#you can't tell me she wouldn't have the worst bedhead

[kinschi]

comfort character

[bropunzeling]

can u do a scene of the soulbond fic from matthew's pov?

ok anonymous maggie i know you gave me suggestions but im ignoring them so here is the scene where leon's mom comes home the first time in the 2022 timeline:

When Matthew wakes up, he wants to puke.

That part isn't new. Matthew has wanted to puke for at least forty-eight hours, if not longer. Like the world's worst case of the flu. It's ebbed and flowed. The worst was that first practice, when he'd passed out in the locker room, woken up in a trainer's room, and threw up directly into a trash can. Since that moment, he's managed to hold it together enough to book a ticket, make his way through the airport, switch flights in New York. The trans-Atlantic flight was bad, though. By the end of it, the flight attendants were giving him worried looks. His transfer in Heathrow was the first time he'd managed to keep anything besides water down.

The next thing he feels is cold, shivery. That part is new. Matthew doesn't often run cold.

He opens his eyes, blinking blearily. He's in a bed, one that's only vaguely familiar. The covers are messed up, half undone; no wonder he's freezing. There's an indent, though, where someone had been.

Leon. Where Leon had been. Where Leon had been when he'd said, I'll be here when you wake up.

Matthew pushes himself up slowly, his gut churning from the loss of connection and from something else, that feels more like fear. That fear courses through his body as he swings his way out of bed and gets to his feet. Leon picked him up, but maybe now he's regretting it. Maybe he's going to come back through that door and tell Matthew to pack it out. Maybe Matthew should leave himself. Yes, the past two days have been awful, but he could probably manage it if he had to go back. It wouldn't be the worst thing he's ever done; only close to it.

Now that he's standing up, he can hear voices through the door, muffled and indistinct. One of them he knows, though, even if he can't hear the words; he knows it as surely as he knows his own.

Matthew takes a few steps closer to the door. Pushes down the handle and slips out.

In the hall, Leon is talking to someone - a woman, middle aged. Leon's mom, whose name is on the tip of his tongue - but that part isn't important to his sleep-addled brain, to the worry and fear and sickness in his stomach. The important part is the person a few feet ahead of him. The familiar span of Leon's shoulders, the mess of his bedhead. The connection between them growing more and more taut, reeling Matthew in as surely as a tow line, the same way it has for years.

"Leon?" Matthew asks.

Leon turns around, eyes wide as he blinks. "Oh," he says. "Um - Matthew, this is my mom, Sandra. Mom, this is - Matthew Tkachuk."

Matthew has to fight back a yawn, even though he knows it's impolite. He wishes, abruptly, that he was meeting Leon's mom under different circumstances. That this was on purpose, instead of what it is - Matthew's own body betraying him, the insistent and ever present demand for Leon's presence undercutting everything else.

Well, there's no point now in wishing for different. Matthew's here, and he's going to have to make the best of it. "Hi," he says, shaking Sandra's hand. "Nice to meet you. Sorry for intruding."

"Any friend of Leon's is welcome," she says.

"Thank you," Matthew says. "I really am sorry," he adds.

"You should go to bed," Leon says. Matthew looks over his shoulder at him, but Leon is frowning. Hard to know what that means. "You look like shit."

Matthew flips him off, mostly by rote. He's such an asshole.

As he steps back, though, he passes within inches of Leon. Immediately, his stomach calms, his head stops pounding. The side of his body closest to Leon already feels warmer. Pathetic, but. So it goes, when it comes to Leon.

And that, maybe, is why Matthew can't think about leaving. That, maybe, is why instead of offering to get out of here, he heads back into Leon's room, into Leon's bed, curling into the indent Leon left behind, and tries his hardest to go back to sleep.