for breakfast. It was this crepe place that went real fancy with it, and served humongous teacups of hot chocolate (to which Chase had two, extra whipped cream thank-you-very-much). Looking back, it was really the first time she tried to understand what it was that he enjoyed so much, why he liked theater, and the music, and all of it. Apparently she had heard him rehearsing in his room one night, when he thought he was alone in the house. Knowing that this conversation was on a thin tightrope to spiraling into the kinds of arguments they'd had about this subject in the past, Chase nevertheless gave her a chance, and explained. It was fun to lose sight of yourself and pretend for a little while - you could make up for the fact that you didn't have a lot of long term friends, or worthwhile partners. Or that you didn't always do the thing that your parents wanted you to be, that you couldn't live up the repeated greatness of your sisters. That you could be Seymour Krelborn, or Happy Loman, or Pierrepont Finch and deal with their own inadequacies for awhile - or, for that matter, to be a reflection of others', when singing on stage. It was addicting.

It felt like a breakthrough for this dynamic, one that Chase could not remember an equivalent to in recent memory. Of course, he left out the recreational substance use and made a point to never show her the tattoos he had collected over the years, neglected to tell her how many more he wanted - the piercings sent her through the roof enough the first time around. It ended with her carefully informing him that she still wanted him to be practical, that a backup plan didn't mean it was what he had to stick with - he just needed that reassurance that he could fall back on something else.

And Chase took that as an insult, as he always did. Didn't she see how talented he was? The band recorded an album! Of course, it wasn't her kind of music so why would she ever listen, past being his parent, and maybe it was just in the bassist's soundproofed basement, but still! People were listening to it on their pages! It was progress, why couldn't she see that? Disappointed and refusing to hear further about how she was just trying to look out for him, he went home, burying his head into everything else he was doing.

When the time for good news came, he didn't even tell her what was weighing on him. Nobody really knew. Two incredible prospects and his parents would have to think he disappeared to run away from it all - an insult to memory. He thought about that a lot, imagining how different things could have been. When he played his guitar here, singing the songs he knew even if no one was listening out of fear he would forget them all, his mind drifted. The leaves on the ground could be faceless people shouting for his name. The wind in the trees were the roaring applause. The sunlight too bright above was a spotlight.

This sucked.

He tried to remain as unaffected by this place as possible, but he wasn't sleeping very well. He was always a light sleeper, so hearing voices outside never helped. Even when he claimed the empty attic as a room, moving to higher altitude still didn't shut them up. Normally, he'd shout back obscenities, but he lived with other people and something told him whatever he had to say wouldn't do much. His reality was too persistent to do much escaping from it, like black smoke weaving its way through his body and reminding him not to drift too fair into his imagination, lest he be disappointed when he returned.

His dreams, typically vivid and full of outlandish premises, were filled with that black smoke. He opened his eyes to darkness, and the pins and needles feeling up and down his arms. It was cold, it was scary, and he couldn't move his hands away - looking up, they were chained up with thick handcuffs around a pole, or beam or something of the sort. Chase had done a lot of exploring of Arcadia since he'd been here, but he couldn't ever remember seeing anything like this.

Was this a payback punishment of sorts from when he threw that rock threw the police station window? It was boarded up now and he didn't even throw it with that specific direction, that's just where it ended. Or maybe it was from mowing down that guard on his skateboard when he lost control, and crude hand gestures he made in their direction when they tried to correctly give him shit for it. But, if that was all the case, why would his mother be beside him? He couldn't see her, but he could feel her presence, knowing it was her in a way only a child would know to their parent. Her perpetually even tone that always used to irritate him was soothing this time, reciting a poem. It startled him so much that it woke him up - Michelle Flannery was not a woman of literary value, he had never seen her read anything fiction in her life.

He brushed it off, including the feeling of how those pins and needles feelings wouldn't leave his arms, not for the whole day, and returned as he drifted back to sleep. Chase found himself in the room again, this time, in pain. His fingertips burned, and when he flexed them above his head, he felt it even more. In front of him was his mom, filing her nails like she usually did when she was attempting to be patient, her punctuality always thwarted by the perpetual lateness the Flannery children inherited from their father.

"I grow until the day I die. You've seen me once, if you don't see me now, you won't survive."

Yeah, yeah, you need your mother to get by in life, she used to say that sort of thing anytime anything good happened to any of them, as if she was taking credit for any success by virtue of being the one to give them birth. Chase and his sisters used to exchange sighs and eyerolls at it, and now was no different. "Is this you doing your mom-guilting thing again?" This was just a very... lyrical way of phrasing it, out of place for her. The faint smile she wore on her face, the look of love he didn't think he was often on the other side of across from him, was just as unnerving. He never thought he was very well deserving of that sort of thing. Briefly, he had the wherewithal to remember their last conversation, the one at that crepe place. That he would need a backup plan, that he couldn't rely on fantasy for the rest of his life to get by.

That irritation spurned him from sleep, and the burning sensation in his fingers returned tenfold. On each of his ten digits, there was a clean slice perpendicular to his nails, starting on the fleshy pad of fingertip and running all the way until they were stopped by his nails, interrupting the hardened skin from guitar strings. How was he supposed to play? That was his escape, that was his sole entertainment here-

Oh.

Then, as if waiting for his realization, his guitar - that had been carefully leaned against the corner of the room, fell forward, a loud and off key bang on the wood floors. Chase rushed over to examine, and though it was fine, testing his fingers against the strings led to a hurt he couldn't ignore. His tried and true method of staying sane here, gone until his body healed itself. He brushed frustrated tears from his eyes at the thought, catching himself in the mirror, catching his mother in the mirror. Behind him, a gentle hand on his shoulder mirroring the touch he felt over his t-shirt.

He knew she wasn't there, not really, and it gave him a sinking feeling of longing when it settled into realization that he was alone again. But he could imagine it so, a comfort every time he looked in any reflection, to pretend that maybe that touch he felt was real. He could imagine she was only trying to help, do what she always said she was trying to do, to set him on the straight and narrow, with a backup plan, just in case. To help.

Maybe fantasy was the backup plan. Or maybe, this was just the pendulum swinging him back to reality.