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Yazzmatazz69 is live: Imma Live Forever - The Reaction! 

“Dude. This sucks.”

Yasper is shaking his head incredulously. “Can you believe it? This is like if Tom Cruise started singing, hit every note wrong and died in a massive explosion of glitter."

“Or got a bedazzled tattoo and ten Maseratis instead of making another Top Gun movie,” Aniq mumbles out of the microphone's range. “You could do this a million times better.”

Something deep inside Yasper twitched affectionately, but also in a yeah, you’re damn right kind of way that hurt all his failed aspirations and wounded him permanently. He could have been big, hitting the numbers Xavier was with this ex-boyband schtick that well, for the person who tripped on his own feet every day of high school for three and half years, felt a little disingenuous. Everything was a pretense for him.

For Yasper, music was truth. Ska spoke for the people, not the pizzazz. This sort of meaningless drivel, it didn’t help anybody but Xavier and whatever corporations were currently leeching off his popularity, and oh yeah, he’s streaming, he should probably be saying all this out loud, huh? 

“This is a classic ‘I’m so great’ song with a sprinkle of ‘look at how rich and famous I am’ added in. Well guess what—being rich and famous isn’t all that impressive when your daddy bought you your first record deal, okay?” 

Yasper hits play again on the music video. It’s all smoke and lights and extremely obvious brand deals. It’s not anything like when they started making music together, just because they could, just for fun. Or because they had something they actually wanted to say to the world, lyrics they’d written that were total garbage but came from the heart nonetheless. Back then, writing music felt like a science experiment, and anything that worked felt like a discovery rivaling penicillin. But Xavier must really be a different person, because the Eugene he knew would never put his name on such formulaic four-chord pop bullshit. 

“It’s pretty funny that it starts at a funeral,” Yasper scoffs. “Considering his career will probably die off once his fifteen minutes of fame are up.”

Aniq, sighing more to himself than to the other, hits a button again. A flashy ‘legal disclaimer—all opinions are the user’s own and are not intended to be libelous in nature’ comes across the screen, hovering slightly above Yasper’s nose, where his eyebrows are knitted together. Between the furrowed expression is a deep-seated, barely burrowed pessimism, one that has grown since high school and rarely dissipated in the years since. When it shows its face, peeking out as a green monster running off personal envy, Aniq is usually there to bring him back to center. But the views are going up, steadily increasing, and he hovers there in a curious silence.

“Look, I’m not saying most people want to push him off a balcony,” Yasper crosses his arms. “Just that if somebody were to do it, would the police really arrest them? Or would they give them a round of applause, and possibly a standing ovation?”

Comments are pinging up in the chat, various shades of ‘wow, this guy is salty’ and ‘are you threatening murder? Can you do that on here without getting banned?’ that he cannot help but bitterly acknowledge.

“It’s a joke, people,” Yasper entertains them with a dramatic roll of the eyes, “All I’m going to do is beat him at the 2024 Grammy Awards with a meaningful power ballad.”

The comments are flying by at a million miles an hour now, almost too quickly to read. The view counter is higher than Yasper’s ever seen it in his life. If it gets high enough, Xavier might be forced to make a response video—he may be a pop star with all kinds of awards to his name, but he’s still a YouTuber, and he still has to follow its unspoken rules. Somehow, that asshole manages to appease the algorithm (and his audience of twelve-year-olds) with daily uploads, mostly horrendous prank videos, apologies when they inevitably go wrong, and vlogs showing off how rich and successful he is. 

Yasper’s videos are art, not just capital ‘c’ for Content. They’re skits that take hours of preparation and editing (shoutout to Aniq for all his hard work in that department), as well as covers and original songs. He pours so much of himself into those that he always feels empty and a bit light-headed for a few days afterwards (of course, also shoutout to Zoë for her beautiful album covers and thumbnails). Yasper doesn’t upload nearly as often, and his videos are short, but he makes enough to carve out a nice little life for himself, Aniq, and Zoë, and he probably could be satisfied with that if he was someone else. 

But Yasper’s always been a Shakespearean tragedy waiting to happen, and his fatal flaw will always be falling in love with the wrong person his ambition. There’s a hole inside him somewhere, a leak that’s sprung in his tattered soul, so that he can never be content with a nice, simple, mediocre life. Yasper doesn’t generate his own warmth—he needs to feel it in the stage lights that shine on his face and the hugs of his many adoring fans. He doesn’t care if he burns bright, hot, and quick, doesn’t care what happens when the fire goes out and he’s left a pile of smoldering ashes. He’s so cold he’s lost feeling in his extremities; he needs to set ablaze just to feel how hot it can burn.

And just as quick as he came, he’ll disappear in a cloud of smoke. A perfect ending to a perfect performance. Not even he knows who he really is anymore.

“‘Why do you hate this guy so much?’” he reads. “I think there’s plenty of reasons to hate Xavier without there being some mysterious backstory between us.” He pauses, resolves to leave it at that, then continues anyway. “But there is a mysterious backstory between us; we went to high school together. I don’t want to get into everything he did because it involves other people, but let’s just say he’s been using his privilege to the detriment of others for a long time.”

The chat goes wild at that, full of conspiracies, speculations, and rabid people foaming at the mouths for drama. Humanity hasn’t changed, not really. It’s the same crowds that used to gather for gladiator fights and public executions, still watching for blood to spill. 

And Yasper, well…who is he but to give it to them? That’s showbiz, baby.

“His whole life is handed to him on a silver play button platter,” he shrugged. “But I do have to say that to user xxPotionBabyxx, it’s not demonic blood sacrifices or satanic rituals for fame. We don’t even have time to go into why that plays into harmful tropes about—” he’s cut off by Aniq flailing his hands wildly, trying to distract him from the golden screen showing all the riches and attention he’s never quite seen in close reach. Or in this case, through a glowing monitor and backlit keyboard. His microphone is just as green but oh so bulky, and it’s his ticket to stardom, so why is Aniq even interrupting?

“I think you should stop,” the other whispers, cautious and eternally familiar with Yasper’s inability to stop running his mouth, even if it’s sometimes at a cost to those around him. “We’re gonna get hit with an NDA or something, Yas. We don’t need to have his legal team up in our emails.”

“Xavier’s lawyers would DM us, Aniq,” Yasper winks, but Aniq isn’t having it. The topic is too eerily, bone-chillingly close to the darkest time in his life, and no amount of YouTube pay is going to mend those wounds of what could have been. Yasper frowns. Aniq’s feelings were important, so much so that Yasper stops himself from continuing, at least for the time being. Also, he was probably right—scratch that. Aniq was always right. It’s part of his intuition, something that Yasper trampled over on a daily basis, his choices driven instead by impulses and horn instruments. He clears his throat.

“Okay, folks! My editor/legal team is telling me to tread lightly here, so let’s move on.”

The rest of the stream goes relatively smoothly, minus the occasional commentary that could be considered a threat. No copyright strikes on the video, no emails (or DMs) from Xavier’s legal team yet. Technically, the high school they all went to and Aniq’s court case are both public record. The videos of Ska-pe Diem are still up on YouTube, and Xavier has never taken any steps to get them deleted. But on that stream, Yasper was getting into some dangerous territory, talking about things they’d all silently agreed to leave behind. Nobody talks about the St. Patrick’s Day party.

Especially not around Aniq and Chelsea. They faced the brunt of it that day, both the social and legal ramifications, which somehow had given them a unique kinship of their own—Chelsea, who has a small yet loyal fanbase on TikTok consisting mostly of feminist Gen-Zers and podcast-watching, wine-toting housewives, occasionally calls Aniq up at their apartment late at night. Yasper, in his strained, always incessant thirst for gossip, tends to press an ear to the wall as he tries to make out what they say in the quiet of their personal vendettas and ashes of their extinguished dreams. It’s typically to no avail, as Aniq is the puzzle solver, and Yasper is too loud to hear himself think 99% of the time.

Also, he’s pretty sure the wall is made of cinderblocks. Except when he’s practicing music, because then, Aniq is made painfully aware that instruments do, in fact, make noise. He reminds Yasper every time to ‘keep it down,’ but mostly in a ‘I’m editing right now and need to focus,’ way rather than a ‘please shut up, you are a menace to society’ way. Maybe Yasper is embellishing what he thinks Aniq would say if he were not the single kindest, nicest human being alive despite everything that’s happened.

But Yasper is being hyperbolic again. It’s a recurring problem of his, but he’s a performer, he can’t help it. If art imitated life exactly, it would become painfully boring; it’s when you decide which details to exaggerate that things start to get interesting. No one knows that better than Yasper, who has mastered using the perfect string of words to get the most people to click a video the same way he knows how to piece together a song from disparate chords, rhythms, and notes. 

“Hey Yas?” Aniq asks, looking up from Twitter, concerned—never a good thing in their line of work. “Do you remember anybody named Walt? They’re claiming they knew us in high school and quote, ‘have all the tea.’” 

Yasper wracks his brain, trying to conjure the image of any other teenagers they might’ve shared classes with, but no one comes to mind. “Nah. Probably a clout-chaser. Does it look like people believe them?” 

Aniq taps on his phone for a few seconds. “No. His tweet only has two likes, and they’re both clearly sock puppet accounts. They have zero followers and only ever interact with his tweets to say stuff like ‘cool story Walt!’”

“Embarrassing.” 

Aniq gets started right away on editing together the highlights from the stream. There’s something incredibly domestic about this moment: Aniq sitting on the couch, staring at the computer on his lap with a look of careful concentration while Yasper is in the kitchen making dinner. And sure, the thing Aniq is working on is a YouTube video of Yasper screaming, and by ‘making dinner,’ Yasper really just means throwing a frozen lasagna into the oven, but it’s special to them, and there’s something about the ease with which they move around each other that makes his heart feel warm, and it’s not just because he accidentally turned the stove on. 

Zoë sends them a message that she’s on her way. She doesn’t need to be in the same room as them to design the thumbnail, but she says it helps to get instant feedback. Yasper almost shoots back that they’re about to eat dinner, that this isn’t a good time for them to be receiving guests, but he bites back the bile building up in the back of his throat and deletes the message. He retypes with a practiced friendliness, slips on the mask of the supportive best friend from where it rests on the hook next to that of the energetic YouTuber—a pantomime. 

Back in Shakespeare’s time, Aniq had once told him, people believed that all your emotions were created by an imbalance of humors in the body. They weren’t too far off, as far as medical science from the Renaissance Era goes. It’s all just a mess of chemicals up there anyway. But they believed that these four substances—black bile, yellow bile, phlegm, blood—they made you who you are. They’re responsible for everything. 

It’s all a bunch of bullshit, of course, made up by people who didn’t wash their hands and thought sticking leeches on bare skin was a good idea. But Yasper knows, deep down inside, he’s bursting with yellow bile, coming up his throat and seeping out of his pores, all ambition and dark jealousy and slowly-building anger, and isn’t it funny how yellow bile is associated with fire? 

“Yas,” Aniq’s voice harshly brings Yasper immediately out of the moment. His hand is wavering slightly over the dial on the stovetop, usually animated but now shaking, a quiver of uncertainty tempted by a smoldering fate. “Dude, you’re going to drop the lasagna.”

Yasper’s hand pulls back like the flame was actually there, even though it’s an induction system without any real, volatile element to call its home. “S-sorry, man.”

“Can you grab three forks?” Aniq brushes past him to take the warm plastic, all chemical waste and cellulose as he grabs it, the pads of his fingers touching the back of Yasper’s right knuckles. It’s a quick transfer for practicality, Yasper knows, but the flutter of digits is strangely intimate, and it twists in his gut as the sentence finally makes sense.

“You’re not going to split the lasagna with her again, are you?” his words lilt, still yellow and irritable. “You know she hates it.”

“One day, she will realize the greatness of our nightly fine dining experiences, and beg for our cuisine,” Aniq smiles, a fistful of napkins and high expectations. “Where else can you get food of this quality?”

Yasper opens his mouth in protest, but Aniq quickly swoops in to stop him while he can.

“And don’t say the grocery store.”

“Fine,” Yasper grabs the third fork anyway, because thankfully their dishwasher will deal with it rather than him personally, but it still means he might have to see a recreation of last time all over again. It was at one of their ‘team meetings’ (Yasper hates when Aniq calls them that, considering this is their third month with Zoë doing thumbnails and she’s amazing, and Yasper likes her, he always has—he just doesn’t like how much Aniq likes her) when Zoë, as nicely as possible, tried not to spit out the sugary red sauce and tasteless cheese on their carpet.

“Great,” she said, mouth full and eyes wide. “I-I love it.”

“You’re poisoning her,” Yasper sounded a little whiny, “She’s gonna die, Aniq, look. She’s in pain.”

“Okay,” Aniq playfully rolled his eyes. “Here. Take my napkin. We won’t look.”

“I didn’t realize I was in the presence of two gentlemen,” Zoë smirked, the words slightly obscured by the offending mush of noodles. She blushed, and they all lied because Aniq is laughing, mostly at her best attempts to be ‘lady-like’ or whatever, his eyes twinkling as she erupts in a matched fit of giggles. Meanwhile, Yasper is watching them, and like they don’t just have chemistry, they have Mr. Shapiro’s class chemistry, and he never wishes he looked away more in his entire life.

Yasper decides to himself that he now hates lasagna. Which is unfortunate, because he’s just spent the past few minutes vehemently defending the dish while holding a rather large pan full of it. 

Yasper sets the pan down on the kitchen table in lieu of good counter space. Their apartment isn’t particularly large—especially after transforming the living room into a recording studio—and kitchen space hadn’t really been a priority. Finding a decent place that would allow a tenant with a criminal record was really the main one. Whatever, those other places were lame anyway. How could they not see that Aniq was literally the sweetest, most compassionate person in the universe? How could they not look past a single (in Yasper’s opinion, completely justifiable) mistake he’d made just a few months after turning eighteen? If they’d known Eugene back then, they would understand. If they knew Xavier—well, they’d probably understand just the same.

There’s a polite knock on the door as Zoë arrives. Yasper shouts that it’s open, but Aniq, the gentleman that he is, opens the door for her anyway. She laughs at the way he gestures his arm inwards with a flourish, as though presenting their messy, marinara-scented apartment. She has to carefully step around the cameras, lights, microphones, and various wires they have managed to learn to expertly maneuver around as a part of their everyday routines. There’s a little part of Yasper that feels vindicated, as though she has failed some hidden test. Zoë is great, but her life isn’t as entangled together with Aniq’s as his, like the way the lines on a circuit board come so close but don’t quite touch. (And he should know; he’s spent a lot of time soldering them.) 

“So, boys,” Zoë smiles, radiant even against the room’s harshness. “I think I’m finally getting the ‘Yasper’ aesthetic down to a science.” That makes Yasper want to internally cheer, because what else could that mean other than flashy neons, excessive fonts and beautiful Photoshop skills? But then her last word brings him back to alchemical matters and academics, and he is trying, goddamnit, to concentrate.

“But,” she clicks her tongue, and Yasper hates when sentences dangle there like that because usually a ‘but’ turns into a ‘here’s the bad news’ situation in about three seconds. Aniq’s eyes go a little wide in anticipation, too. “I gotta say, Yasper. It was pretty ballsy to, uhm…go where you did.”

Uh oh. The thing-that-should-not-be-talked-about is being talked about. Sirens are going off in Yasper’s mind, emergency maneuvers and damage control mode activated, about to jump in for the best friend save when Aniq clears his throat. He sometimes does that when the topic of high school surfaces, when he’s reluctant to let the mood sour, spoiling like forgotten leftovers and missed opportunities.

Zoë raises a finger to signal their silence, begging for them to let her finish.

“Going off of that…” she shoots Aniq a look of reassurance. She hates bringing it up, it’s visible on her face, eyes welling with a quiet understanding. “This one came to me almost instantly—which doesn’t happen very often anymore. I even finished and got a nap in before I picked Maggie up from school.”

“Oh my god show us,” Yasper exhales, the words falling out in a single breath.

She pulls out the iPad, turning the screen brightness up and flipping it over for them to see.

Yasper’s expression in the image is exaggerated, to say the least. His one brow is raised, blown back in shock, while the other is downwards in a pained, borderline pissed glare towards the center of the composition. He can’t remember making that face, but it works, shooting metaphorical daggers and firing on all clickbaity cylinders. An insert of Xavier pulled from his ‘Imma Live Forever’ promo sits in the middle, transparent so the ‘X’ he’s forming with arms (and gold chains, ew) are against…a massive poop emoji? Yasper squints, taking in the well-placed eggplant symbol that’s also around him, followed by what must be the gaudiest WordArt ever known to man. The text says, ‘Why I REALLY hate Xavier,” and it’s such a lively green that it makes him notice the tiny puking man that Zoë included around a digitally-inserted halo. Everything together, wow, really drives the point home that Yasper may or may not have brought back all of their high school trauma and wished him dea—

“Uh…” Aniq looks at his friend, expecting outrage and disgust. “Yasper, what do you think?”

But Yasper has one of those cheesy, cartoon Las Vegas slot machine moments, with dollar signs and hearts popping up in place of his pupils.

“It’s so perfect, I could cry!” he takes the iPad from Zoë, pretending to parade it around in an emphatic dance of appreciation. “Zoë, you’ve truly outdone yourself, you beautiful human, you.”

“Oh?” even she looks surprised, hand raised to her chest. “That’s high praise coming from you.”

“All it needs is a title worthy of Yazzmatazz69,” he nods. “Like, ‘Finally Telling the Truth: My Imma Live Forever MV Reaction.’ Or ‘Ex-Friend Tells All: Imma Live Forever’s Hidden Messages?’”

Aniq is so close to giving up and calling it a night. His lasagna, barely touched, is getting cold.

“It should also have your name in it for SEO purposes,” he grumbles, deflated.

Maybe it’s the clickbait, or the drama, or simple luck, but the video goes even more viral than the stream did. Generally, Yasper’s videos get more views than his livestreams—it’s why he posts the highlights in the first place—but never before has one of them gone this viral. The comments are a bloodbath. His Twitter mentions are insane. His like-to-dislike ratio just teeters towards likes, and every piece of engagement only hypes him up more.

Spark, meet flame. 

It’s all a scramble of sorting through potential sponsors and partnerships, the bright colors of opportunity dancing in his peripherals, watching the numbers on his social blade tick up, up, up. They have a few meetings about where this might be headed, but it’s all short-term ideas on how to capitalize on the gold mine they’ve struck while the AdSense checks keep coming in. In the quiet moments, Yasper thinks he can see the avarice in his eyes, sharp teeth bearing in the reflection of a camera lens, but there are hardly any quiet moments, so it’s easy to ignore. 

Their next stream is lit by fancy ring lights that cast a soft glow on everything, and while it isn’t scripted, Yasper has planned exactly what he’ll reveal and what he’ll keep secret. There’s an excitement to the mystery—people are constantly theorizing on what might’ve gone down. Just a few hints that they might’ve had a band together, enough to let people find those old YouTube videos on their own. And maybe, a part of him thinks desperately, maybe that’ll lead them to check out his own originals on his channel, which have hardly had any uptick in views.

Yasper sits down in front of the camera, pushing a hand through his hair reflexively. Aniq stands by, checking the equipment carefully even though Yasper’s the one who always sets it up. “Before I start the stream,” he says, “Are you sure about this? I mean, the band meant a lot to both of you, do you really want to be digging up the past like that?”

“Aniq, come on, it’s what the people want!” Yasper replies, nonchalant to hide his nerves. Of course he isn’t sure. “Gotta give ‘em the ole Yazzle-dazzle, if you know what I mean.” 

“I do not know what you mean,” Aniq says, but he counts Yasper down anyway, and Yasper knows him well enough to know the hidden message inside–that Aniq is trusting him. 

“IIIIIIt’s Yasper time!” he shoots finger guns at the camera. “Your favorite ska-lebrity—that’s ska-celebrity, for the boring people—is back with another stream. I know, I know. I’ve read the comments. But Xavier might not be up to answering yet, guys?” he shrugs, playfully trying to direct his gaze to Aniq. “It means we have to go even harder, get even more views, to get the big shot’s attention. Maybe he’ll pencil us in enough for a collaboration video. Just like old times.”

Yasper winks, and Aniq is stiffening, he can feel his friend’s body tense even from across the room. A comment pings up saying ‘Ska-pe Diem, right?’ followed by a ‘dude, you need serious therapy’ and one that is actually a genuine question. He coughs, mulling over whether to give it attention just yet. But Aniq could use a victory right now, too—one a bit more sensational than a larger paycheck and watching from the sidelines for that light to go off, to rush his fingers across keys and write out minutes of captions.

“CulpIsaBlink1998 asked, ‘Who edits your stream highlights? Those are my favorite videos, even more than the livestreams, TBH.’ First off, you should like both equally, but uhm—” his eyes dart up. “That would be the lovely work of my best friend in the world, Aniq! He’s had my back for as long as I can remember. Seriously, the sweetest, mushiest little guy. I think he deserves a Nobel Peace Prize just for being alive. How can we make that happen? Is that something we can do with enough internet power?”

“Dude, what are you doing?” Aniq is massaging his temples, cringing from the attention even though he is thankfully, not yet on screen. “I thought you were talking about Ska-pe Diem today.”

“We’ll get to that,” Yasper whispers back. “Everyone, do you want to meet him? He’s kind of sort of my partner in this, honestly. Uh…both on YouTube and life, I guess—anyways! Aniq, come here, man. Say hi to the people inside my computer,” he begs, clasping his hands together with an exaggerated, protruding bottom lip that makes him look as puppylike as a man pushing forty possibly can.

“Fine,” Aniq relents, a small smile creeping up because as much as he denies it, Yasper can be convincingly adorable when he needs to be. “H-hi everybody…I’m Aniq, Yasper’s editor.”

The chat is going wild again, but for Aniq, not for the drama. “Look!” Yasper points, shit-eating grin and sparkly expression. “CulpIsaBlink1998 called you ‘adorkable.’ I didn’t know people actually said that.”

“This is embarrassing,” Aniq pulls at his shirt collar, the comments full of compliments, a few lingering hate messages towards Yasper (he really needs to hire a mod to kick those kinds of people), and, as they watch, a big sentence takes up the middle of the monitor from a notification.

Yasper gulps, because well, he does not have an AI set up to read those out, so he has to.

“DannerisDun has donated 5,000 Bits,” he is struggling. “Insert, quote-unquote, ‘are y’all dating? There’s some history here, for sure.’ Um, D-Danner, we’re just best friends, platonic bros, nothing more—” he notices a life raft that might also potentially lead to the demise of this moment, but he settles on taking that bet rather than dying of humiliation live on stream. “Yes, to answer that random person who I already forgot the name of, Aniq did go to high school with Xavier and I. But that’s hardly relevant, because—”

“Because I am leaving!” Aniq said with a rush of fake enthusiasm. “Guys, thank you for all the nice comments. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention our amazing thumbnail artist and designer, Zoë, whose work is far superior to me mashing two different clips together of Yasper screaming.”

“Actually, sometimes I’m singing,” Yasper points out, but he’s sweating differently now. It’s not a ‘do all they know I’m in love with him ’ sense of impending doom, but an awareness that what he did answer was in close proximity to the flames. The air is cool and breezy, but his skin is burning with regret. Instead of throwing himself under the bus to evade the uncomfortable feelings, he fed Aniq to the digital wolves. They would surely be taking this and running with it, plugging his name into the search engines for a connection. Thankfully, no one knew about the actual incident between them, and the records might not be digitally available, nor of any interest once Yasper drops the next conversational bomb on the viewers.

“Thank you, Aniq!” Yasper is pleading, a subtle apology under curled fingers. “Back to Ska-Pe Diem. Yes, you’ve heard the rumors, you might have seen the videos, but what you are missing is the Yazzmatazz69 live reaction video. Should we do a mukbang? Aniq, want to do a mukbang with me?”

“I’m good,” he looks disappointed. “...Do you want me to make lasagna or something?”

“I was gonna do it with this weird candy I got off the internet,” Yasper grabs a bag from the floor. “Some of it might contain illegal substances, but think of it like a life or death BeanBoozled. Could be fun, especially since my Yazzers—that’s what I’m calling them now—seem to love you, as they should.”

“I said I’m good,” Aniq grimaced. “I’m gonna go out and get some air.”

“Okay,” Yasper sighed, turning back to face the camera with manufactured gusto. Everything he rehearsed goes well, despite the continuous questions popping up in the chat about his relationship with Aniq. Yasper’s never been one to mind the (sometimes intense) attention of the internet, but there’s something that feels dangerous about this, he knows he’s playing with fire and people are already close to uncovering the truth. He accidentally cultivated an audience of sleuths and puzzle-solvers like Aniq, which is great because Aniq is awesome, but he can’t help but worry because while Aniq is smart, he can’t be objective when it comes to Yasper, and he’s somehow managed to remain oblivious. 

He sometimes feels like their relationship is this fragile, delicate thing, beautiful in the way teacups and glass ornaments are. They tiptoe around romance, a ballet of sorts, trying to balance a life that looks like dating but isn’t, that despite Yasper’s desperation can’t be sustained. They can’t live together forever. They can’t always share a life, not when Aniq wants to share his with someone else, and Yasper selfishly wants him all to himself. 

Still, it’s a dream despite the random, self-inflicted nightmares infringing on their success. “As always, thank you for watching. Make sure to check out my music, streaming on Spotify, Apple Music and SoundCloud—and, if you watch on YouTube, you’ll notice that the music videos are co-directed by my buddy Aniq! Remember, every time you listen, a future Xavier loses his dreams. Bye!”

By the time Yasper makes his way to the kitchen, there’s a pan of lasagna sitting on the table, perfect in all its familiarity. It’s probably too familiar at this point, but it’s got dairy and protein and carbs and tomato sauce counts as a fruit so that’s basically all the major food groups covered. From deeper inside the kitchen, where he’s digging out a cheap bottle of wine, Aniq asks, “How mad would you be if I cut myself out of this stream highlight?” 

“Noooo,” Yasper whines, “You can’t do that! The people love you, and they were all asking if Zoë takes commissions too. I mean, this could be great for you guys. Besides, I gotta give credit where it’s due. Teamwork makes the stream work!”

Aniq tries to give Yasper a look, but finds a smile slipping onto his face despite himself. 

“Alright,” he still has that slightly bashful face where his cheekbones, perched high and perfectly sculpted, just make Yasper truly, truly weak in the knees as the fixed stare between them ends. “I hope no one said anything weird. I’m thinking of getting Chelsea to mod your comments or something.”

Oh yeah, nothing much—just a lot of inquisitive minds who want to pry into the details of our dynamic and tell the whole world about my big, fat, decades-long crush on you . “‘Course not!” Yasper digs into the pasta, burning his tongue and witnessing his tired taste buds finally give up on life. “Ow.”

“You have to slow down,” Aniq sits next to him, resting a hand on the table and the other on his cheek in observance of the other’s characteristic impatience. “...Yas, do you really think Xavier is going to answer you?”

“Yes,” Yasper bounces the heat of the food around in his mouth in childlike ignorance of its temperature, trying not to give away to the other he’s right about waiting, and growing up, letting go, being an adult blah blah blah . “He won’t want to admit it to himself, but he still cares. If he didn’t, why would he be going around being famous with the name I told him to go with?”

“Because it’s his middle name?” Aniq raised an eyebrow.

“Because he owes me,” Yasper took another bite with ferocity, and wow, candy with a list of ingredients that you can barely make out and marinara is a strange combination in his stomach. “Anyways, no more about him. Big shot, you should capitalize on this, too! Picture this—a podcast.”

Aniq lets out a bewildered laugh at the suggestion, shaking his head and stopping in a freeze frame moment of brutal realization. “Wait. That wasn’t a joke?”

“No,” Yasper hesitates, arms crossed. “Just think about it. You wouldn’t even have to show your face.” It’d be a shame, because the listening audience might never get to witness Aniq’s collection of eccentric button-downs, or the rimmed glasses he wears sometimes when his contacts dry out, or how his thought process is visibly apparent when walking through any and all mental puzzles. Sometimes, when they do crosswords—ahem, when Aniq does the crossword and Yasper bounces around like he’s been shot out of a cannon, offering pop culture trivia when asked—Yasper will stop what he’s doing just to see his roommate’s endearing combination of squinting and attentiveness play out, facial muscles so keen on concentrating Aniq never notices how Yasper has slowed down, stress absent, breathing collected.

Yasper always manages to resume whatever his activities are before Aniq glances up. 

“Hm,” Aniq tilts his head to the side in thought, but definitely not the same ones that Yasper is having right now. “I guess it would be a nice way for Zoë and me to spend some time together. Maybe something could finally happen between us—you know, the right mood, a high-quality microphone, us appealing to the algorithm together. What’s more romantic than that?”

Oh yeah, Yasper sighs internally. With Zoë. Of course. Cool. “I could get you an audio recording setup within the week.”

“Thanks, Yas. We should probably set it up at Zoë’s place. I think if we plug anything else into our walls it’ll constitute a fire hazard. Actually, it probably already is a fire hazard. Should we be worried about that?” 

Yasper shrugs. “It hasn’t killed us yet.”

Zoë agrees to the podcast almost immediately, and after a bit of deliberation, they decide to do movie reviews. It leaves Yasper home alone more often than not, because when they’re not recording or talking excitedly about their analytics, they’re at the movie theater together watching new releases. And then Aniq texts Yasper that it’s already so late that they’ve decided to get dinner together, and Yasper can tell even through his dry texting how excited he is about what’s practically weekly dates at this point. 

Whatever. All the time to himself gives Yasper the opportunity to think of his own career, which he’s decided to throw himself into building. He has to be careful, giving the audience enough interesting clues to keep them engaged without telling them everything outright. It’s all parasocial, but he does genuinely care about them, spending a lot of time incognito on Twitter, Reddit, and Tumblr. They’re so clever and curious, and he tries to pretend their adoration can replace the hole Aniq is unknowingly digging in his heart. 

They don’t really know him. They’re still trying to uncover his past, and they don’t know anything about his present, either. A significant chunk of them seem to think he and Aniq are secretly dating. There’s already fanfiction about them, which Yasper is really hoping Aniq doesn’t ever find. 

When Aniq tells him he and Zoë have finally started dating, he can’t say he’s surprised. It is kind of funny though; their fans have it all wrong. They’ve decided to keep it a secret for now, while they’re in the early days of their relationship. Yasper’s gotten used to fake smiles and congratulations, but this one nearly breaks him. 

It’s stupid, really, the way he can still be in love with Aniq after so many years. But he still finds himself wonderstruck by the simplest moments: a smile that reaches his eyes, the way he breathes in right after he makes himself a cup of coffee. For Yasper, it’s not a quick heartbreak, it’s a constant ache—there’s probably lyrics in there somewhere—dull and pounding. It’s awfully lonely. Yasper never told anybody about his feelings for Aniq, certainly not as a kid, and not as an adult when he eventually found the courage to come out. He hates this feeling, hates the gut-wrenching pain.

Even when they aren’t exactly rubbing their happy relationship in his face, it’s behind the wall that he never seemed to discern any sound through for literal years, all concrete and self-contained mysteries of the later twilight hours, where Yasper can finally hear something.

But he doesn’t want to, and not just because it’s bad roommate etiquette.

Just sitting there, Yasper makes out the tiny whispers and not-so-subtle giggling of two people fumbling their way through a new romance. There’s light, amorous teasing followed by touches as delicate as the one placed over the gaping emptiness in his chest. He forgets that it can still beat until it does.

Yasper is smaller than ever, shrinking into the corner with his headphones on, but haunted by the presence in the other room. It’s seeping through a mess of pipes and structural vulnerabilities like the ghost of the life he might have had if he ever confessed, an extension of their natural domesticity coupled with lingering caresses, or—and he’s blushing in a tortuous heat alone, like a loser or something—because even a simple kiss from Aniq would change everything in the most miraculous of ways.

Yet he never spoke up, and he never will get the chance, probably. This is Aniq’s 'forever thing' just like being a global mega superstar is for Yasper, and he waves off the notion that maybe there could have been a time where they both liked each other without ever acting on that shared attraction. Yasper is surprised he’s never had “unrequited” practically scribbled on his back in red ink as he walks around, none the wiser and always the jester, the comic fool who performs to pretend otherwise. It’s fitting that his stage is primarily online for now, where people cannot throw actual tomatoes—at least given the current limits of the metaverse—and any responses are exclusively limited to mean-spirited comments and dislikes.

In front of a live crowd, they would all see how transparent he is. He might fade away, slinking through the channels of the apartment building out into the street, running out like blood into the sewer drains, slipping and sliding as he went. The world needs to be ready for that Yasper who is so full of star power that he instantly commands all attention, grabbing fists of spotlight from YouTube to Hollywood and feeling so complete, so together, that his pain of being solitary never truly sets in.

“Eureka!” Yasper snaps, because he’s practically a living cartoon character and he’s sick of pretending that weird expressions and phrases like ‘cha cha cha’ cannot fit into how an adult human being talks. He loads up the Yazzmatazz69 page on his laptop, scrolling through to compare the metrics between the reactions and rant compilations versus his original content. Instead of following the steady upward trajectory of those videos, Yasper’s genuinely gut-splitting skits and fabulous music are barely hitting over a thousand views. Usually, he would be devastated, except that was past Yasper.

Modern Yasper? He has a plan to expose Xavier and fill that void cement his status as an internet legend, to become the god among men who took down a reigning king of YouTube.

And unlike most royalty, Yasper is fine ruling by himself.

He just tries to forget the second throne was ever really there in the first place.

It’s not like he’s a power-hungry villain or anything; it depends how the story is framed. Some might say he’s about to exploit his best friend’s pain for the sake of internet drama. Others might say he’s an investigative journalist working on an explosive hit-piece, who’ll stop at nothing to get the truth into the hands of the people. He’s practically Maria Ressa or Woodward and Bernstein. See? Framing. 

And he’s about to drop the biggest exposé since Tiger King. Everyone will know what Xavier did that night, and they can be the judge of who really deserves all that fame.

Yasper doesn’t eat. He doesn’t sleep. If he’s not filming, he’s editing, or carefully watching his analytics for the perfect moment. The content isn’t particularly good, but it’s easily consumable, and there’s a lot of it, and the more he makes, the more every statistic keeps growing. He’s in such a flurry, he’s hardly noticed all the time Aniq is still spending away from the apartment. He doesn’t know how the podcast is going; he can’t stand to listen to it. Besides, he doesn’t have time for movies anymore. 

So Yasper is all alone when the notification pings on the top of his YouTube page. The tiny number mocks him as his laptop struggles to load with his thirty tabs (all in color-coded groups, of course) and open windows, unceremoniously revealing that the upload belongs to…Xavier? He blinks rapidly.

Even for a self-righteous douchebag, Xavier always posts at the same time. This break from the formula must mean something big. ‘Addressing the Rumors,’ the title says, and the picture is Xavier biting his lip for the camera, left eye winking and fingers pointing upwards to imitate a gun. It’s so try-hard that Yasper has to resist from physically cringing, but he knows that countless women—hell, anyone—could easily fall for his decades-late, stale bad boy routine. If this is about Yasper, his face is not in the thumbnail, which is just plain rude. And bad for getting any traction.

He sucks in a quick breath, then clicks on the video.

“What’s up, se’X’y people,” Xavier moves his hair out of his face, enunciating the ‘X’ because it’s the only branding he has, and he will die on this hill that Yasper wants to push him off of. “So, this is a bit of a random upload today, but I wanted to do something different. Ya boy’s been busy making new music…and I also want to get a few things off my chest.”

“I can’t watch this,” Yasper says out loud to himself, but he keeps going, stuffing a groan back down with all the fervor of someone about to purposely watch a car crash happen. “Just say something about me. About how you know I’m onto you—”

“I’ve always been told that there are some major clout chasers trying to lie about me, to like, I don’t know, compensate for their failures and loser attitudes? So, I wrote a little song about the haters, what I have, and what they don’t. Skanks, right? Cool. Enjoy.”

Yasper is fuming at this point. It’s like a giant casino sign is on him, the arrow flashy and beckoning the promise of money in multicolored lights, except there’s no real dollar signs coming down one after another for a winning prize. Instead, he’s getting shapes or fruits on the slot machine, whatever filler they put in for when you lose, you’re a loser, and Yasper hates that word so much he can barely think.

Something clicks, though, coming into focus. Skank…skanking.

♪ Cause the party's never ending and we're skanking till it's late ♪

“He’s talking about me!” Yasper clapped, spinning around in his chair with a sense of triumph. Otherwise, the word choice would be odd, a little disparaging, but much older than his usual verbiage. If this was a stream, he knows that people would be commenting in droves about Ska-pe Diem and Yasper Lennov, the real mastermind behind Xavier’s strange combination of A-list and YouTube celebrity.

This is great! Yasper couldn’t care less about the insults, or about Xavier claiming he’s a liar—in fact, he couldn’t have asked for a better response, except for maybe one that addressed him directly. In the end, it’s Xavier’s pride that’ll take him down. Responding at all was his first mistake, but to outright deny everything? That’s practically asking Yasper to come in with receipts. And boy does he have them. Photographs of them together, videos of the band, their old high school yearbook, Aniq’s court documents—hell, he could call Xavier on stream just to prove he still has his phone number.

It hardly counts that Xavier has never answered. Forget his one throne, forget the podcast, forget Zoë; this is important, and Yasper misses having his best friend around. He picks up his phone and calls Aniq, the excitement tingling down to his fingertips, a palpable electricity building in the pulses of the dial.

“Hello?” Aniq answers with an air of confusion.

“The time has finally come,” Yasper replies, all low and dramatic.

“What? Yas, I thought we talked about this. The point of a phone call is to communicate information. Skip the theatrics and tell me what’s going on.”

“Just come back home as quickly as you can, okay?” Yasper says, ignoring him entirely. “It’s Yasper time.”

Yasper’s already hung up before Aniq can respond, and he’s left confused, trying to figure out how important this really is, and if it’s worth interrupting his date with Zoë. She is giving him a look, a smudge of paint on her face from their current art project, and she has goggles on just like in Mr. Shapiro’s class. It’s a safety measure, sure, but Aniq thinks she herself is a beautiful work of art in need of protection from what might happen. He doesn’t want to ruin the moment, but Yasper has been dangerously on the edge lately, a human whirlwind tying his entire self-worth to a taste of fame. Zoë can handle anything, that much is sure, and she can definitely tolerate Yasper’s usual antics, but the question remains—does he want her to? Yasper is vibrating on a higher frequency than in years, a ticking time bomb testing the digital waters every day.

“I think he needs me,” Aniq says, frowning softly. “I don’t know for what.”

“It’s okay,” she pushes the goggles up, “Aniq…are you worried about him?”

“How can I not be?” he’s sighing. “He’s obsessed with this Xavier thing.”

“Maybe he feels like he’s doing you justice, in a way,” Zoë dips the paintbrush into their ramekin of water, letting the bristles dry against a paper towel blotting away shades of blue. “You know he has never really forgiven himself for leaving you when the cops showed up. But he’s also an adult, just like us. He’s allowed to make his own choices,” she bites her lip. “...Sorry. That kind of got into mom territory a bit, huh?”

Aniq takes her hand, chuckling lightly. “Maybe just a little.”

He thinks he loves her. But he loves Yasper too, albeit in a different way.

“Promise me you’ll let me know what cryptic message he’s getting at?” Zoë nods.

“Promise,” Aniq wants to kiss her, but he has to get back to Yasper before he combusts.

Yasper is practically glued to the screen when he gets home.

It’s honestly kind of creepy, the way the sole light in the entire apartment is coming from the computer screen so that Aniq can only see Yasper’s manic face. He’s never quite sure what to do when Yasper gets like this, so thoroughly obsessed with an idea that nothing else matters and nobody could possibly talk him down. In times like these, all Aniq can really do is hope to be a stable enough presence to calm him down. And if not, then he can at least help pick up the wreckage. 

“Hey bud…what’s going on?” He asks delicately, making his way through the living room/studio with trepidation. He doesn’t need to see to move around at this point, but he doesn’t want to make any sudden movements. Yasper has the emotional state of a house of cards sometimes, just waiting for a reason for it all to come toppling down. 

“Xavier’s vagueing about us, man,” Yasper says. He still hasn’t looked up. “All the comments think so too.” 

“Okay, don’t you think you should take a little break from all this stuff?” 

“A break? Can’t you see what I’m building to? This is gonna be the takedown video of the century! Not only is he gonna apologize to you personally, he’s gonna quit YouTube forever.”

“Woah there, slow down,” Aniq puts his hands out, almost to steady himself more than to tame whatever Yasper is up to. “Your whole idea now is to…get famous off of ruining Xavier’s image?”

“It’s not an idea, it’s already in motion,” Yasper almost fake salutes. “Yours truly is on it.”

“Did you ever, um, stop to think…” Aniq is uncomfortable, to say the least. He knows he should be careful, but sanity and stepping on eggshells left the building when he entered. “That—”

Maybe I don’t want this? Maybe I want to move on in my life ?

“I just don’t know why you’d go for something so cheap and easy when your music, skits, I don’t know, anything else is right there! What about your passions, Yasper? This is just,” Aniq waves a hand dismissively, instead. “Crap—and you know it.”

“Sometimes plans have to change,” Yasper bites back, more than a little bitter. “This is just a stepping stone to the Grammys, man. One day, a million YouTube subscribers and the most followers on Twitch. The next, a Broadway musical! Ooh, or a documentary about my life! You’d be played by the hottest current actor in Hollywood, of course. I’ll be playing myself. You can’t beat perfection.”

“Stop, stop,” Aniq starts rubbing his temples. “Yasper, I need you to be quiet. I need you to listen.”

“Okay,” the other blinks.

“This isn’t you.”

This is Xavier.

“I don’t know why you can’t just be happy for me!” he shouts impatiently, rushing to the finish line before Aniq can get another word in. “You don’t understand. Everyone gets their own thing. I mean, Megan Fox has Machine Gun Kelly, Xavier has Megan thee Stallion, and y-you have Zoë,” Yasper is so transparent it fucking hurts. “I just want to be a star, Aniq.”

It’s quiet for a moment, a stillness unlike any other they have felt before.

“...Then maybe you should be a star without me,” Aniq says with a degree of finality.

Because a friend wouldn’t do this.

Something starts suffocating in Yasper’s throat, he’s desperate, he begins scratching at his conscience because he needs air—it’s raw, and not something a massive online milestone could ever fix. The wound is too deep, slithering sweet poison through his bloodstream as his best friend stays silent.

“I don’t want to,” Yasper digs his fingernails into his palms like a natural reflex. Stay, he begs internally, wishing they could plant roots in this moment so he did not have to let him grow away. There’s vines and dirt, leaves falling on his heart, in rapid stages of decay like the changing seasons.

“I’m going to stay with Zoë for a few days,” Aniq’s mouth is a straight line, unwavering. “I-I just need a break from this. You’re bringing up memories I’d rather not think of right now.”

You need a break from me, Yasper thinks, as much as it hurts.

“Yeah?” he forces himself to croak out a response, vocal cords strained. “I’m sorry, Aniq.”

“Sure,” Aniq shrugs, and he won’t meet his friend’s gaze. It’s a passiveness that is just as foreign to them, but with aggression underneath, bubbling at the surface. “I’m sorry, too. Or whatever.”

The door clicks shut behind him, and Yasper is left staring at the place where Aniq once stood, the impression of his anger left behind like an image burned into an old TV, or maybe a ghost—maybe something dead, a phantom that only remains a mockery of your grief and of what you’ve lost. Aniq leaves, but his presence can never truly be gone, not in the pictures he hung or the smell of his cologne or the indent in the couch where he used to sit.

Yasper watches him leave, blinks back the tears he hadn’t noticed forming, and starts his next script.

So, okay, news flash: he’s always been insecure and terrified of rejection. For all his bravado, Yasper’s painfully aware of the fault lines that run through his body, of how easy he is to break apart. And then came along Aniq with his compassion and wry smiles, tape and rubber bands to put himself back together. There was no universe where Yasper would have told Aniq exactly how he felt, even if it hadn’t been 2006 and being queer was barely even legal. It doesn’t matter, because he hasn’t told him now for the same reason he never did back then: Yasper can’t lose his best friend. 

He can’t be alone. Alone is dangerous. Alone is when he ruminates in his emotions in a way he knows isn’t healthy; alone is when he wonders how slowly he can run his fingers through the flame. 

Yasper is falling, and he realizes rather selfishly that Aniq isn’t here to stop him anymore. There is a pathetic, clawing part of him that thinks he has nothing left to lose.

But can the person who has everything lose it, too? If Yasper is going to fuck up the one constant in his life that gives him the motivation to get out of bed—or really, Aniq might be his reason for breathing at this point, because he’s not sure if his lungs are still functioning organs or merely pieces of tissue and membrane that Aniq’s squeezed into shapes, patterned in his likeness—then Xavier is coming with him.

And boy, it’s going to be a bloodbath.

Somewhere around three in the morning, Yasper passes out in exhaustion, waking up to drool and a home screen full of notifications. Of course, there are messages from everyone except the one person Yasper wants to talk to, and it’s not like he’s codependent or thinks Aniq can solve all his problems (because if the reverse could be true, Yasper would do it in a heartbeat). But when he is around, even just as a mirage of what their relationship might become or break into, it’s better than the mirror image Yasper faces when he brushes his teeth, features contorted into a person he can barely recognize.

But maybe that’s what this is, he muses when skipping breakfast, flexing his self-destructive muscles and pushing back a swath of dark hair. The livestream is more than revenge, it’s a quest for peace. How else can he hope to undo all of the wrongs from high school and afterwards, the failures, the depressive episodes, the sheer rage Yasper finds at his fingertips more often than not? In another life, he could have been just an AV installation guy trailing behind Xavier’s every move like a sick, somewhat murderous puppy, but just as much as that could happen, there is an equal reality that Yasper reached the stars first. Fifteen minutes of fame would surely turn into over fifty years of a decades-long career, achieving greatness from the most towering of heights—meanwhile, that left a sniveling, coffee-stained Eugene fumbling along on the message and floorboards, endlessly begging for crumbs.

Yasper moves deftly across the typing keys, drafting up a tweet to begin the massacre of Xavier’s egos. He figures someone like him probably has multiple to deal with all the overflow.

“Hey Yazzers,” he reads aloud as he types, since no one is around to tell him to keep the volume down or anything like that. “Today is the day. If you want to hear about what @Xavier is REALLY like, with all of the gritty and problematic details, I am going to expose him live on stream in an hour. Be there or miss out on the greatest musical beef in history,” he ends, hashtagging it with a slew of unrelated things just to get the circulation working in his favor, albeit cheaply.

It’s barely fifteen minutes before he gets a call from Chelsea, and he knows this isn’t a social call because normally, she always texts first. She’s not the type to just call someone out of the blue, except now, apparently. Yasper reluctantly answers the phone. 

“What the fuck are you doing?” she asks before he even has the chance to say anything after picking up. “Did Aniq sign off on this?”

“Aniq doesn’t have to ‘sign off’ on anything I do, okay?” Yasper says, pushing down the guilt that bubbles up until it can be turned to pure anger somewhere in the deepest parts of his stomach. “And neither do you.” 

“It does when ‘all the gritty and problematic details’ clearly involves us,” Chelsea counters. “Come on, where’s Aniq?” 

“He’s not here,” Yasper says bitterly.

“Yasper, you know I love you, but I’m trying to move on, and whatever’s going on between you and Aniq isn’t worth this. I think you know that,” she huffs audibly, the sound of clinking glasses in the background causing him to wince. “Just because people eat this kind of drama up does not mean that it’s your decision to make. If anything, you’re just giving these vultures what they want, and then they’ll forget about it and move to the next big thing—because newsflash, cancel culture isn’t real, Yasper. All this is going to do is get Xavier’s lawyers to kick your ass, piss off Aniq, and everyone will forever brand you as that random streamer who tried to ‘take Xavier down.’ Genuinely,” Chelsea stops to scoff. “Nothing is touching that douchebag’s grip on the world until he isn’t on it anymore. Please let it go.”

Everything she says is scorching, a white-hot burst of truth that Yasper has no time or restraint for. If his viewers are turkey vultures looking for decaying scraps of meat, then he is the one who’s expected to serve up a four-course meal of roadkill from the pavement. In his attempts to wound Xavier’s reputation, Yasper looks down the street to see he was the one driving the car responsible, but he’s still gagging behind the wheel. The mess is overwhelming, with a rush of iron turning his nose up in disgust. It smells like deployed airbags, and almost like gunpowder.

Yet, behind the painted line of the shoulder, Aniq is standing with a thumb out to signal his usual eagerness, ready to hitchhike along for whatever journey Yasper goes on, ride or die—but this time, Yasper won’t let him inside until he gets blood on his hands, too, with the wheels turning and gears about to shift.

“If not for me, then for Aniq,” Chelsea’s voice is growing more dire in tone, and Yasper is so caught up in visualizing scenarios that she has to say it twice. “Yasper. Tell me you understand.”

Yasper swallows the lump in his throat unpleasantly, like medicine, like hard truths. His hands fidget, restless. “Okay,” he says quietly, and he isn’t quiet very often. “Okay. I understand.”

The stream starts in five minutes. In a way, it’s already started, the screen showing any current viewers a timer counting down. He wonders if Aniq is watching, or if he can’t stand to see his face. It’s been a long time since Yasper has streamed alone. He checks the camera and microphone, the giant lights that take up way too much room. His footsteps echo like a dance with no music; his ears are ringing with silence. Like so many times before, Yasper sits on the couch. 

When the stream goes live, Yasper throws a huge fake grin on his face, the mask he’s doomed to always wear. “What’s up guys? Are you ready for some tea to be spilled? Everything has been leading to this.”

DannerisDun: yesss tell us everything!!

xxPotionBabyxx: is he part of the illuminati 

*~jenn1fer~*: i knew he was bad even b4 he got popular

CulpIsaBlink1998: where’s aniq tho 

“Get ready to have your brains exploding out of every hole in your face, eyes included. The truth is…” Yasper trails off, his voice suddenly incapable of making sounds. He sighs deeply, kisses his YouTube fame goodbye, and continues. “The truth is, I don’t think I can do this anymore. I’m sorry I let it go this far, like, so genuinely, I-don’t-have-words-for-this sorry. Not because Xavier isn’t a bad person who hurt a lot of people because he is, but because I let my life revolve around him. And isn’t that what he wants in the first place, for everyone to always be paying attention to him, no matter what? This isn’t about him, not anymore. The truth is, I love you, and you deserve better than what I’ve been doing. Honestly, you deserve better than me, and that’s why I never—sorry. All this to say, I’m not doing any more ‘takedown’ style content, of Xavier or anybody. I’m going back to my music, even if it means less ad revenue. I’d feel too small in a bigger apartment anyway. The truth is, I have a lot to apologize for and a lot to explain. But for now, I’ll just leave you with this: lasagna?” 

Yasper shuts off the stream before he can read the comments that are probably incredibly confused, and within reason, of course. But their lack of understanding or frustration means little to him at the moment. He needs to know that Aniq was there to see it, to hear his secret message. He’s never been very good at codes, but this is one that Aniq is sure to understand.

Yasper goes into the kitchen and makes a dinner for two he can only hope won’t be eaten alone. He pauses at the forks, knowing the number he needs might change, and everything might change, because this is more than a pasta dish or trending video to him. It’s a sincere apology, or what could very well be a dying wish for a friendship eternally stuck in the past.

There’s a gentle rapping on the door. Yasper jumps out of his skin to answer it, practically traveling through dimensions and wormholes for the best reality— fuck multiverses—because even though Aniq has a key, knows there’s one not under the mat but inside a plastic box locked with a combination code he chose, then buried under layers of dirt in the decorative plant, Yasper needs to see him as fast as possible. For a person who hates confrontation, he swings open the door in record time.

Aniq is standing there, and Yasper can’t help but notice the framing matches the climax of every cheesy rom-com he’s been forced to watch but secretly enjoys. After a million years of dead silence, the other makes the first move.

“Hey,” Aniq says softly, as if it might break.

"Hey," Yasper repeats, but he's already been broken five times over, made entirely of shattered illusions and snapped toothpicks.

Aniq's face is still stoic, composed—like he’s been practicing how to appear unfazed.

“Do you still have usable forks, or did you throw everything out in a box marked ‘Aniq’ and ship it all the way to Timbuktu?”

Yasper’s mouth falls open, then closes in a way that could only be described as smug, but still baffled. “... Yes  I still have forks, but I can get you the spork, if you want. No, I left it all where it was, it’s literally been a single day, and also—was that a reference to The Aristocats?”

A smile creeps up on Aniq’s face. “Maybe. You mean that spork Zoë bought you?”

“Yeah,” Yasper braced himself, remembering that Aniq was with her, not a random motel moping about or finding new hobbies. “A present so good, it almost made me wish I celebrated Christmas.”

“You always did with my family anyway,” Aniq shrugs it off like that's casual, like their connection doesn't span decades and lifetimes of entanglement. His expression might have changed, but his body language is still rigid and stiff, posture speaking the truth.

So it’s time for Yasper to.

“I’m sorry,” he starts, simply but firmly. “I mean, I’m assuming you watched the stream, but… you deserve to hear it in person too.”  

Yasper moves away from the door to let Aniq in. For a moment, they both just stand there awkwardly, uncomfortable in a way they haven't been with each other in a very long time. 

“Do you want—” Yasper starts to say, at the same time that Aniq starts talking. 

“What were you going to say?” 

“Do you want to go to the kitchen?”

“No.” Aniq says, though not harshly. “During the stream. You started to say something, but then you cut yourself off. What were you going to say?” 

Yasper sighs. He knows it’s time to tell the truth, all of it. But he’s never been very good at this sort of thing. Being vulnerable. Showing his true face. He’s been acting for so long, he doesn’t know how to be himself. He doesn’t even know where to begin. 

Aniq looks back at him patiently, like somehow, he knows this is a big deal, like he can feel the way Yasper’s blood runs cold and his mouth glues shut. Maybe he has some idea what this is all about. Maybe it’s a good sign that he hasn’t run away. 

Yasper braces himself. For what, he’s not sure. “You deserve better than me. That’s why I never told you when I fell in love. You deserve someone better than me—like Zoë. I’m sorry. I um, hope we can still be friends.”

There's a rest, then a note.

“Of course, we can stay friends,” Aniq says, his voice always warm with reassurance. Even when they fight, Yasper swears he can hear it, that endless compassion that underlines everything Aniq does. “I’ll just…I need to think about things. A lot’s happened lately, Yas.”

Instead of plunging down into the abyss of despair, Yasper looks up and sees a comforting grasp outstretched. He reaches, takes the glow of hope in hand, smiling all the way.

“You’re right,” Yasper nods, walking—or jumping—off the ledge. “I’m really, truly sorry.”

“Nope,” Aniq shrugs, just shy of a grin that barely hides the dramatic reframing of his whole world view. “I’m actually too busy thinking to accept that right now.”

“Wow,” Yasper laughs. “Uhm…you don’t, by chance, want to eat this lasagna, right?”

“I’d love to,” Aniq shrugs, never to turn down someone who just poured their heart out.

They eat a quiet, but not unpleasant, dinner. In some ways, nothing’s changed. In others, everything has. Aniq isn’t used to Yasper being so silent. But the way their forks clash against each other as they both reach for the same part of the dish is heart-achingly familiar. He’s missed this, he realizes with sudden clarity, like dropping a stone into a puddle and seeing your reflection once the ripples die down. He’s missed the way he knows every inch of this apartment, the furniture he helped pick out. He’s missed eating dinner on opposite sides of a Sundvik, and the way Yasper always ends up with sauce all over his face. 

He has a lot to think about.

But for now, Aniq tries his best to shut off his brain and enjoy eating lasagna with his best friend, even if that best friend just almost revealed his most embarrassing moment to an audience of thousands, backed out at the last minute, apologized, and professed his love all in the same day. It was a lot, but it was also one of the first times he’s ever seen Yasper stop himself before crashing into an exploding ball of flame, so maybe that’s a good sign. 

Maybe everything will be okay.

Yasper rolls over in the morning, his stomach still jumbled and knotted. With the revealing nature of last night, both professionally and personally, he thought maybe he would feel worse. But, he realizes as he brushes his teeth, the only thing eating at him is the late night meal—it’s been a freeing feeling, really, now untethered to his biggest secret. He wants to resist checking to see if Aniq stayed the night, as it is still their shared home, but his curiosity has grown in the newfound absence of making bad decisions.

There’s a distinct imprint in the sheets where Aniq could have been, but it was clearly left in haste.

“Wow,” Zoë almost drops her bowl of oatmeal. “He, um…really said that?”

Aniq had met her for coffee in the morning, wanting the opinion of a longtime friend, as well as romantic partner, to mull over the details of the previous day—and what an exhausting day it was. A fantastic mocha cannot even solve this, Aniq frowns into the foam, sensing there is still more to the other’s words.

“What?” he asks, studying her expression like an equation he needs to solve.

“It’s just…” Zoë appears guilty, almost. “I thought it was obvious.”

He rarely enjoys being left out, so thoroughly puzzled by the maze of her implications. Along the way, Aniq dodges the booby traps and downward swings of armored knights, evading everything in his path as he tiptoes to the real answer. “You mean, that he was sorry?”

“No,” she pushes around the cheap, flavorless walnuts that came in a plastic pouch, praying they would save her from getting out her true intentions. “...That he loves you, Aniq. I thought you knew.”

Frozen in time, suspended in space, Aniq opens his mouth only to close it without a word. After a few seconds of silence, he remembers that he can move and operate like a regular human being, finally asking the real question.

“For how long?”

“Since high school,” she has a pained look on her face, peeling off the bandage. “I honestly figured you two were officially dating when you moved in together. So did Chelsea. We literally had a bet going, and she won—but I got my money back, of course, because you were, uhm…” Zoë waves her hands. “Not a couple. After my divorce, I literally didn’t even think it would be possible for us to ever be something romantic, like you were minutes away from figuring it out, because Yasper is so obvious, Aniq. He almost confessed that night where we did drunk charades, but he gave up halfway through because his voice cracked after too many hard seltzers and from ‘not speaking for a while,’ remember?”

Aniq blinks.

“Then he gave you that awkward ‘platonic bro-five’ for your silent rendition of Cabaret?”

“Oh,” Aniq feels like he’s been hit by a freight train. “I thought he was doing an impression of Xavier.”

Zoë looks at him like he’s the dumbest man on the planet, and Aniq thinks he might be. “Look, I honestly thought you knew. By the time I joined the channel, I assumed the two of you had reached some sort of mutual understanding. But if not…he needs to hear some kind of answer, Aniq. The not-knowing has to be killing him. It nearly killed me.” 

“What if…” Aniq pauses, unsure of what he’s about to say until the words leave his mouth. “What if I don’t have an answer? What if I don’t know how I feel?” 

“Then, I think you need to puzzle it out.” Zoë has always been good at hiding her emotions, but Aniq has known her long enough that he can tell when all the different versions of her are screaming at once, and it’s all she can do to keep it together without bursting at the seams. “I really like you, Aniq, and I want our relationship to continue. But if this changes things, I understand.” 

Aniq is stunned. He’s spent so long alone, and yet here he is, at the center of a love triangle; on one end, the girl of his dreams, at the other, his childhood best friend. It’s just like those cheesy rom-coms made for TV, except this time, the symbolism is all messed up. The childhood best friend is supposed to represent the world the protagonist is already familiar with, nostalgia, playing it safe. And the dreamy one is supposed to represent the new and exciting and dangerous. Zoë is new and exciting, but she’s anything but dangerous. And Yasper is nostalgic and familiar, but he’s never in his life played it safe. 

So, okay, real life isn’t like a Hallmark movie, fair enough. But Aniq doesn’t know where else to go for advice. Whenever anything happens, he always either talks to his best friend or his girlfriend, but now both of them are out, for obvious reasons. He needs someone outside it all, he needs…

Chelsea picks up on the first ring. 

“Will you please hug Yasper for not telling that story and then kill him for almost doing it in the first place?” She asks without greeting.

“Yeah, about that…” Aniq puts on his coat and starts walking. He doesn’t know where he’s going, really, only that he needs to be outside, somewhere where there’s more room for emotions to fly free without being quite so suffocating. “After that stream, he kind of confessed his love for me.”

“You didn’t know already?”

“No! Why am I the last person to know about this?” 

“You’re the guy who solves things!” Chelsea blurts out back. “It’s like if Watson has been pining after Sherlock for years, but the world’s great detective fails to see what’s been right in front of him the whole time.”

“I don’t need to be reminded of my stupidity right now,” Aniq huffs. “I just met up with Zoë.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing,” he bites his lip. “Nothing yet. She’s such a good person, Chelsea. I don’t want to hurt her—especially after it took so long for us to get here, to a place like this. I’m…confused, everything hurts, I have a migraine and my phone is almost dead. I don’t know what to do.”

“Aniq,” Chelsea’s voice softens in sympathy, no longer thorny or prickly at the ends. “You’re a good person too, you know. You deserve to be happy.”

“I am happy!” Aniq says it so fast, it’s almost defensively. “...Sorry. I think.”

“You’re sounding like Yasper,” she chuckles, a fainting one more of recognition than humor. “Aniq, if anyone deserves to be loved, it’s you. You need to figure out who you love, who’s a friend and who’s more. Unless you want to try a throuple, which believe me, can be a lot to take on sometimes.”

“I think one partner is enough for me,” Aniq says. Especially if that partner ends up being Yasper. “But how do I know?”

“I think, deep down, you already know. Just dig until you find it.”

Chelsea hangs up, leaving Aniq with nothing but his own thoughts and the sound of cars rushing by. He needs time to think. He wants answers now. Zoë has been his crush since high school, so why is it, now that they’re finally dating, he’s suddenly having second thoughts? She’s beautiful and kind, and dating her has been everything he’d thought it’d be and more. Shouldn’t that be enough? 

It’s not like Aniq has never thought about what dating Yasper would be like, not when half their fans ship them anyway. It just never seemed like a possibility. From a young age, Aniq had decided two distinct paths for the two of them, with Yasper neatly in box a – ‘best friend,’ while Zoë sat in box b – ‘crush.’ Maybe it’s his fault that in that filing system of his brain, he never bothered to change or update the labels, because he’s pretty sure the term ‘crush’ is all at once unfitting and stirs up purely juvenile feelings, while ‘best friend’ just remained as natural as breathing.

For a man with a lot of digging to do, his hands are shaking, steadier than before Chelsea, but still at an unfamiliar pace. Frankly, the frenetic nature of everything reads more Yasper, more hitting the gas past the speed limit and throwing caution out the car window than he hoped for.

Yet, as he turns the corner of the street, he summons Zoë’s strength before making the call.

Yasper is unplugging his ring light, tongue stuck out in concentration. It’s unwieldy and causing a mess, one that he wants to fix before anyone—potentially Aniq—comes over. There’s still wires that could trip up even the most careful of people, and he dives under the table lamp like a spy in a movie, exaggeratedly dodging red lasers in his own elaborate action sequence. As he’s busy scatting to a random rhythm, one that is purely Yasper and far from Xavier, he matches the trumpet sounds from his mouth to an impassioned soundtrack befitting the off-beat, unconventional heroes. Cinema could one day feature scrawny guys trying to right some of their wrongs, yet still with characteristic reckless abandon they try to avoid—alright, possibly ones who threaten a little online violence here and there—who did get the love interest at the end of the day. Actually, a television show would probably be better. It usually is.

His social media relevance might be completely shot, because no one will probably tune in to singer Yasper, the entertainer, the performer who just wants to use music as a vessel rather than turn towards more, uhm, ‘destructive’ methods. It might have started as self-sabotage, but importantly, it would be endangering those who were working to move past the incidents of their youth—or merely pretended to on the outside—praying for downfalls about no one in particular. And they would have every right to.

Yasper’s grooving comes to an end when, like a dog with his ears perked, he hears the gravel outside rumble with the sound of Aniq’s car. It’s not like he has it imprinted in his mind or anything, but the roaring of it is rather unique because the ignition runs loud, signaling it’s probably more than a few years past its prime. Yasper tucks another cord away into a bag to seem busier than he really is, unsure of the significance this moment is hinging on.

As the door squeaks open, the air between them is still thick and cloudy with uncertainty, and Yasper would really like to breathe comfortably for once. But Aniq has a strange expression on, one he can’t figure out.

“Hey,” he smiles, fucking smiles, and Yasper hates how chest tightens in response. It’s not a confident one, except it breaks the tension, the corners of his lips signaling that okay, maybe they really are alright.

Maybe it can all go back to normal, Yasper hopes, quirking a brow. “You okay?”

“I, um, glad you asked,” Aniq practically coughs out. “Erm…nevermind, it’s stupid.”

“What’s stupid?” the other steps forward. “I literally don’t think anything can beat yesterday.”

“About that,” Aniq clears his throat, and uh oh, that means nerves, but also maybe business. “I wrote a thing.”

“Song? Screenplay? Slam poetry?” Yasper perks up in response, eyes already sparkling with interest. “Tell me, tell me, tell meeeeeee.”

“You have to listen to the lyrics,” Aniq scrunches his nose somewhat seriously, but Yasper just tries not to stare at how absolutely adorable he is right now. “It’s…a song, I think?”

“Seated,” Yasper pulls out a stool by the kitchen table, moving a pile of magazines over to put both elbows on the wood, hands folded beneath his chin. “This is a nice surprise. I’ve been trying to get you to put a pen to the paper our entire lives, but the closest you got was that awkward rap you wrote to Zoë in lunch, but never actually gave to her. See, the performance is the best part. Just get laser-focused, my man, relax and…”

“Yasper,” Aniq is visibly skittish now. “It’s for you.”

In all of his elegance and grace, Yasper’s heart falls through his stomach ten times over.

“What?” he whispers back, confused.

So, as best he can, Aniq sings.

“I never thought about us that way before,” he starts, stumbling. “Always friends, I didn’t think that we could ever be more. I thought I loved Zoë while you loved me, but I needed to see…what’s the next line? Shit. This was a bad idea.”

Yasper, nearly jumping out of his own skin, just nods. “I can snap, if it helps,” he says.

Aniq nods. Yasper gets ready to join in with the metronome-like movement of quick fingers.

He takes a deep breath and starts again, a little off-key, but more confident and on beat with Yasper’s snapping to guide him. He’s not sure what tempo his song’s meant to be sung at, but this works. “I like puzzles and logic and chess, not love and magic and fate. But Yasper, somehow despite our mess, you make me believe in soulmates.” 

Aniq gathers up the courage to look at Yasper’s face. He’s staring off silently, like he doesn’t quite believe what he sees. “...That’s it. Yas, uh, did you like it? I put more ‘and’s in than necessary to be artistic, even though it’s less efficient. You know, I learned there’s a word for that, it’s called polysyndeton and it’s contrasted by—”

Yasper thankfully interrupts his rambling by suddenly jumping up and hugging him tightly. Yasper’s hugged Aniq a million times, but there’s an exciting tinge that builds up under his skin at the idea that it could lead to something more, something magical.

“It was perfect,” Yasper says from somewhere over his shoulder. He starts to move away from the hug, but there’s a hesitation, like he’s afraid that if he lets go, the illusion will shatter and it’ll all go away. It’s funny because to Aniq, in this moment, nothing feels more real. Yasper keeps Aniq less than an arm’s length away, looking at him as though he is every precious thing in the world. “Does this mean I can—”

“Kiss me?” Aniq finishes. 

Yasper cups his face and leans in. It isn’t a perfect kiss—Aniq’s never kissed anyone taller than him before, and he finds that changes things much more than the fact that it’s a guy—but he loves it anyway, the way Yasper kisses him with what is probably a decade’s worth of yearning and desperation. If his life were a rom-com, it would end right here, with the music swelling and the camera panning out, a wide shot of this tiny, impassioned couple kissing amidst the snake-like wires coiling at their feet in their messy, shared apartment. 

But it doesn’t end there, and Aniq is shocked back into his feet when Yasper finally pulls away. “I never thought you would love me back,” he says, so quiet it’s halfway a whisper, halfway his real, nearly broken voice. 

“And I never thought I would fall in love with my best friend,” Aniq replies. “But now it all makes perfect sense.”

To Yasper, it has always made sense, even if this is the first time that he can fully immerse himself in the feelings, no longer savoring the relief in tension with every embrace and tossed out glances between jokes. It’s not scarce; there’s no water running out or emotions tightly crumpled up like balls of loose-leaf paper on the classroom floor. For so long, Yasper thought he could only see his love for Aniq growing inwards, blossoming in private as if the very core of his being, akin to the flowers of a fig, could never see the light of day. Being vulnerable, truly vulnerable, was hard—most of it was a pretense, for safety reasons. Yasper would rather wear his heart down to dust than show it on his sleeve to the wrong person.

Unlike Xavier, though, he could never bear to make that mirage his single defining trait.

“Do not make fun of me if I cry,” Yasper paws at his eye, laughing lightly to cushion the blow. He’s never let his walls down this much before, always the supportive best friend but never more than a source of comedy relief. It’s lonely being the one to make others giggle, sometimes at your own expense, with no one to come home to as the real isolation sets in. Well, he always came home to Aniq. Just not like that.

“As long as you promise to never air out my trauma on the internet for views,” Aniq says back, mostly tongue-in-cheek. Something in Yasper pangs, because—not that anyone knows—he’s the bratty one, so whenever Aniq does it with a knowing wink, it’s more than establishing his boundaries.

It’s, uhm, hot in the room suddenly, and Yasper goes to tug at the collar of his shirt.

“Never,” he says with the searing sincerity of a burning flame. “But…if you’re open to it, I think your song could use some improvements.”

“You can say it’s awful,” Aniq laughs, a real one from within, and if they weren’t just kissing as Yasper’s mind painfully wandered elsewhere, their conversations have yet to miss that familiar beat—which, graciously, is more melodic than whatever tumbled out of Aniq minutes prior.

“No, just add a little bass,” Yasper makes a ‘tutting’ nose in his mouth, gently rocking back and forth, very much in character as they are still in each other’s personal space. “Some saxophone there…”

“Maybe,” Aniq looks at him, and fucking blushes, which Yasper kind of dies over internally. But the slight flush reminds him of red brushstrokes and everything he had momentarily forgotten about.

“Wait,” and the question makes him stop dead in his tracks. “Did you break up with Zoë?”

Aniq looks like he blanked too, and his face falls in earnest. “Yasper. Of course I did.”

“Can I come over?” Aniq had hushed into the phone an hour earlier, wondering why he sounds so quiet, so soft, but still clearer in diction—and thought—than what he thought to be possible in his mental fatigue.

“Aniq,” Zoë replies, matter-of-factly, “I never left. I’m literally sitting in my car in the café parking lot.”

After a hurried jog back down the street, Aniq slides into the passenger side of Zoë’s vehicle, slightly out of breath and watching the blow of warm air take shape into smoke. Zoë’s hands are on the wheel even as it’s staying stationary, unmistakably pensive in pose. Her eyes are dry, so Aniq hopes that there is a safe bet she has yet to go down that road. But she bridges connections, especially interpersonal ones, as the observer, the creative, and the steady pulse of their post-high school friend group. Zoë is smart, more so than anyone else in his life, and she is quick to catch on about the real risk of letting go.

With all her might, though, the words come out small like the preface to something more.

“I love you,” Zoë reaches for him with her right hand, the other still static like an anchor to the moment. “...But I know what you’re going to say, and I understand.”

“Zoë,” Aniq clasps her outstretched grasp in his, tightly holding on to their knotted fingers as storm clouds form up ahead. He is completely worn down and weathered by the unknown. For the first time, the crossed wires of his heart spark with electricity, crackling down to icy fingertips, and the only constants Aniq has ever known are charged from him reaching for live wires. “I think I love him, too. I don’t know how it’s something I’ve never thought of, but I don’t want to hurt you by staying in this relationship when you deserve more than someone who is genuinely, honestly, really confused right now.”

Zoë smiles like she’s trying to hide, eyes darting to the seat cushions instead.

“Because we fell in love with each other’s high school selves, and Yasper never fell out of love with you, even as you changed?” she finally glances up, locking gazes in the accompanying silence.

Aniq has no idea what to do, merely gaping in response. Being lost for words has been happening much too often for comfort, almost as dangerous as being lost in an escape room, unable to move the right clock or play the exact rhythm leading to the next answer. Although he’s fortunate to have moved to editing, the industry is just as unpredictable—although technically, he’s exploring feelings for a coworker who, although never subtle, managed to avoid Aniq’s romantic detection skills throughout their lives.

There is no signal what the next step is, no subscribe button or fitting puzzle piece. Just confusion.

“I changed too,” Zoë grants him that clue. “Hell, even Mr. Shapiro has changed since chemistry class. Do you know he’s dating Quiet Heather? They’re getting married.”

“Really?” Aniq asks.

“Yeah,” she frees the other hand to move a few strands of hair aside. “Crazy, right?” The brief laugh that follows, if not for the shy, ‘contain everything’ Zoë personality currently dominating the conversation, comes off almost wild in nature. She hates not knowing, too, so he goes for it.

“...Can we still be friends?” Aniq hates the pain more than the fear.

“Always. I’d like to think Yasper would say the same thing, if it went the other way around,” Zoë nods, helping Aniq work up the courage to face the truth head on. “But, you know, it stopped being that way a long time ago, Aniq. Not since high school, not since Brett—”

“Not since Xavier?” Aniq bit his lip.

“No,” she has a precise patience to her tone now, like an endless sea of calm finally welcoming in the low tide. “Not since you realized that loving Yasper more than a friend was an option in the first place.”

A click of the lock turns again in Aniq’s head, leaving that mental labyrinth behind.

Maybe Yasper hasn’t been the only one holding onto the past. The thought hits Aniq like a brick, but decidedly unlike a brick, it doesn’t let go. For all his talk of moving on, has he? Or has he been spending all his life chasing a path that forked out miles and miles ago? The hypotheticals. The what-ifs. The alternate universe where he never went to that goddamn party and maybe everything ended up okay. That isn’t the Aniq here, in Zoë’s car, feeling the vinyl seats and the strain of the seatbelt and the cool air from the air conditioner. That Aniq is dead. Or not dead, but not alive, because he never existed in the first place. If he just lets go, maybe one hand can hold Yasper’s and the other can reach for the stars with him. 

There’s something beautiful in that realization. And there’s something terrifying in it, too. 

Aniq is filled with so many emotions, it’s almost hollow, like it’s all melted together and only the faint impression of each feeling remains. Zoë once told Aniq as they were painting together: when you start mixing colors, add too many and it almost always ends up brown. It’s the same way with emotions, really, Aniq realizes, only when everything comes together you just end up feeling tired. He just wants to sleep in his own bed, comfortable even though Yasper always keeps the apartment a few degrees too cold. 

Zoë waves goodbye as she drops Aniq off, and he sees all at once how well she’s holding herself together, how much she doesn’t want to fall apart. 

He wonders if it’s for his sake or her own, but then she drives away and there’s nothing left to do but climb the steps up to his apartment where his old best friend—and possible new boyfriend—is waiting, and marvel at how much his life has changed.

Back in each other's grasp, Yasper’s puppy-dog excitement fades away. “...You just broke up with her, didn’t you?”

Aniq doesn’t say anything, and that probably says it all.

Just as wordlessly, Yasper leads Aniq to his bedroom, turns on the TV and shuts off the lights. It’s a dance they have done before, careful choreography of the deflated, ever the ‘hopeless romantic’ Aniq, with Yasper there either to set the stage or, well, get the hook. Yasper had, to his embarrassment, merely dabbled in dating before giving up on the allure of other people; so for him, it was a dream role to wait from the proverbial wings of outside romance, providing moral support when necessary.

Plus, every show needs an emcee, and Yasper could be hell of a ‘wingman,’ even if he hated himself for it. But this time, the movements are different, because Yasper knows his best friend (slash boyfriend?) just ended the relationship he has been dreaming of since high school for him. And he doesn’t want to be an asshole, because he loves Zoë, and he knows that Aniq is tiptoeing the very fine lines of his worldview with the mental adjustments he’s had to make in just a few hours’ time. It’s a lot. Anyone would be justifiably tired, rather than jump headfirst into a new chapter. Usually, that’s more of Yasper’s thing.

“Breakups are hard, man,” Yasper says from the doorway in that same casual language, slightly aglow from the bathroom across the hall. Aniq slips under the covers and lets that warmth envelop him. It’s not quite enough, and he needs more, a tactile reminder that things will be okay, soon. Just not right now, maybe.

“Get some rest,” Yasper moves to pull the knob in front of him, closing the curtain on their day.

Aniq, from the blanketed cover of darkness, asks something instead.

“Yas, will you cuddle with me?””

He feels more than sees Yasper appear by his side, wrapping his arm around his shoulder. Aniq leans in, rests his head on Yasper’s chest, and is powerless to the way the tension eases instantly from every limb, every knotted eyebrow, every strained muscle.

Aniq can hear Yasper’s heart beating; he can feel every breath he takes. It’s such a simple thing, but it’s never felt so right. They both fall asleep there, still wearing their same clothes in Aniq’s bed, with an old episode of Modern Family playing on the TV.

The title of Yasper’s next video, ‘Boyfriend Reveal and Original Song *REAL*,’ is perhaps the humblest of his career, even with the asterisks working overtime. All it features is the two of them in what Yasper thinks is a beautifully understated musical effort, and the footage is equally spliced between clips of them together—some from the present day, others much older—in a true, sentimental time capsule.

He refined the lyrics just a little, but forced Aniq back into the studio with him anyways.

We were fifteen in your bedroom/ a weekend nothing to do/ talking about life and I knew/ I’d fallen in love with you. 

Best friend from the sidelines/ filled broken lungs with my lies/ thought you loved her I nearly cried/ how could I make you decide? 

You like puzzles and logic and chess/ not love or magic or fate/ And yet somehow despite our mess/ I think we might be soulmates 

And then there’s Aniq, singing awkwardly beside him, still not used to being on this side of the camera. The comments go nuts, some vindicated at the reveal that Yasper really is dating Aniq, some complaining about the change in content, some excited for the new chapter in his channel’s history. Out in the internet ether, a video essayist is probably already writing a script titled “The Rise and Fall of Yazzmatazz69.” Yasper breathes in that idea, lets it live in his mind for a moment to see how he feels, and realizes he doesn’t feel much about it at all. He’s learned that to hold onto Aniq, he has to learn to let other things go. It’s hard, but it feels good in a way, like dropping sandbags off the edge and letting himself float up, up, up.

Yasper stands vigil over pots and pans and ingredients he knows nothing about while Aniq thumbs through the recipe. They’re attempting to actually cook something, a simple pasta involving relatively few dishes and very little contact with knives. So basically, perfect for them. At the moment, there’s a bunch of little tomatoes in a pot, hopefully not burning. 

“Found it!” Aniq exclaims, and he and Yasper do a short victory dance. Just for themselves. “Okay, keep the tomatoes in the pot till they burst.” 

Yasper looks in at the tomatoes. They are still stubbornly holding their shape.

“Huh,” Aniq says.

Yasper waits for more. It doesn’t come. “What?” 

“Well, I gave the recipe website my email to make that annoying pop-up go away, and I just went to go unsubscribe, and look, we’ve been invited to our high school’s fifteen-year reunion.” 

“Aniq, you must be mistaken, because I am not that old.” Yasper looks at himself in the reflection of the metal pot. It’s all dull and warped anyway, but he probably looks like, 25 tops. 

Aniq laughs, not unkindly, more in the realization that he knew exactly what his boyfriend was going to say, and in exactly what tone he’d say it. “So, you wanna go? Show off your influencer lifestyle? I bet you’ll be just as popular as Xavier, if not more.”

The funny thing is, Yasper doesn’t care about fame and popularity so much anymore. He cares about Aniq, about the man he’s been in love with for, oh God, almost twenty years now. Whatever life of overindulgence Xavier has been getting up to on his fancy yachts, it is not nearly as important as moments like this spent simply in each other’s company. Their love feels cosmic, as cheesy as it sounds. The two people now floating in this romantic orbit, flirting above their former friendship just as instinctive in nature? Well, Yasper thinks that makes them the stars.

Without an answer, this time, Aniq comes up behind Yasper ever so gently.

“Hey, careful, Yas. Remember last time when the tomatoes all burst and the juice squirted you in the eye? You were literally seeing red.”

Yasper leans into him somewhat, soothed by the other’s presence. “I don’t care,” he says, firmly.

“You don’t care if you get hurt?” Aniq’s voice is softening, and his hand comes over the other’s grip on the plastic spatula—not too much that it seems like he’s overbearingly stepping in or insinuating his partner cannot do it, but to help guide.

“Not that,” Yasper lets him move the ingredients around, lets someone else take control and watches as the heat transforms the outside flesh of the fruits. Slowly, they go from rigid to a pulpy mess at the bottom of the pot, waiting to be scraped off into a hopeful sauce. It’s less than appetizing and havoc on Yasper’s sensory issues to see them annihilated like that, although he assumes the destruction is necessary. Plenty of tomatoes have to die for frozen lasagnas. “About…stardom.”

Now that he’s what, 33 ? The term feels a little juvenile, yet fitting. “I want to go to the reunion as a couple, as Aniq and Yasper. Being influencers, internet icons, or Xavier’s sworn enemies?” he spins around, ducking under Aniq’s arm to see his expression better. “That’s all second to having you.”

Aniq’s entire face lights up, sparkling like twilight. “Really? Guess we should give it a shot, then.”

“Two shots,” Yasper kisses him, and oops, the food is burning. It’s starting to smell.

“Oh my god. You are sabotaging me!” Aniq mocks surprise, and he’s laughing as he pulls the disaster off the stove for its eventual home in the nearby trash can, going immediately to hold him again as soon as the threat to the fire alarm calms down. “...You’re serious, right?”

“What’s the worst that could happen?” Yasper rolls his eyes playfully, trailing a finger along the other’s hip, gazing at him in the smoky aftermath. “Ooh , do you think there will be an after party?”

“Fuck the after party,” Aniq shrugs, and they melt into another kiss, distracted once more. It’s a good thing they stopped cooking, or the whole apartment would be up in flames, unceremoniously lost to lurking embers. When Yasper comes back down to earth, his hands—cool to the touch—brush past Aniq once more, doing so just enough to reach for the familiar comfort of the microwave.

“I can’t wait to show you off,” Yasper says with a mischievous grin. “People love to see high school sweethearts.”

Aniq laughs even as he’s scrunching his face up in disgust. “Gross, don’t call us that. It makes it sound like we had a shotgun wedding at eighteen or something.” 

“No, we clearly eloped to get away from your disapproving father,” Yasper shoots back, and he can’t help but laugh like a maniac because holy shit, he’s dating his best friend and it’s everything he ever dared to imagine it could be. 

He doesn’t care about how many subscribers he has, or his fifteen minutes of fame; he can’t wait to go to that high school reunion just so everyone can see the man that through it all, somehow came to love him too.