#old habits die screaming. ( musician arc ii )

[vipier]

▸ nostalgia is a mind's trick.

IT HAD BEEN A MISTAKE TO RETURN TO THIS PLACE. the refrain has repeated in tristan patel’s mind over and over and over since the moment he set foot back within the limits of his de facto hometown, ferrix, that backwater bayou bullshit louisiana town he’s avoided for every year of his unexpectedly successful music career. he’d turned tail what felt like a lifetime ago, with the tailpipe of his old chevy truck — the one @k4ssa had helped him reconstruct — belching smoke and memories behind him as he charted his course straight to tennessee, the land of music. he’d hoped it would make him forget his heartache, propel him forward into a life beyond where the four corners of ferrix and everything he knew and loved there could be placed on a shelf high out of reach, to be admired occasionally as some kind of old relic. but he can’t outrun this place, or perhaps more accurately, he can’t outrun that torch which still remains here, like a beacon ever calling him home, some kind of siren song weaving notes of hope into his desperate, delusional brain. he hasn’t expected that torch to be the only person milling around bix’s auto shop when he arrived, prepared to meet brasso, who coincidentally didn’t show up. now he understands why, although the understanding really only heightens the annoyance. never trust a romantic, he reminds himself for what feels like the hundredth time tonight as he stares into his cheap lager.

his second mistake, after coming here in the first place, was agreeing to actually have a drink with cassian andor, just to catch up, as if that wasn’t an objectively insane idea at baseline. they’d both played it so cool at the shop, cool enough that tris still wonders even in this moment if cass is affected at all by seeing him again. and up until moments ago, it had gone — dare he say — remarkably well between them. for a sweet blip in time, for the couple hours that they’d been here tucked across from each other in the back booth of the only real dive in town, it started to feel something like it used to, a glimmer of the past shimmering between them like some kind of mirage. but already, he can see that a mirage is all it was. after all, he knew the moment he drove into town that nothing could ever really go back. he’d left ferrix years ago in that old chevy truck, which remains parked next to his residence in the east tennessee appalachian foothills even today, and returned in the 1969 camaro he’d always coveted with a single suitcase, a guitar, and the weight of a strange legacy about him. ferrix looked almost exactly the same : the methodist church across from their old high school, the one tavern they now sit in as the only real watering hole in town where they both had their first legal drink, the dirty sketchy side streets in the industrial zone where he and cassian used to sneak away to smoke as teenagers, the auto shop bix has now inherited where they once spent hours, the dirt roads stretching out to the wilds where they used to spend warm summer nights in the truck bed near the bayou … it would have felt like stepping back in time, were it not for the stares he attracted even when attempting to fly under the radar. it’s a small town without much population turnover, and somehow, in an outrageous and unlikely turn of events, he’s become its most recognizable former resident. he could feel the whispers begin humming the moment he’d been spotted driving down the main street.

those stares and whispers had followed them here, though they had both clearly done their damnedest to ignore them. people made some effort to be subtle, he supposes, but he can always feel when there’s eyes on him because it makes his skin crawl when he isn’t onstage. for the past hour or so, as the bar slowly filled up, he thought he sensed the rise in tension in cassian as well, although it’s difficult for him to be confident in reading him anymore. once, it took only a glance, a gesture, a word to communicate between them what the other was thinking or feeling. after so many years, after so much heartache, he has to consider that maybe he doesn’t really know cass at all anymore, though the mere thought tears painfully at him. the physical changes in both of them are apparent, both older, more angular, more proportionate. cassian’s even better looking now, if that’s possible, and he hates that it thrills him a little to look at him, to imagine bygones and old possibilities anew, as though any hope were not the most potent poison for his heart, already terminally ill. but there are changes beneath the surface, too, darker ones immediately apparent to tris the way he suspects they are to cass in him. cassian’s sadder, angrier, colder, his guard up even as he manages to smile and talk about both the old days and the new despite the messy way things ended, despite the yelling and screaming and barbs thrown and doors slammed and shards of shattered hearts left all over cass’s front stoop as tris drove away, tires squealing.

the most painful indication to tristan that they are no longer the same is that he knows they’re keeping things from each other. that’s something they never would have done before, in school or after, when they told each other absolutely everything without reservation, friends before lovers, trusting nobody in the world quite as blindly as each other. now, tristan talks about his music ; he leaves out the fact that every love song his last album was written about cassian himself just like the two albums before that, the frustrations he feels about his manager’s continued efforts to introduce pr relationships into his life for exposure, the way a too-big part of him regrets all of it and wants to run away and show up at cassian’s door and hide with him for the rest of his life. cassian talks about working in the shop, about how nothing ever changes, about how it hasn’t so bad after all to stay here ; he doesn’t mention prison or maarva’s death — both of which tris certainly heard about secondhand — or the rumors tris knows must swirl around him each time he releases new music. ( after all, small towns cling to any whisper of scandal with white knuckles, and their fated love story, the way tris climbed from reviled street rat to the pride of ferrix while cass took the opposite trajectory, is certainly an interesting enough topic for sunday brunch. ) those omissions have carved holes in him since the conversation began, no matter how he tried to cling to how almost normal it all felt, and in this moment — when cass delivers that line ( “ nostalgia is a mind’s trick. ” ) with a little extra sharpness, a little extra defensiveness, and tristan watches in his eyes as any part of the wall he momentarily deconstructed flies hastily back up — it all comes crumbling down, leaving tristan’s throat dry and tight and his fingers too tight around his pint glass. he’d ventured to talk about their fishing trips, how much he missed dropping off the map for a day or two without a care in the world, how sometimes he hiked up into the mountains to get away from it all but it was never quite the same — all dangerously close to a confession of missing cassian himself, which should have been the most obvious thing in the world and yet neither of them will acknowledge it. it had clearly been the wrong thing to say.

“ sure, ” tris answers flatly, sipping off his beer, his shoulders drawing in slightly, as though trying to withdraw. “ whatever you need to tell yourself, cassian. you’ve always been phenomenal at that. ” it’s unnecessary, too defensive, and some voice of reason deep inside of him urges him to let it go, to move on before anything escalates. latching on to a single comment and firing back, letting himself get worked up instead of smoothing it over, would lead to nothing productive, his rational mind rightly says. the only purpose it would serve would be to channel some of that anger still living in him, rotting daily in his tainted chest of memories of his childhood, almost all of which are just cassian, cassian, cassian, over and over again. unfortunately, tristan has never excelled at listening to the voice of reason. “ why bother asking me to get a drink with you then, if I’m just some mind’s trick to you at this point? we haven’t seen each other in years, all we have is nostalgia. ” he fights to keep his hand from shaking, grabbing the rest of the well whiskey shot that came with his lager and throwing it back. he’s already four deep, so what can another hurt? perhaps he shouldn’t have had a drink at all and this could have been avoided — but frankly, he’s tortured by enough what ifs in his life that he can’t be bothered to add another. his throat squeezes again and he fights against it with feral determination. the last goddamn thing he’s going to do is let cassian see him shed one more single goddamn tear over him. “ that’s fucked up, you know? I was hoping we could be adults about this and at least try to talk and reconnect and maybe be okay, which is pretty fucking generous considering who broke up with who here, but fuck me, right? that’ll show me for trying to be mature. ”