I would start a riot

In the Balance ~ May 2015

"'It's better than the actual show'," Ant read out, trailing behind a slightly exasperated Stephen. The crew lining the corridors as they prepared for the show smirked knowingly at what was going on. All day, Ant had been waiting for the right time to start dropping in some of the tweets he'd saved the night before and it hadn't taken long for Stephen to catch on and play into his own mock frustration.

"Piss off," Stephen said, unable to hold a laugh in. Then he stopped suddenly, causing Ant to almost crash into him and seemed to register what had just been said. "Actually, I'll take that one." Ant shoved him playfully and they began to walk again.

"Don't get ahead of yourself, nonsense," he grumbled, secretly pleased that it had got Stephen to smile.

As they reached the dressing room, Stephen stopped abruptly at the door again, mumbling, "Jesus Christ."

"What now?" Ant asked, joining him at the door and then starting to laugh. There was a printed-out sheet of similar tweets stuck to the door. Stephen lifted his gaze to the ceiling with faux melodrama and swatted Ant's arm.

"If this was you..."

"Not me, I swear," Ant said, still chuckling to himself as he skimmed over the page. There, front and centre, was one of the positive tweets about Dec that he'd saved, surrounded by nice ones for Stephen. He pointed at it and raised an eyebrow. "There's your culprit, Stevie."

Stephen followed his finger, grinning lopsidedly as he read Dec's tweet of choice to put right in the middle. "'Dec is definitely my favourite'? Unbelievable!"

Ant watched his eyes flicker over the rest of them, the natural upturn of his mouth drooping slightly over time. He rested a hand on the younger man's back without thinking about it too much, his brain far too absorbed in his attempts to look after Dec and forgetting that this was Stephen. Stephen, who glanced away from the paper, his gaze dropping to Ant's arm with a slight look of surprise but not saying anything.

"It's nice to read it," he said eventually, forcing himself to smile unconvincingly. Ant remained patiently quiet. "It's just – seeing them like this means there's bad stuff too. And I know there's bad stuff because there always is but... it's really bad at the moment, isn't it?"

"You're better off reading the edited highlights right now, I'm not going to lie to you," Ant said at first, trying to spin any of this mess into something reassuring. That felt impossible though. "It's important you do get to see the positives though because there are a lot of positives. We just know how the negatives would make you feel."

"We?" Stephen's expression stuttered for a moment and his eyes flashed protectively as he seemed to catch up to the implications of the joke left pinned to the dressing room door. "Dec read through the rest of it?"

"He curated this selection from the things I sent him," Ant corrected swiftly, not needing to be psychically in tune with the other man to see his thought process. The idea of Dec reading their own Twitter feed at the moment made Ant feel quite ill as well.

"It doesn't hurt you to read that stuff about him?" Stephen asked after some time, the unspoken 'about me' hanging in the air.

Ant found himself smiling sadly, patting his back one more time and then withdrawing. "Of course it does." He sighed, resting his hand on the door handle and preparing himself to be more upbeat for the sake of Dec as he sat in their dressing room. "It's a different sort of hurt, Steve."

Stephen's gaze wandered again, something cryptic and indecipherable behind his expression. Ant had never realised quite how emotive the other man could be, if you paid attention to the small flickers, although he couldn't often figure out what those emotions were.