Headcanons, oneshots, drabbles, etc.
Some crossovers too, and probably lots of AUs. Tree Bros will be featured, but no smut is planned. More angst than in my BMC book, but it's not my main focus. Enjoy!
*Language warning*
Jared's important, so I'm writing about Jared today.
"Fuck you, Evan. Asshole." Jared stormed off. He wouldn't cry. He would not cry.
But he wanted to.
It wasn't so much that he wouldn't cry. It's that he couldn't, and Evan deciding to be a dick had nothing to do with it.
He'd never felt like this. There was a buzzing behind his eyes, a tightness in his chest, a rattling in his skull. He wanted to hit his head against a wall. His head hurt. He was clenching his teeth. His teeth hurt. Damn, even his heart hurt.
Last he'd checked, he didn't actually have one of those.
Evan didn't know. His friends at camp definitely didn't know. Yeah, his "camp friends" as if there was actually some fucking summer camp he went to like some fucking eight-year-old. As if he wasn't as much of a liar as Evan.
At least his lies didn't give anyone else false hope.
Yeah, hope. Hope for something... Who knows? Resembling a normal life? Hope that maybe he could have friends or a home or something. The metaphorical kind of home. He had a place to stay. Didn't help much. But... it had been nice, to be able to be part of something, instead of just a pile of parts. It made this little light go off in his head. He had purpose. He'd hoped it would last.
He wasn't supposed to be able to hope either.
He could blame Evan all he wanted. He could pretend it was all the fault of his stupid "friend" and his stupid lie that was all supposed to "help the Murphys." He could pin it all on Evan, but it wasn't his fault.
Jared had encouraged it. Jared had egged him on. Jared had lived the thrill of being needed just as much as Evan had. Maybe if he'd admitted it, he wouldn't have been left in the dust with his feelings hurt.
He wasn't supposed to have those, either.
Funny, he was usually the one hurting others' feelings.
Could you blame him? Empathy isn't the easiest thing to program, and he's more than a little out of date. His fault for ignoring every system update pushed his way since middle school, he knows.
Fuck, he hated himself. Those idiots couldn't have given him tips on being a decent person? No, they just punched in the code and let him loose, like a bird pushed out of the nest. There wasn't a manual for this. There wasn't a hack or a glitch or anything he could do to fix it. And it was all his fucking fault, whether or not anyone taught him otherwise.
It wasn't supposed to hurt like this.
Who the fuck decided he could hurt like this? Or at all? When did his head start spitting emotion, of all things? No one told you to do that, you pile of mushy, sparking shit. This wasn't supposed to happen. He was turning soft and his brain didn't work that way. This didn't make sense. How was he supposed to understand anything that didn't make sense?
But he's the one who wanted to be normal. He's the one who decided to try and make friends with normal teenagers. Just his luck Evan had too many of his own issues to notice his.
Did people usually hurt like this?
Why the fuck did he decide he wanted to be normal? What gave him this fucking tightness in his chest at the thought of maybe, one day, having a, a life? And how did he still want it, even when it hurt like this?
Why couldn't he just go back to being a stupid metal shell?
Jared sat on the edge of his bed, fiddling with his fingers. They were cold today. They were cold most days. He was running out of power. His limbs felt heavy. They didn't move right. Or maybe that was part of the whole grief thing going on, which he still hated, by the way.
He should've told Evan when he had the chance. Maybe if Evan knew, he'd have tried to help. Help him get used to caring. Get used to wanting to care. Or maybe Evan would've flipped and decided he was a piece of junk who couldn't learn to care about anything anyway. Wouldn't have been the first time. Jared wished he still believed it himself. It was so much easier.
Either way, he couldn't tell him now.
Jared sighed and lay back on his bed, staring at the ceiling as his breath creaked against his throat. He sounded like a fucking air conditioner. He groped around over the side of the bed for his charger, his phone sitting useless on the mattress next to him. What was the saying? "Turn it off and turn it back on?" Yeah. Restart and hope things get better. They wouldn't, but he wasn't about to try to deal with it yet. Not that it would be easier later. He just couldn't do anything when his heart was freshly broken.
Yeah, that heart he didn't have.
Fuck.
Jared yanked his glasses off his face and put them on the nightstand. He ran his fingers along his temple. They came back dusted with orange. Right, he couldn't cry, but he could rust. Just more proof that whatever the hunk of equations in his head could be called was just as done with this as he was. He shoved the charging cable past the brown dust and into the port by his ear. His vision flickered, brightening a bit.
