#like i don't really remember much because i was horrifically sick and couldn't stop crying

[cummetal]

.

[parkeryangs]

thinking about matt woe.begone and how easily he accepted his death. like-- i don't even think he cared that it was a necessary evil in order to save him, i think he saw it simply as a chance to die.

tw for discussion of fictional suicidal ideation under the cut

see, him dying in the car wreck was never the horrific freak accident that everyone believed it was. every second of the crash was meticulously planned and plotted, and matt was still a coward who couldn't even die properly, because mike just had to go and get involved.

that's why it was so easy to give him the gun.

to mike, it was a rescue mission. to matt, it was just some long-coming end to a bitter fight with his own mind; even if it wasn't self-inflicted, it was an inevitability he'd already come to terms with even before he'd met mike and tried to learn to love living again and failed halfway.

he deserved whatever was coming to him, after mike changed history without his knowing and all that really happened in the crash that night was matt breaking his wrist in two places, shattering his survival instinct along with it. he wishes he remembered what it was like to die. he doesn't, until mike shows up in vancouver with tears in his eyes.

mike saved him but now he has to kill him and that human instinct to keep living has been gone for a long time but he puts up a fight because he has to. mike starts crying and then matt starts crying. matt can't breathe and mike is gone again and he comes back, different, changed, and there's two of them and it's not just because matt's eye is already turning purple, freshly bruised.

matt thinks that, in a different life, he wouldn't have forgiven mike for this. he died, he was supposed to die, but mike just couldn't leave it—him—alone. maybe things would've been better if he hadn't interfered. mike told him he couldn't sleep after he died and some nights he woke up screaming and he never moved on, not really, but life was temporary anyways and matt was never going to live forever. he was never going to live as long as he had now.

this was all mike's fault and as much as he loves mike walters—to death—he hates him right now, standing on the other side of the too-small kitchen table looking so guilty it makes matt sick. still, he takes a deep breath, then another. he tells mike the truth, all of it, about the car wreck and all of the broken bones and the bottle of pills in his medicine cabinet and he never stops crying but mike doesn't either. then he pushes the gun across the table and tells him that it's okay.