From The Start (George Daniel/Matty Healy)

4: these chapters are getting long as fuck but i have no regrets

He knew that it was a gradual fade: the changing of states of consciousness, slowly falling asleep, and slowly waking up again, both in such a matter that it was pretty much impossible to pinpoint the exact moment when you stopped being asleep and started being awake again. It was just that a lot of the time, things didn't feel like that; he felt drowned out, washed away downstream as everything happened far too fast around him and left him choking for air and struggling to stay afloat.

Waking up that morning came as a very sudden moment. The morning after Matty had let it happen, let things fall into place around him, placing his trust in George - George who seemed to look at him and indeed understand like not much had happened between them at all, as if four months had evaporated into thin air, but of course, the thing was that life didn't really work like that.

Waking up came with sudden realisation, with his heart pounding in his chest, cold sweats, and his head pounding against his skull: his whole body seeming to scream at him from the inside.

There was the dropping sensation in his stomach - regret, confusion, a mess of everything and a struggle to breathe as he pulled himself away from George, who lay still soundly asleep on the sofa. Matty was just able to make his figure out amidst the thick blanket of darkness that had fallen over, and eventually smothered his living room. He desperately wanted to reach for the light switch, to fill the world with the comforting warm glow of yellow light: a falsified sense of safety to bide him by until the sun rose back over the horizon once more, but he couldn't do so as to not wake George up in all of this.

Getting George's attention was the last thing he wanted to do in all of this; he'd already done too much, he'd already let him get too involved. He'd fucked up - he could see that now, somehow, through the pounding of his head and his heart that seemed to encompass and swallow his body whole.

He was fucked. So fucked. And he'd let this all happen, because this was always his downfall - getting too close to people, letting them understand him, letting them hurt him, letting them use the deepest corners of his mind and his most guarded secrets against him. Last year, he'd made the mistake of thinking that George was different, but he certainly wasn't going to let himself make that mistake again.

He'd gotten comfortable with the idea of everything, eating dinner together, going out together, talking, laughing, and falling asleep together, and to repeat something exactly and to expect different results the next time around was the kind of insanity that Matty needed to push himself away from.

He'd let George get comfortable with the idea of them again - let him think that he could fix this, and that putting him back together in his own image would be a good idea, because Matty knew that he was more than what George saw of him, and as much as he wanted things to be okay, and as much as George mattered, with the deep kind of ache at the bottom of his heart, he wasn't the entire world, and it was of course how they'd gone wrong last time. Matty had given too much to him, let George take too much away, let him redefine him in his own image, let Matty adjust, and let Matty fall, as trust crumbled, as trust always did, because promises lasted only in people's heads, and not in reality.

Matty made it across the darkened living room as quietly as he could, shaking all over as he pulled open the bathroom door and locked himself inside: reaching for the light and falling down to his knees against the wall as the room was illuminated around him.

The harsh white glow of the light was cruel to his eyes, and sent a piercing sensation too his head: it was too bright, it was too much, especially intertwined with the mess and the headache of it all that he was yet to sort out. Yet, he found solace in the fact that he was alone, solace in the light, solace in the locked door between him and the rest of the world, he was safe here, even if just temporarily, because he couldn't trust George like he wished he could. He couldn't trust anybody, not really.