#but even when it does work so well and bobby believes he’s the luckiest person ever to get looked after by someone like beau it’s still

[loverboydotcom]

my brain is mush so i cant write prose but do know that i as usual am thinking about best friend dynamics and caretaking dynamics, and the way they integrate in beau and bobby’s relationship arc, and what it means to not just require increasing levels of daily care but to receive it from the person who’s always been your peer, the same guy you grew up with and experienced teenagehood and adolescence with, and now you need him in a vulnerable way you never expected to need from anyone, and how them being best friends shapes that caretaking dynamic in both positive and negative ways, but ultimately in the end it integrates with that friendship and deepens their bond in a way nobody could understand but just them

[tangledstarlight]

good, bad or the space between (maybe i’m all three)

i just got a lot of thoughts and feelings about luke implying (twice) that he’s possibly going to hell??? and like i’m not sure what this is, i started it at 3am once and it got out of hand and also doesn’t really have a conclusion?? but okay.

luke thinks he’s a bad person, then he starts thinking about fate and destiny and soulmates and his thoughts spiral from there. but alex and reggie are there to try and help slow them down.

trigger warnings!! swearing, mentions of death (cos they’re ghosts) 

also on ao3

The thing is, Luke didn’t think he was a bad person. Not really.

He’s never killed someone, never gone out of his way to hurt someone, never purposely broken the law. But he’s also never gone out of his way to be a good person either. His homework was always handed in late, he never hesitated to jump into a fight if someone else started it, he definitely stole a candy bar from the corner shop when he was ten and never told anyone.

He’d always sort of considered himself neutral. That he’d have time to work on being a better person (because he was seventeen and dying really wasn’t high on his list of worries) after the band got signed and they were touring the world.

And then they’d died and became ghosts.

And suddenly everything that he’d been putting off – thanking bars who gave them a chance, dropping a few dollars into donation buckets, going home, talking to his mom, his dad, making things right – was off the table. He’d missed his chance.

There’s a moment, a brief few seconds after they first land back in the studio and Julie is running, screaming, from them, where he thinks maybe being not a good person but not a bad person in life means you end up as a ghost forever.

But then he looks over at Alex and at Reggie and they’re the best people he knows. They don’t have a bad bone between them, they’re always kind and polite and caring and just good people. If anyone deserves to go to a happy peaceful afterlife it would be Alex and Reggie.

That starts a second brief moment of panic in Luke’s brain. Because did he rob them of a peaceful afterlife as well as being responsible for robbing them of life? The street dogs had been his idea after all, he’d said they were probably fine, he’d lead them right into death.

The thought haunts him, pokes at him, follows him around until someone mentions the idea of unfinished business and he lets out a breath.

He might have been indirectly responsible for their deaths but at least he wasn’t the reason they were ghosts. It was a small comfort.

Small, because while Luke is pretty sure he deserves this limbo, in between, half-life that they’ve been dumped in, he doesn’t think Alex and Reggie do. They suffered and survived so much in life, they shouldn’t have to deal with more pain in the after. And he’d give anything to change it.

But they were still dead and it was still partly his fault and they still don’t know what their unfinished business is and now there was Julie.

Julie with her voice of an angle and warm smile and afterlife saving hugs and understanding eyes when he tells her that he misses his mom. Julie, who makes him want to live and to be a good person. But he’s already dead and honestly, does being a good person in your afterlife even make a difference?

She makes him feel more alive now that he’s dead then he did when he was alive which is just. It’s not something he really wants to get into because this was all just going to end badly anyway. Right?

Because he’s dead. He can’t change that. And being here, with Julie, being with her every chance he gets, Luke is pretty sure that’s selfish of him. They’re going to – hopefully – move on one day and the boys will go somewhere better and he’ll go – wherever it is people like him go and Julie will be left alone.

A good person wouldn’t fall in love with someone they knew was going to be hurt in the end, would they? Surely a good person would stop it now, when it was new and undefined and still unspoken. They’d stop it before it just ended in heartbreak and pain. Luke didn’t mind taking on all that pain but Julie didn’t deserve any of it.

They were the ones who fell into her life, he was the one who’d gotten them killed, so Luke should be the one to take on all the fallout.

But he was selfish. He wasn’t a good person, and maybe it made him a bad person. But all he wanted to do was spend every second he could get with her. Even though he knew it was just going to end badly. He couldn’t stop himself.

A part of him, a small, selfish, clinging to any little bit of hope, part him wondered if soulmates were real. If maybe, just maybe this wasn’t destined to be a tragedy like so much else in his life.

“Do you believe in soulmates?” The question falls from his mouth before he can stop it. They’re at the beach, outside what used to be Reggie’s house and Alex has just finished rambling about Willie with this hopeless little smile on his face and he can hear the waves crashing and, if he closes his eyes he can almost pretend this is twenty-five years ago.

“What, like ‘there’s only one person in the world for you’ kind of soulmates?” Alex asks, head tilting to look at him and Luke shrugs, Reggie propping his head up on his hands as he rolls over in the sand.

“Yeah. And like, fate and destiny and all that shit,” because he’s been thinking about it a lot lately.

Luke had never really given fate or destiny much thought before. When they were alive that is (just another one of the things he’d put off because there was supposed to be more time). But now he was dead and a ghost and well, it gave him a lot of time to think about things he hadn’t before.

They were kind of cool concepts, fate and destiny and soulmates, something he could make a song out of one day maybe, but he’d never really considered them real. Because if he did, then he had to think about how it was his fate to die at seventeen, and how he was never destined to make it big with his band, and how maybe he needed to die to find his soulmate twenty-five years later and how there might be some big powerful entity out in the world just waiting for him to slip up and ruin everything.

He was pretty good at ruining things and peoples lives. If he was to have a superpower, Luke thinks that would be it.

“I don’t know, never really thought about it.” Alex frowns like this has opened a door to thoughts he’d never considered before and Luke bites his lip, because the last thing he wanted was to send Alex on a thought spiral. Because of course he has, because Luke is good at doing the wrong thing.

“I hope it’s real,” Reggie buts in before Luke can come up with something to say to Alex, and both of them turn to look at him with surprise.” I just think it’s nice, y’know? That there’s someone out there for everyone, that there’s someone out there who will get you, even if you don’t get yourself. And it sucks that maybe we’ve missed that, being, y’know, dead,” now Reggie is frowning, fingers of one hand digging into the sand and from the corner of his eye Luke can see Alex open his mouth about to say something when Reggie looks up at them, a smile on his face.

“But maybe we didn’t miss it. Maybe we had to die, y’know? Like it was part of some bigger plan. We had to die because someone knew that Julie would need us and that Alex had to meet Willie and that the 90’s just weren’t the right time for us. And that all this is fucking fate and it’ll make sense one day. Better than thinking we died eating street dogs for no reason, anyway.”

Alex seems to be caught on the way Reggie has pointed out Willie specifically for him, and if it was any of time Luke would probably tease him for the way his cheeks had gone pink. Seeming to notice it too, Reggie directs his attention to Luke, giving their drummer a chance to wrangle his thoughts.

“Do you? Believe in it all, I mean.”

“I don’t know,” Luke shrugs, brows furrowing as he looks out at the sea and the horizon and the sky that’s slowly turning purple as the sun sets. “I think if soulmates are real then Julie’s probably mine.”

When he doesn’t get any response to his declaration he pulls his eyes away from the horizon to find Reggie nodding at him and Alex raising an eyebrow like what he hasn’t just said is absurd or wrong. Don’t they get it? Frowning, Luke tries again.

“Which is bad, y’know? Because she’s– well she’s Julie. And she deserves like, the fucking best and I just ruin everything. All I’ve got is my music, the stuff I can write and even Bobby took that from me so, I mean, I’ve not even really got that. Plus I’m like, the whole reason we died and probably part of why we’re stuck here as ghosts and honestly if soulmates are real then someone is being really shitty to Julie by making me hers. I know I’d be the luckiest guy in the world but – being stuck with me? Pretty fucked up. It’s not like I’m a good person or anything, y’know?”

Alex is gaping at him now, head shaking slowly and Reggie has gone unnaturally still, hands full of sand curling into fists. Luke just frowns, not sure what’s wrong with them.

“That’s – okay, yeah no,” Alex starts, mouth opening and closing a few times as he tries to come up with something. “So much of what you just said is so wrong I don’t– I don’t even know where to start.”

“Luke. You’re not the reason we died. You know that, right?” Reggie asks and oh.

Luke had thought they’d known. The street dogs were his idea, he’d not stopped them when Alex had pointed out they tasted funny, he’d not gotten them help quick enough after the first time Reggie threw up.

“It was my idea to get street dogs that night. I basically walked us right into it.”

“No.”

And Luke has never heard Reggie sounds so sure of something then that single little word.

“You didn’t kill us man, the battery acid soaked hotdogs and pickles killed us. The food that we all ate willingly. You didn’t force it down our throats.” Reggie looks pained as he says it, like he’s reliving the moment all over again, but his eyes are focused solely on Luke’s and it takes him a moment to realise that he’s in pain because of what Luke’s been thinking, not because of their painful deaths.

“None of this is your fault. If any of us are to blame for dying and being ghosts and all the other shit then it’s like, it’s equal blame on all three of us. Though the guy who sold us the food is probably the one really at fault here,” Alex muttered the last part, lips pulling into a small grimace.

“But–” Luke starts, only to be cut off by Alex smacking a hand over his mouth and okay. Kinda rude.

“Nuh uh, no more talking from you until it’s positive things.”

“Dude, it’s shit. We died, it was shit. We almost died again, even more shit. But we didn’t,” Reggie snaps his fingers in Luke’s face, as if to punctuate his point, “And yeah, we don’t really get this whole ghost existence thing, and apparently no one else does either, we’re clearly special like that. But that doesn't mean it’s a bad thing. It’s our second chance.”

“You deserve a second chance at life just as much as we do,” Alex says, hand still covering Luke’s mouth even as he looks him right in the eyes and he really hates how they both seem to know exactly what he’s been thinking.

Even if he still thinks they’re wrong. Because Luke, what did he ever do in life that made him worthy of a second chance? Of getting to still be with his best friends, his family? Or getting to meet Julie? Of getting a chance to finally touch his dream?

“Do you think we don’t deserve a second chance?” Reggie asks and Luke can feel his eyes widen even as he shakes his head quickly, a muffled ‘no’ making it past Alex’s hand and he’s seconds away from turning into a five year old and licking it when Alex finally takes it away.

“What!? No! Of course you guys deserve this! After all the crap that you put up with when you were alive the universe owed you a second chance. You two deserve like, the gold standard of an afterlife.” Why don’t they understand that?

“Then why is it so hard for you to understand that we think the same about you? That you deserve a gold standard afterlife too. With us. With Julie.” Reggie has grabbed his hands, Luke’s not sure when he did that. Or when Alex moved so he was sitting so close their legs were pressed together, no space between them.

“I– I don’t–” Luke tries to to say something, anything. But he doesn’t have an answer, he doesn’t know why.

Because he’s always thought of himself as not being a bad person, but not being a good person, of being neutral and thinking he’d have time to figure it all out later. And now he’s head and his best friends are holding him and telling him he’s not guilty of second hand murder and–

He lets out a shuddering breath, shoulder shrugging helplessly as he looks between them both.

“I’m not to blame?” Idly, from a far away point in his mind, he noticed how small his voice sounds. How it could almost get lost in the crashing of waves.

“No. Not for anything that happened to us.” Reggie squeezes his hands.

“But I’m not– I– I didn’t do anything in life that made me a good person. I fucked up so much stuff, my parents I–” he trailed off, eyes going a little unfocused.

“We were seventeen Luke. We were kids, and we were meant to have like, a whole lifetime to fix the stuff we broke. You didn’t do anything worse than me and Reg, which means you deserve to be happy just as much as we do.”

Luke nods at the words, lets them settle in his mind. Tries to absorb what they’re saying. Tries to believe it the same way they seem to. He’s not sure he’ll ever be able to, but he can at least try.