#i just wanted to write some macdennis shit for abbey road's 50th anniversary ig

[ashwayssunny]

carry that weight.

hello! here’s a lil fic that nobody asked for. aka, dennis spends the night on the couch. set during “the gang gets romantic,” so it’s tagged for spoilers! warnings for brief mentions of v*miting, drug use, and dennis-typical creepiness.

Like most nights, he couldn’t sleep. He’d felt a headache building for hours, had known it would be a nasty one as soon as the woman Mac had unceremoniously decided to pair him with revealed she was no single woman after all. He wasn’t sure if he’d lost interest in the scheme then, or if he’d simply never had any to begin with. Either way, he’d had to swallow his complaints. It would’ve been so simple - should’ve been so simple - for him to crawl into Mac’s bed, drift away, and forget the scheme altogether, but the way his skin burned like he’d laid down on a bed of hot coals told him it simply would not be. 

The couch was not meant to host an overnight guest. It was uncomfortable on the best of days, and today was not one of its best days. It was cold, the leather warped and torn in odd places, and so lumpy, Dennis felt as if he were trying to get comfortable on the head of a giant mushroom. He was cold, too, as he always was, and the throw blanket he must’ve stolen from his sister no less than ten years ago offered him no support. He dreaded the way his back would ache in the morning, and the thought of it was almost enough to send him running back to Mac’s room with his tail between his legs. Almost. 

The woman - Lisa, he remembered vaguely, though he’d thought he’d made it a rule for himself that knowing their names cheapened the experience - was attractive enough. Slender figure, inauspicious features, a face he’d forget once it wriggled out from underneath him. He liked redheads. Mac knew that, of course. Mac seemed to know many things about him; Dennis didn’t know why that surprised him after nearly twenty-five years of cohabitation. I know you, man, Mac had said to him once in a way that sounded quite like he was saying something else. Dennis remembered fighting back tears for the first time since childhood. Mac was so close, he thought, just in the other room, nothing but paint and drywall between them. If Dennis concentrated hard enough, he could make out the sound of him snoring obscenely; he pictured Mac’s arms and legs tossed haphazardly over themselves, knew he was drooling into his one and only pillowcase-less pillow. He wondered, if he had stayed, if Mac would be drooling into his shoulder instead. 

Dennis rolled onto his side, pushing those thoughts away. The current occupants of his room seemed to still be awake; the walls in their apartment would certainly win no awards for protecting anyone’s privacy, and despite his best efforts to soundproof the room, sound escaped just as frequently and as forcefully as so many failed sexual escapades that passed through that very same door. Twenty-five years’ worth of sexual escapades. Dennis tried not to think too hard about how long twenty-five years truly was. Until recently, he’d been twenty-five in his head, willfully ignorant of the passage of time, but now as he stared down the reality of being nearly twice that age, the bliss that came with his willful ignorance had all but disappeared. At twenty-five, he could shoot tequila till the sun came up, sleep for a few hours, and go on about his day, rinsing and repeating each night in a pattern that became as comfortable and familiar to him as waking up and falling asleep. He would always vomit, of course, because a weak stomach and an easily triggered gag reflex was something, among other things he didn’t care to admit, he shared with his twin sister. Now he was lucky if vomiting was all that came of nights like that. After thirty-five, his hangovers seemed to evolve, lasting days and robbing him of usefulness for what seemed like weeks, like months, like years. Now, pushing forty-five, it was not so easy to rinse and repeat. 

A brief but unmistakable sob came from his room, and Dennis rolled his eyes but was secretly grateful for distraction. His thoughts returned to the woman, Lisa. He remembered trying to stare at her. It wasn’t unusual; he often studied his targets, drank them in like a smooth crème de menthe. He knew it made them uneasy, and he’d liked it that way. But his eyes kept drifting, and it was jarring to him in a way he could not pinpoint. He didn’t feel anything when he looked at her; then again, he didn’t feel anything when he looked at any of them, but a deep, burning lust that boiled in his brain and in his stomach and told him he would combust if he didn’t touch someone was ever-present. Or it had been. It wasn’t now, and that was most jarring of all. Lisa was attractive enough; sweet-faced, red-haired, curvy in the best places, and totally, completely uninteresting to him. He wondered if something in him was broken for good this time, if he could never get it back, if he even wanted to get it back. If he even wanted anything at all. 

Another sob choked its way through the silence of their apartment, grating on Dennis’s eardrums. He groaned aloud, hating Mac for putting him through this. He considered turning on the TV in the living room and popping in a Rambo DVD just to rattle him awake with the sound of gunfire. When more muffled whimpering made him clench his fists tightly to his body, he decided he needed some other noise, anything else, to drown it out. He reached for his phone across the coffee table, sliding past the home screen and opening his Spotify app. With shaky hands, he pressed the ‘shuffle’ button on a Rock Classics playlist, closing his eyes and placing his phone next to his ear. Soft, simple piano chords started to loosen the knot in his chest, and when Paul McCartney’s sweet voice began to dance against his eardrum, he smiled in spite of himself. His eyes drifted shut. “Once there was a way to get back homeward,” Paul sang, “once there was a way to get back home...”

He’d tried to look at her legs. He’d forced himself to stare. They were nice enough, as was the curve of her ass, but he felt no familiar twinge of desire. Why couldn’t he just look at her legs? Instead, he felt fear. Months could by at times without him feeling anything at all, and though that frightened him, he knew he could substitute physical arousal for emotion with a relatively high rate of success. It didn’t make him feel happy, but it made him feel something. And that counted. Every drop of water in the desert of his emotional terrain was appreciated, was needed. Like any desert, he could dry up for months, not a feeling in sight, but once the rainy season began, it ran its course with such forceful agony, he wondered if the therapist he’d seen with Dee so many years ago was on to something after all. 

“Sleep, pretty darling, do not cry...”

Why had he agreed to the scheme at all? As the verses repeated, he turned the question over and over in his mind, poking holes in his own arguments, tearing down his own defenses. Obviously he’d done the scheme to satisfy Mac, but... why? Dennis bristled at the thought of Mac having purposefully booked a married couple to force Dennis into his room, but his reaction to the unfortunate existence of Lisa’s husband seemed genuine. Dennis knew Mac well enough to know when he was lying. He paused, considering that thought. He’d seen Mac lie through his teeth a thousand times, and he was bad at it because Dennis knew that he wore his heart on his sleeve, but how many others knew that about him? How many others could sniff out Mac’s lies, pick his laugh out of a crowd of a thousand, recognize even the faintest hint of his scent when Mac’s clothes inevitably mixed with some of his own in the wash? I know you, man, Mac’s voice whispered in his head. 

Lisa, he said to himself. He needed to think about Lisa. Lisa, with her red hair and her red, snotty nose and her husband. Dennis nearly scoffed. What a ridiculous thing to want to have. Perhaps if he tried hard enough, conjured Lisa’s face above Jackie DeNardo’s chest, it would work. He could rub out a quick one and be asleep in twenty minutes. For whatever reason, however, his mind’s eye could not linger on her. Lisa’s face warped and changed shape, shifting into something so unrecognizable, he could not remember it at all. What was it he’d said to Mac earlier? That this whole thing felt desperate, felt unlike him? Odd, he conceded, for a man who once purchased a boat to help him attract women. But Dennis had run the same course, danced the same steps so many times between twenty-five and forty-five, he’d finally begun to dream about packing up his tap shoes and retiring the show for good. Performing, yes, it was all a performance - albeit an excellent one, he gave himself - but a performance nonetheless, and one he feared may finally be better left to a younger man. But perhaps he could do it. Dennis Reynolds had done everything in his life with grace, with poise and mystique. Why should aging be any different? He could retire the skin of his old self like a baseball jersey; some ill-fitting thing at which he could look back and smile but no longer had the power to squeeze him to fit its mold. Yes, that would be nice. 

The drums cascaded like a waterfall down the track and forced in a new tune. “Boy, you’re gonna carry that weight, carry that weight a long time...”

And what would be left there, in the empty space between the old Dennis and the new? Dennis swallowed hard without meaning to as another face took shape in his mind, a much more familiar face. Mac smiled at him so sweetly that morning, his giddiness about scheming together again palpable in the air. Mac smiled at him earlier, too, lying next to him silently, their arms brushing just enough to set that part of Dennis’s skin on fire. Mac had always looked at him that way. It made him seem younger. Dennis wondered if perhaps that was because it reminded him of high school, of smoking pot underneath the stadium bleachers, of Mac staying late at his house and beating him for fifteen rounds of Killer Instinct just so he wouldn’t have to go home. Mac still looked at him that way, even when that Dennis and the Dennis he was now seemed lifetimes apart. 

“Boy, you’re gonna carry that weight, carry that weight a long time...”

Feet moving before he even made the conscious decision, Dennis slinked off the couch, feeling his way through the darkness until his fingers curled around Mac’s doorknob. Yes, maybe he’d done the scheme to make Mac happy, to spend time with him, to make-believe their friendship hadn’t taken a turn for the worst in recent years. Dennis knew he had to shoulder most of the blame, but perhaps it didn’t have to be that way. He was so tired of performing, so tired of playing a character that nobody, especially Mac, believed in anymore. And if Mac already knew him, truly knew him in the way that he had so long feared being known, then why play the character at all? 

Dennis assuredly but slowly creaked open Mac’s door, shuffling forward until he nearly tripped over the bare mattress. Mac was snoring, but the sound was familiar, and Dennis was suddenly tired enough to deal with it. He laid down as quietly as possible, but Mac’s cheap old mattress practically screamed beneath him, and Mac rolled over, eyes wide and stark white in the darkness, searching until he found Dennis’s face. 

“Den?” he asked. “What are you doing?” 

“Shhhh, go to sleep,” Dennis said, slipping his legs underneath Mac’s blanket. He curled his arms inward on his chest, contouring his body to fit around Mac’s shape without actually touching him. Mac didn’t protest, only sighed softly and inched just a bit closer. “The couch was killing my back,” Dennis whispered, and Mac chuckled. 

“Figured,” he yawned, rolling back over. Dennis’s eyes popped open, and he stared at the back of Mac’s head for a long moment before swallowing and letting out a little yawn himself. He released the tension he’d been holding since that morning in his jaw, and with the familiar scent of Mac’s hair gel on their shared pillow consuming him, sleep finally came.