Fic: The Story Remains Wrong
Title: The Story Remains Wrong
Fandom: Green Street Hooligans
Pairing: Matt Buckner/Pete Dunham
Rating: R for language
Warnings: Offensive Language. Spoilers for the movie.
Wordcount: ~2500 words
Summary: Fucking journos even fuck this shit up.
A/N: Self-beta'd. I really do mean the warning for offensive language. Don't think this will be a fandom I normally write in but I couldn't quite get the outcome out of my head.
His time in England is a blur now. It's been a few months and Shannon's right; no one gives a flying fuck just what his reputation was over in England. Hell, no one gives a flying fuck who he is because of England. It's all about what he's done to Jeremy Van Holden. He gets interviews and his dad helps him write the story for the Harvard paper. It's all a rush and a blur. A blanket over all the time in England covering it in a sea of numbness and activity.
It's not that he forgets, he can't. It's not that he wants to forget. He doesn't. It's that he can't think about it right now, can't absorb what happened, can't do anything about the fact that Pete's dead, he helped get him there and, fuck's sake! There are too many other things. He's got to stop thinking about Pete and he sure as shit has to stop looking at the damned newspaper article detailing Pete's death.
During the day, he's all right. He's good. He goes to class, he comes back to the house, he cleans, he cooks, he spends time with his sister on the weekends, he babysits his nephew, he does any of a thousand and one things to keep his mind off of football and Pete and that newspaper article.
In the middle of the night, though, he can't fool himself any longer. The article haunts him and he pulls out the paper, flips through until he sees it and then rubs a finger over Pete's name. Matt knows exactly how Pete would react to the article, too.
Fucking cunt journos. Can't even get the fucking thing straight, could they? They put me on the front page when we win a match, all cause we get into a little scrap but a man dies and where's he get? Fucking in the middle of the fucking adverts. Bloody muckrakers don't know a fucking thing about perspective, do they?
Matt gives a bitter laugh before folding the paper back up and putting back into the drawer where he keeps it buried underneath his hoodie (still bloody from that last fight) and his jeans (dirt on the knees from where he tackled that guy trying to strangle Pete). The laugh hangs in the air as he grabs his pack of cigarettes and heads out onto the small balcony of his brownstone. His dad, finally pretending to be a dad, had bought him the place. Need a home port, don't I? You can have it but keep a room ready for me.
Even this period - standing here, rain or shine, smoking and humming I'm forever blowing bubbles, pretty bubbles in the air, they fly so high, they reach the sky, and like my dreams they fade and die - is better than when he's sleeping. It's in his sleep that he fully remembers his time in England.
Shannon worries about him more than she worries about Ben not knowing his father. He's dealing all right with things other than not sleeping. He goes until he crashes, every fucking time. When he crashes, he remembers the fights and the camaraderie. He remembers the sense of belonging and the friendship. He remembers the feel of being pressed against the closed door of Pete's flat as Pete's hands hold him against it while his mouth ravages his own. Bovver was closer than either Pete or him were ever comfortable with when he'd commented about them being in one another's pockets.
There wasn't any love there. Every time they'd come together, it had been after a fight while the adrenaline was still pumping and they were drunk on victory, bruised and battered, needing to reaffirm that yes, they were still alive. They'd won and they'd take that victory out on one another's bodies. It's these moments that haunt him more than the smiles or the casual arm swung over his shoulders or the way that he'd ever-so-slightly lean in to Pete's body as they sat together drinking at the pub.
He's fooling himself. He's not dealing with Pete's death well at all. He's the cause of it, the reason Bovver went over to the Millwall lads in the first place. It's his fault that Steve was stabbed and his sister's crying her eyes out missing her husband. It's his fault that his nephew doesn't have a dad. It's his fault that Pete's fucking dead and the only thing that remains is a shit article in the London Times. They don't mention that West Ham beat Millwall four to nil. They don't mention that at all, they're too busy fixating on the death of a man in a fight in a field of rocks and bricks and old boards.
He stubs out his cigarette just as his phone starts ringing. Looking at the caller id, the slight sense of peace he gets from the cigarettes disappears as he glares at the phone. If he ignores this call, his sister will just pack Ben up and bring him over. It'd be better and easier just to answer it. "Yeah?"
"How are you?" she asks and Matt wants to just close the phone.
"I'm good, you? Heard from Steve lately?"
"He's out of hospital. The scarring won't be too bad."
"You going back, then?"
"I don't know," she says it with a resigned tone, as if she knows but just won't say to him. After all, he's already told her countless times just why Steve was there.
Still, he can't resist saying it once more, "Steve was only protecting me. He wasn't there for any other reason. He never even threw a punch. Hell, he was trying to reason with that asshole when he got stabbed. You love him, you know you do. Ben deserves his dad and, let's face it, Steve's better at the whole dad thing than Carl ever was."
"I know but -" she starts to say but he interrupts her.
"No buts. You have a chance to give Ben a home and I don't think you're being fair to Steve. He was protecting me. It's like you're punishing him for what my choices were." There. It's out in the open now.
"Pete's death isn't your fault." She's always known him too well.
"It is."
"It's that friend of his's fault. It's not yours." He can hear her sighing and then playing with her hair. Ben giggles in the background and then she comes back onto the phone, "You need to sleep and to start getting over this."
"That why you won't go back to Steve? Because I'm not going to get over this if you're back in England?"
She pauses long enough that he knows that's exactly what she's thinking. If she goes back to England, back to Steve, he'll remember his time there and the, as far as she's aware, friendship with Pete. He'll never heal because he'll be drawn to visit and haunt the hangouts. "Christ, Shannon, stop punishing Steve."
"I…" there's that pause again. He rolls his eyes at the phone. "I don't know."
"He didn't break his promise. Not even when he was getting threatened. That's got to count for something. Hell, he got stabbed instead of breaking his promise to you. Forgive him and go back to him. Life's short, too short maybe, to stand your ground like this."
"You're right." It's an admission he never really expected to hear.
"I am?"
"Yeah."
"You going to call Steve?"
"I think I will," she says and then bursts into tears.
"Hey, Shannon? You're freaking me out. I thought this was a good thing."
"It is, it is." She stops crying for a moment and says into the phone, "I've got a call to make and you need to sleep."
"Yeah, all right. You're doing the right thing."
"Good night."
"Night," he says and then hangs up the phone before tapping another cigarette from the pack. He has classes in the morning, a full course load that he should be concentrating on.
Pete taught him more about living by dying than Harvard ever could.
~~**~~
Shannon's been back in England for two months and his semester's almost over. The whole lot of them are coming in for his graduation: Steve, Shannon and little Ben. Hell, Carl'll be there and that's a rare enough occurrence that Matt takes it for the gesture that it is.
He's writing his thesis, on the way that the media distorts fact, that it concentrates on negatives instead of positives, that it does anything for a headline to sell papers because that's exactly what they're in the business of doing, selling ad space or their souls. He's really into it, his iPod blasting the West Ham fight song loudly as he types on his laptop. So when the bell rings, he's startled by it to the point that he types out gibberish and has to go back and delete. The bell rings again. And then again. Whoever it is, it isn't more important than the story swirling in his head, the picture of Pete ranting about the coverage of the match and their scrum. When he's a 'fucking journo', he wants to cover the story, not just the sensationalism of whatever might surround the main point.
The bell rings again, breaking his concentration and Matt rips the earbuds from his ears and curses as he walks towards the front door.
"Oi! What the bloody fuck is taking you so fucking long to get the bloody door? Fucking cunt, open up the ruddy thing!" Matt stops dead in his tracks at the familiar accent and missed voice. He's finally getting over his time in England, finally channeling it into something more positive. Obviously, though, he's not dealing near as well as he thought he'd been because he's hallucinating.
"You bloody fucking cuntrag! Open this fucking door before I break it down myself!"
Matt throws open the door and stares at the sight in front of him. A grin - the one that still haunts his dreams - spreads across that missed face.
"You're dead," he blurts out rather stupidly.
"Look, old son, the rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated. Fucking cunt journos fucked up the story again. Can't expect better of them, though, can we?" Pete keeps grinning though his hands clench and unclench, a sure sign of his nervousness. "You going to invite me in or am I going to have to sleep out here for all your neighbors to see? Want me to get roused by the police? Less than a bloody fucking day in this country and I'm getting arrested already. Promise to Steve broken just like that."
"Yeah, yeah, come in," he says and steps back, waving Pete in to the house. "I…"
"What? Never seen a bloke come back from the dead?"
"No, never." He's really sounding stupid but right now his brain is rather stuck with the whole concept of Pete's dead and this is a dream and I've finally lost it and I'm never going to graduate from Harvard.
"It's good to see you," Pete says quietly, suddenly serious with his grin disappearing.
"You have hair," Matt remarks stupidly, again.
"Steve thought it might make me look less disreputable. 'Sides, it covers the scars," Pete says and then pulls the hair from his forehead to show a mass of scar tissue. "Can't rightly get a bloody job teaching kids when you look like Frankenstein."
"You don't look like Frankenstein. Tommy Hatcher do this?" Matt reaches out a hand and traces the lines.
"Yeah." Pete's hand moves, lightning fast, and captures Matt's, trapping it against his skin before pulling it down against his cheek. "You miss me?"
"Course I did, you fucking wanker," Matt says before Pete laughs.
"Yank, you need to learn how to say that properly." There's a lighthearted moment before it all slides back into that too-serious I-thought-you-were-dead.
"What happened to you?"
"I died." Matt rolls his eyes and makes no move to shift his hand from Pete's cheek. "I did but they used those electric paddles on me and bam, I'm back. Fucking Steve wanted to beat the bloody fuck out of me when they put us in the same fucking room. Got knocked around enough that they didn't let me out of hospital for weeks."
"You go after Hatcher?"
"Steve and me, we made a pact. It died there. No more GSE for either of us."
Matt finally let his hand drop and then lunged forward and hugged Pete. "God, I just… God."
Pete's arms came around him and held on tightly. "You missed me? You going botty boy on me?"
"Fuck off," Matt says as he breathes against Pete's skin. He's content enough to stay right here, in his foyer with a paper due, graduation looming and Pete alive and holding on. When Pete pulls back, Matt resists sighing or doing anything at all except for absorbing the past few minutes. He realizes, rather quickly, that he's not the only one that's missed and been missed when Pete pulls him forward by his shoulders only to kiss him. Their mouths meet in a tumble of misaligned lips and clashing teeth. The knock to his teeth only makes him feel more alive as they kiss, hands touching and groping, exploring skin that's changed in the months since last they saw one another. They'd only had weeks, months, before. Hell, Pete's been dead longer than they had but that just means that this tastes even better than memory with the way they finally remember the rhythm and the way that each liked to kiss.
There's no fight before this one, no blood in their eyes or on their hands and faces, dripping down to flavor the kiss. There's only stale cigarettes and Coke and time. Too much time. When they pull apart, both are breathing heavily and they rest forehead to forehead, hands cupping the backs of necks as they stare at one another in that blurry closeness.
"I didn't know if you'd…"
"I can't believe you're…"
They talk over one another and then become silent together.
"How long are you here for?" Matt finally asks after minutes that seem like hours.
"I was reckoning as long as you can stand me." Pete pauses before continuing. "Had to get out of London for a bit. Steve thought I'd go back to it and end up permanently dead this time."
"Guess it's only fair. You let me stay with you there. You do realize, though, you'll have to watch the Red Sox, right?"
"Those bloody tossers?" They separate and Matt can't help keeping his hands on Pete's body, his hands drifting along Pete's shoulders and then down his arms to squeeze his hands before letting go. Pete grins at him. "It's not a real sport. Fucking cuntrags wouldn't last two seconds in a real game."
"We'll see."
"Guess we will."
As always, I'd love to hear what you thought.
Fandom: Green Street Hooligans
Pairing: Matt Buckner/Pete Dunham
Rating: R for language
Warnings: Offensive Language. Spoilers for the movie.
Wordcount: ~2500 words
Summary: Fucking journos even fuck this shit up.
A/N: Self-beta'd. I really do mean the warning for offensive language. Don't think this will be a fandom I normally write in but I couldn't quite get the outcome out of my head.
His time in England is a blur now. It's been a few months and Shannon's right; no one gives a flying fuck just what his reputation was over in England. Hell, no one gives a flying fuck who he is because of England. It's all about what he's done to Jeremy Van Holden. He gets interviews and his dad helps him write the story for the Harvard paper. It's all a rush and a blur. A blanket over all the time in England covering it in a sea of numbness and activity.
It's not that he forgets, he can't. It's not that he wants to forget. He doesn't. It's that he can't think about it right now, can't absorb what happened, can't do anything about the fact that Pete's dead, he helped get him there and, fuck's sake! There are too many other things. He's got to stop thinking about Pete and he sure as shit has to stop looking at the damned newspaper article detailing Pete's death.
During the day, he's all right. He's good. He goes to class, he comes back to the house, he cleans, he cooks, he spends time with his sister on the weekends, he babysits his nephew, he does any of a thousand and one things to keep his mind off of football and Pete and that newspaper article.
In the middle of the night, though, he can't fool himself any longer. The article haunts him and he pulls out the paper, flips through until he sees it and then rubs a finger over Pete's name. Matt knows exactly how Pete would react to the article, too.
Fucking cunt journos. Can't even get the fucking thing straight, could they? They put me on the front page when we win a match, all cause we get into a little scrap but a man dies and where's he get? Fucking in the middle of the fucking adverts. Bloody muckrakers don't know a fucking thing about perspective, do they?
Matt gives a bitter laugh before folding the paper back up and putting back into the drawer where he keeps it buried underneath his hoodie (still bloody from that last fight) and his jeans (dirt on the knees from where he tackled that guy trying to strangle Pete). The laugh hangs in the air as he grabs his pack of cigarettes and heads out onto the small balcony of his brownstone. His dad, finally pretending to be a dad, had bought him the place. Need a home port, don't I? You can have it but keep a room ready for me.
Even this period - standing here, rain or shine, smoking and humming I'm forever blowing bubbles, pretty bubbles in the air, they fly so high, they reach the sky, and like my dreams they fade and die - is better than when he's sleeping. It's in his sleep that he fully remembers his time in England.
Shannon worries about him more than she worries about Ben not knowing his father. He's dealing all right with things other than not sleeping. He goes until he crashes, every fucking time. When he crashes, he remembers the fights and the camaraderie. He remembers the sense of belonging and the friendship. He remembers the feel of being pressed against the closed door of Pete's flat as Pete's hands hold him against it while his mouth ravages his own. Bovver was closer than either Pete or him were ever comfortable with when he'd commented about them being in one another's pockets.
There wasn't any love there. Every time they'd come together, it had been after a fight while the adrenaline was still pumping and they were drunk on victory, bruised and battered, needing to reaffirm that yes, they were still alive. They'd won and they'd take that victory out on one another's bodies. It's these moments that haunt him more than the smiles or the casual arm swung over his shoulders or the way that he'd ever-so-slightly lean in to Pete's body as they sat together drinking at the pub.
He's fooling himself. He's not dealing with Pete's death well at all. He's the cause of it, the reason Bovver went over to the Millwall lads in the first place. It's his fault that Steve was stabbed and his sister's crying her eyes out missing her husband. It's his fault that his nephew doesn't have a dad. It's his fault that Pete's fucking dead and the only thing that remains is a shit article in the London Times. They don't mention that West Ham beat Millwall four to nil. They don't mention that at all, they're too busy fixating on the death of a man in a fight in a field of rocks and bricks and old boards.
He stubs out his cigarette just as his phone starts ringing. Looking at the caller id, the slight sense of peace he gets from the cigarettes disappears as he glares at the phone. If he ignores this call, his sister will just pack Ben up and bring him over. It'd be better and easier just to answer it. "Yeah?"
"How are you?" she asks and Matt wants to just close the phone.
"I'm good, you? Heard from Steve lately?"
"He's out of hospital. The scarring won't be too bad."
"You going back, then?"
"I don't know," she says it with a resigned tone, as if she knows but just won't say to him. After all, he's already told her countless times just why Steve was there.
Still, he can't resist saying it once more, "Steve was only protecting me. He wasn't there for any other reason. He never even threw a punch. Hell, he was trying to reason with that asshole when he got stabbed. You love him, you know you do. Ben deserves his dad and, let's face it, Steve's better at the whole dad thing than Carl ever was."
"I know but -" she starts to say but he interrupts her.
"No buts. You have a chance to give Ben a home and I don't think you're being fair to Steve. He was protecting me. It's like you're punishing him for what my choices were." There. It's out in the open now.
"Pete's death isn't your fault." She's always known him too well.
"It is."
"It's that friend of his's fault. It's not yours." He can hear her sighing and then playing with her hair. Ben giggles in the background and then she comes back onto the phone, "You need to sleep and to start getting over this."
"That why you won't go back to Steve? Because I'm not going to get over this if you're back in England?"
She pauses long enough that he knows that's exactly what she's thinking. If she goes back to England, back to Steve, he'll remember his time there and the, as far as she's aware, friendship with Pete. He'll never heal because he'll be drawn to visit and haunt the hangouts. "Christ, Shannon, stop punishing Steve."
"I…" there's that pause again. He rolls his eyes at the phone. "I don't know."
"He didn't break his promise. Not even when he was getting threatened. That's got to count for something. Hell, he got stabbed instead of breaking his promise to you. Forgive him and go back to him. Life's short, too short maybe, to stand your ground like this."
"You're right." It's an admission he never really expected to hear.
"I am?"
"Yeah."
"You going to call Steve?"
"I think I will," she says and then bursts into tears.
"Hey, Shannon? You're freaking me out. I thought this was a good thing."
"It is, it is." She stops crying for a moment and says into the phone, "I've got a call to make and you need to sleep."
"Yeah, all right. You're doing the right thing."
"Good night."
"Night," he says and then hangs up the phone before tapping another cigarette from the pack. He has classes in the morning, a full course load that he should be concentrating on.
Pete taught him more about living by dying than Harvard ever could.
~~**~~
Shannon's been back in England for two months and his semester's almost over. The whole lot of them are coming in for his graduation: Steve, Shannon and little Ben. Hell, Carl'll be there and that's a rare enough occurrence that Matt takes it for the gesture that it is.
He's writing his thesis, on the way that the media distorts fact, that it concentrates on negatives instead of positives, that it does anything for a headline to sell papers because that's exactly what they're in the business of doing, selling ad space or their souls. He's really into it, his iPod blasting the West Ham fight song loudly as he types on his laptop. So when the bell rings, he's startled by it to the point that he types out gibberish and has to go back and delete. The bell rings again. And then again. Whoever it is, it isn't more important than the story swirling in his head, the picture of Pete ranting about the coverage of the match and their scrum. When he's a 'fucking journo', he wants to cover the story, not just the sensationalism of whatever might surround the main point.
The bell rings again, breaking his concentration and Matt rips the earbuds from his ears and curses as he walks towards the front door.
"Oi! What the bloody fuck is taking you so fucking long to get the bloody door? Fucking cunt, open up the ruddy thing!" Matt stops dead in his tracks at the familiar accent and missed voice. He's finally getting over his time in England, finally channeling it into something more positive. Obviously, though, he's not dealing near as well as he thought he'd been because he's hallucinating.
"You bloody fucking cuntrag! Open this fucking door before I break it down myself!"
Matt throws open the door and stares at the sight in front of him. A grin - the one that still haunts his dreams - spreads across that missed face.
"You're dead," he blurts out rather stupidly.
"Look, old son, the rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated. Fucking cunt journos fucked up the story again. Can't expect better of them, though, can we?" Pete keeps grinning though his hands clench and unclench, a sure sign of his nervousness. "You going to invite me in or am I going to have to sleep out here for all your neighbors to see? Want me to get roused by the police? Less than a bloody fucking day in this country and I'm getting arrested already. Promise to Steve broken just like that."
"Yeah, yeah, come in," he says and steps back, waving Pete in to the house. "I…"
"What? Never seen a bloke come back from the dead?"
"No, never." He's really sounding stupid but right now his brain is rather stuck with the whole concept of Pete's dead and this is a dream and I've finally lost it and I'm never going to graduate from Harvard.
"It's good to see you," Pete says quietly, suddenly serious with his grin disappearing.
"You have hair," Matt remarks stupidly, again.
"Steve thought it might make me look less disreputable. 'Sides, it covers the scars," Pete says and then pulls the hair from his forehead to show a mass of scar tissue. "Can't rightly get a bloody job teaching kids when you look like Frankenstein."
"You don't look like Frankenstein. Tommy Hatcher do this?" Matt reaches out a hand and traces the lines.
"Yeah." Pete's hand moves, lightning fast, and captures Matt's, trapping it against his skin before pulling it down against his cheek. "You miss me?"
"Course I did, you fucking wanker," Matt says before Pete laughs.
"Yank, you need to learn how to say that properly." There's a lighthearted moment before it all slides back into that too-serious I-thought-you-were-dead.
"What happened to you?"
"I died." Matt rolls his eyes and makes no move to shift his hand from Pete's cheek. "I did but they used those electric paddles on me and bam, I'm back. Fucking Steve wanted to beat the bloody fuck out of me when they put us in the same fucking room. Got knocked around enough that they didn't let me out of hospital for weeks."
"You go after Hatcher?"
"Steve and me, we made a pact. It died there. No more GSE for either of us."
Matt finally let his hand drop and then lunged forward and hugged Pete. "God, I just… God."
Pete's arms came around him and held on tightly. "You missed me? You going botty boy on me?"
"Fuck off," Matt says as he breathes against Pete's skin. He's content enough to stay right here, in his foyer with a paper due, graduation looming and Pete alive and holding on. When Pete pulls back, Matt resists sighing or doing anything at all except for absorbing the past few minutes. He realizes, rather quickly, that he's not the only one that's missed and been missed when Pete pulls him forward by his shoulders only to kiss him. Their mouths meet in a tumble of misaligned lips and clashing teeth. The knock to his teeth only makes him feel more alive as they kiss, hands touching and groping, exploring skin that's changed in the months since last they saw one another. They'd only had weeks, months, before. Hell, Pete's been dead longer than they had but that just means that this tastes even better than memory with the way they finally remember the rhythm and the way that each liked to kiss.
There's no fight before this one, no blood in their eyes or on their hands and faces, dripping down to flavor the kiss. There's only stale cigarettes and Coke and time. Too much time. When they pull apart, both are breathing heavily and they rest forehead to forehead, hands cupping the backs of necks as they stare at one another in that blurry closeness.
"I didn't know if you'd…"
"I can't believe you're…"
They talk over one another and then become silent together.
"How long are you here for?" Matt finally asks after minutes that seem like hours.
"I was reckoning as long as you can stand me." Pete pauses before continuing. "Had to get out of London for a bit. Steve thought I'd go back to it and end up permanently dead this time."
"Guess it's only fair. You let me stay with you there. You do realize, though, you'll have to watch the Red Sox, right?"
"Those bloody tossers?" They separate and Matt can't help keeping his hands on Pete's body, his hands drifting along Pete's shoulders and then down his arms to squeeze his hands before letting go. Pete grins at him. "It's not a real sport. Fucking cuntrags wouldn't last two seconds in a real game."
"We'll see."
"Guess we will."
As always, I'd love to hear what you thought.