Title: The Strong and Silent Type
Rating: PG (language)
Characters: Cory and Matt (friendshippy), and various other cast/crew.
Word count: 4,000-ish
Summary: Matt doesn’t like bad news, so he keeps it to himself.
Notes: There was a prompt over at the meme about shaved heads, sickness, and talking. This isn’t a happy fic.
Cory isn’t there for the start of the conversation, just walking through the lot and hanging out. Matt is sitting in a folding chair outside Jane’s trailer, under a little canopy that acts as her front porch. He’s playing with his phone and talking with Chris.
Chris does not look happy.
“What? You think I should just bottle up every bad thing that happens to me?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“That I shouldn’t be trying to raise awareness?”
“I didn’t say that, either.”
“Well, what the heck are you saying?”
Cory can’t help but smile, and gravitate over. He thinks that Chris is super cool, and seriously ballsy about some things. And it’s sweet the way he has no potty mouth at all. And it looks more interesting that jamming with Mark, for the moment at least.
“I’m just saying that we’re entertainment,” Matt says, not looking up from his phone. He’s probably playing Tetris, or online chess.
“Well, duh,” Chris says.
Matt sighs, and finally looks up. “What you do is great, and it’s helping, and we’re all proud of you. Honestly. And we’re all trying to do the same kinds of things. But at the end of the day, we’re entertainment. We’re a distraction. I’m not saying that bad shit doesn’t happen, and that we haven’t all gone through hell at one time or another.” Matt shifts his attention back to his phone. “I just don’t think that part is anyone’s business.”
Chris’ hands are fists by his side, and he turns sharply and stalks off. Chris probably has more character-bleed than most of them. The fact that he’s wearing bunny slippers with a pair of Target jeans is what separates him from Kurt at that moment.
Cory raises an eyebrow at Matt. “Another charity thing?”
“Yeah,” Matt replies without looking up. “I’m taking the weekend off.”
“Don’t tell Ryan,” Cory replies.
“Can’t have him knowing we have free time,” Matt agrees.
*
Cory offers to go with Chris, along with Naya and Heather. It’s part of the ‘Stand up to Cancer’ campaign. When asked, he talks about his grandma having skin cancer, and how important sunscreen is.
“It’s crazy down in Australia,” he says to a microphone and a camera. “They won’t let you walk outside without a hat, and sunscreen, and sunglasses. Yeah, I scored, like, five pairs of sunglasses when I was over there. That part was great.”
Because it’s a serious issue, but Matt’s right. Sometimes it’s easier to laugh and move on.
*
It’s hard to hang out with Matt outside of filming. For one, they’re all crazy-busy. For another, when Matt isn’t crazy-busy he’s lost somewhere, in the middle of a run. He’s one of those freaks who can run for something like ten hours. Cory figures that if Matt could just find a pair of shorts that didn’t get all sweaty and gross, he’d never stop running at all.
He gets a little out of breath while they’re rehearsing the dance part of Toxic, and he puts a hand over his lower ribs, like he’s pressing out a tight muscle.
“You okay?” Cory asks him.
“Yeah,” Matt replies. “This is nothing.”
They get hurt all the time on this show. They’re lucky that no one has broken a bone or done anything to put them off their feet for a few weeks. But they work hard, and they get hurt, and that’s just part of it. Cory knows he’s lucky that he sucks, and that Finn is meant to suck at the dancing thing. It means he doesn’t have to do anything hard.
*
“Kris said she checked you out,” Ryan says to Matt.
Matt nods as he drinks from his water bottle. “Yeah, I’m gonna go to a real doctor when we wrap for this one.”
“Hey, I am a real doctor,” Kris replies. She isn’t, she’s a paramedic who works for the studio, but whenever someone teases her she withholds ice packs and painkillers. “Just because there’s nothing wrong with you.”
Matt batts his eyelashes at her. “There’s plenty wrong with me,” he says in a low voice, and she laughs and shoves him away. Matt laughs too, his eyes bright and happy. So Cory doesn’t worry.
*
Cory raps his knuckles on the door of Matt’s trailer, and heads in without waiting for a reply. Matt’s sitting on the bar fridge inside, his feet still touching the floor, one hand tugging at his curls. The other holds his phone to his ear.
“Because you’re my agent, that’s why,” he says into the phone. “Yeah, and your cut of this job got you two sports cars. So when I tell you to turn up for a meeting, you damn well turn up.”
Matt looks up at Cory, and rolls his eyes with the most drama he can muster from his position. Cory loosely curls his fingers and lifts one hand to his mouth, making the universal ‘cocksucker’ motion, and raising his eyebrow to provide a question mark.
Matt nods, and mimes shooting himself in the head. “Well, look at it this way, I’m going to go in there anyway, so you can either get down here and back me up, or I go have fun and you have to dig me out of the shit I get myself into anyway.”
Cory walks over, and runs his fingernails over Matt’s scalp, scratching the top of his head like he does with Lea’s cats. Matt head butts him in the chest, and nudges him away with his elbow.
“If you didn’t want to deal with divas, you shouldn't have become an agent now, should you?” Matt looks up at Cory again, who takes to moment to get out his Jazz-hands and his smile ‘so bright it could cure cancer’. Matt has to force down a smile. “My audience awaits,” he says into the phone. “I’ll see you Friday.”
“What’s happening Friday?” Cory asks, stepping back so Matt has the room to straighten up.
“Nothing,” Matt replies. “Just contract stuff, the usual circle-jerk.”
“Circle-jerk, eh? I thought Mark, Chord, and Kevin had the monopoly on that.”
“They said they’d let me come if I wore the chicken shorts.”
“Do you mean ‘attend’? Or are the dirty images in my head completely justified?”
Matt snorts as he locks his trailer. “The shit in your head is never justified,” he replies.
They shove each other as they walk back to the soundstage, bumping shoulders and calling names. Matt is in a good mood, a playful one. And usually a playful Matt is a dangerous Matt, because he has an inventive streak in him and a cruel sense of humour. But Cory’s tires are still full of air when they can finally go home, even though Matt is still a little hyper.
Cory figures it’s just a good day.
*
Matt and Cory don’t have a lot of scenes together so far, so they don’t see much of one another for the remainder of the week. First thing the following week, Ryan rounds them all up and says, “I hate you all, and your contracts are non-negotiable. Grab your scripts; we do a read-through in five.”
Cory looks over at Matt and raises an eyebrow. Matt waves it off, and turns his back to Cory as he reads through the script.
*
It’s almost halfway through the week before Cory manages to get Matt alone. He’s been in a good mood all week, despite Ryan’s fit earlier, and he’s been busy playing pranks and making people laugh. Matt spent four hours following Diana around, just standing really close behind her, and stepping back and looking innocent whenever she turned to call him on it. Earlier in a scene, Mr Schue kept shifting in the background, so he was standing behind Quinn, and Diana kept corpsing.
“So, what?” Cory asks as he steps into Matt’s trailer. “You looking to skip out on us?”
Matt doesn’t look up from his Sudoku book. “Nah,” he replies. “Just wanted to cut my hours back a bit. And maybe get a different haircut sometime in the next four years.”
“Oh. You pissed you didn’t get what you wanted?”
Matt looks up at Cory, with this odd smile on his face. “I’ll get it eventually,” he says.
*
Matt takes a lot of painkillers. That’s the first big change that Cory notices. “It feels like I pulled something,” he says, his hand over his ribs.
“You gonna be alright?” Cory asks.
“Yeah,” Matt replies, pausing to swallow some water. “I’ve had this before.” He looks up at Cory with big, green eyes. “Don’t tell anyone, okay?”
“Sure,” Cory says. “Just don’t go dying on us or anything.”
And Matt laughs.
*
There’s no Mr Schue in the next episode.
“Matt’s out for the week so we can all go home without worrying about confetti bombs under our hoods,” Ryan tells them, a wonky grin on his face. “We’re filming the stunning guest scenes, and he’ll have to suck it up and do his bumpers when we tell him to. Otherwise you’re all safe from his creeper-ways. So there’s no excuse for cracking on camera. Alright, let’s go.”
It feels weird without Matt on the set. Cory keeps waiting for a yell of outrage from somewhere, as if Matt has just been hiding in a cupboard and waiting for the right moment to leap out, but it never comes. They take the time he’s away to completely fill every possible storage unit in his trailer with sample packets of Lubriderm. Jane writes a fake scene of Mr Schue confessing his inappropriate feelings for Finn, accompanied by three pages of entirely pornographic stage directions. They mail it to him in an official studio envelope, with a forged note about a ‘new direction’ for the show.
Matt should have gotten it the same day, but there’s no response. Cory just figures he’s out running or something.
He tries to fill Matt’s shoes. He does the lurking thing behind Lea, and she whirls around and explodes within an hour. “What?” Cory says. “What am I doing? I’m just standing here.” That quickly escalates to him holding a fingertip one inch from her body, and saying “I’m not touching you. I’m not touching you,” until she’s laughing and punching him in the arm all at once. He just has to start to lift his arm when they’re on set, and both Lea and Dianna start laughing.
But it’s not the same when Matt’s not doing it.
*
Cory has a wedding he’d like to go to in three months, and they’ve all learned from experience that you give Ryan a lot of time to say ‘no’, otherwise he yells it and throws things at you. Cory hovers by the open door of Ryan’s office, waiting to be noticed. (He’s six-foot-three, it usually doesn’t take long for him to get noticed.) Ryan’s on the phone.
“So how bad is it? ... That’s bad. That’s how it works, right? The higher the number the more advanced?” Ryan is propping his head up with a hand over his eyes. “How’s he taking it?” Something on the other end of the line makes Ryan snort. “Really? He didn’t fucking mention that in his medical history. Yeah, you go explain to him that the ‘relevant’ part really does include shit like a singer and dancer having fucking-”
Cory’s height must have filtered through somehow, because Ryan looks up then and stops dead.
“Right,” he says into the phone. “We’ll just have to get as much done as we can before it gets bad. And I want some kind of documentation explaining what the hell is going on before he comes anywhere near the set again.” Ryan mutters a goodbye, and hangs up.
“Who were you talking about?” Cory asks, because it’s not like he can pretend he wasn’t blatantly snooping.
“Some moronic triple-threat.” Ryan looks Cory up and down, and tries to school his face into a glare. “And what do you want?”
“I, uh. A friend is getting Married. In January. It’s on a Sunday, and I could do the round trip within a day?”
Ryan’s brow is still furrowed, but he’s staring past Cory not at him. “Sure,” he says. “Take the whole weekend, whatever. Just get the form filled out and filed pronto.”
“Sure,” Cory says. “Great. Uh, thank you.” And he goes.
*
Cory drives over to Matt’s place the following evening. It’s late, and he has no idea if Matt’s even home, but there’s been radio silence from him all week and people are wondering what he’s up to. The main theory is that he had to run off for some album-fixing, maybe go OS to record some duet. Cory just wants to check things out.
The lights are on, and Matt lets Cory in without a word. He looks tired, like he really has been jet setting all over. Cory follows Matt into the wide, bright living area. Matt’s new house doesn’t suit him, not yet. It’s all white walls, wooden floor, and dark furniture. There’s nothing on the walls yet. Cory has seen hotel rooms that look more personal. He opens his mouth to make a dumb comment, when he spots Matt’s phone. It’s not broken into a million pieces, but it’s definitely broken. Definitely had an altercation with a wall at high speeds.
“Lose one too many games of chess?” Cory asks.
“Yeah,” Matt replies. “Something like that.”
Despite the bad sense of humour, and the weird need to rile people up, Matt is quite the professional on set. He might be pensive at times, but he’ll pull himself back from wherever his thoughts have gone and be playful and teasing. He was always willing to offer advice, or tell a story, or cheer someone up. But they weren’t on set, and even though Cory had seen next to nothing of Matt on his downtime, he knew that he could be a very different person.
“How’ve you been?” he asks as Matt pours them glasses of soda.
“I’ve been fine,” Matt replies. Which is a fucking lie, Cory is sure of it. Cory stares at him even as Matt finds excuses not to meet his eyes. He puts the cap back on the soda. He puts the soda back in the fridge. He puts the cutlery drying on the sink away. He puts the tea towel back in place. “It’s been an interesting few weeks,” he finally concedes.
Cory rests his hip against the kitchen bench, and takes a sip of soda. “What’s happened?”
Matt puts plates away. Wipes the bench down. Wipes the table down. He replies when his back is to Cory, focused on these menial tasks. “My lungs have been playing up.”
“What? Like asthma or something?”
Matt doesn’t even pause, just finishes wiping the table down and stands back, looking for streaks on the cherry-wood surface. “No,” he says finally. “Not really.”
*
Matt is back the next week, and back to his usual self. His agent is with him, and disappears into Ryan’s office holding a giant folder.
“What’s going on?” Lea asks, standing on tiptoe behind Matt and resting her chin on his shoulder. “You bringing out the big guns to get Christmas off?”
“Nah,” Matt replies. “He’s redecorating and wants Ryan to help him pick out wallpaper patterns. You know he’s good a good eye for that stuff.”
Everyone knows that Matt’s lying, and no one is sure why. Whatever it is, it’s definitely bigger than asthma.
*
Matt spends most of the week arguing on his new mobile with his agent. Or maybe his agent argues, Matt just says ‘no’ repeatedly with various level of annoyance.
“Is he reading out marriage proposals?” Chord asks.
“Yeah,” Matt replies. “You need to get your mom to stop writing to me about that. It’s making the sex awkward.” And then Chord leaps at him with a battle cry of “For Momma’s Honour!” and they’re playing a cross between tag and pro-wrestling.
“What’s it really about?” Cory asks later.
“Just some publicity bullshit.”
*
Matt is quieter over the next weeks. He’s less playful, between takes. He saves up all of his energy for when he’s working. It’s not that big a deal, they all burn out every now and then. The hours they work, they’d be inhuman if they didn’t just run out of juice every now and then. He argues with Ryan too, though no one knows what about since they both go silent if anyone goes near. The rumour is that he’s gotten a sexy deal from a record company or something like that.
Cory is pretty sure it’s nothing like that.
“All right, everyone, get the hell over here!” Ryan claps his hands, and beckons everyone over to the catering table. In that respect, Ryan is a genius - able to combine yelling at people and feeding them into one time-saving enterprise.
“As you all know, Matt is a pussy who won’t talk about his feelings unless there’s a camera in his face and a pretty lady asking him questions-” Matt throws a chunk of rockmelon at Ryan. He doesn’t look happy, but he hides it fairly well. “- so the long story short is that he’s getting his hours cut back for health reasons, and the rest of you are getting the screen time that was once wasted on white-boy rapping.”
“You love the white-boy rapping,” Matt calls out.
“I do,” Ryan admits. “Cutting it out is going to break my heart.” His face is soft then, and that’s how everyone knows that something really serious is happening. And then he’s back to business. “So, our schedule will be a little choppy until we fall into a new rhythm. Just ride it out, and be nice to Matt, and don’t beat him up too bad when he touches your cars. Gentle beatings, people. We’re all about the tough love here.”
Everyone is dismissed, but none of the actors move. Everyone turns and stares at Matt.
“So,” he says after a long pause. “How about this weather we’re having?”
*
“So, are you ever going to tell any of us what’s going on?” Cory asks. They’re in his trailer. Mainly because people keep dropping by Matt’s and badgering him.
“Eventually,” Matt says. “When I can’t avoid it any longer.”
“If it’s something that’s hard to talk about, then maybe you should practice how you’re going to tell people?”
Matt gives Cory a look that lets him know that he’s completely failing at being subtle. “Practice on you, maybe?”
Cory slaps his Finn voice on without hesitation. “Hey, that’s a great idea! Man, I was just going to suggest using a mirror or something.”
Matt’s mouth twitches, and he looks down at the bottle of Coke in his hands, peeling the label off with absent fingers. “I have cancer,” he tells the bottle of Coke. “In my right lung.”
Cory stares at him. When he finally speaks, it’s nothing articulate. “What?”
“Yeah.”
“I... you don’t smoke?” Cory knows that sentence isn’t a question, but he needs some kind of an answer and he just doesn’t know what to ask.
“No,” Matt replies. “But that doesn’t really matter.”
Cory slumps back against the arm of his tiny couch. “How long have you known?”
“I knew something was wrong at the Tonys. Took me a while to get it checked out.”
And Cory has an urge to strangle Matt, because the Tonys were ages ago. He thinks back, trying to find all of the times when Matt the exercise freak was short of breath. He remembers Matt clutching his ribs and swallowing painkillers. “You said you’d had this before?”
“Yeah,” Matt says again. “About five years ago. I had radiation therapy, which killed off the cancer. And I got to rock the shaved head look, just in case we needed to go to chemo.”
“But it... it didn’t get all of it?”
“That’s one possibility,” Matt admits. “The other is that the radiation damaged some cells in the treatment area, and gave me an all-new and exciting cancer.” His mouth twitches, like he’s trying not to laugh.
“That’s fucked up,” Cory says at last.
Matt slumps back against Cory’s couch, and grins. “Yeah. It’s fucked right up.”
*
Lea gets told next. Cory knows, because when she finds out she latches onto Matt and cries on him, leaving Matt looking oddly perplexed and patting her shoulder. And after that, everyone knows. The cast know, the crew know, people on Broadway know.
Cory is pretty certain that this is exactly what Matt had been trying to avoid. The way his face tightens whenever someone unexpected offers their prayers and well wishes says a lot, but then he puts on a confident smile and says, “Given some of the audiences I’ve played too, cancer doesn’t seem too bad. At least it’s not going to write a review panning me after.”
The general consensus is that Matt will kill and skin whoever leaks this to the press.
“I didn’t know he’d had cancer before,” Jane says, her laptop open and her Google-fu amped to the max. “There’s nothing coming up about it.”
“No one knew,” Lea replies. “He just... took a year off. I asked around, apparently he told people that Disney captured him and took him to a re-education camp.”
“I wouldn’t put it past those scheming mice,” Chris says absently. “I never trust anyone who refuses to take their gloves off.”
“This blows,” Mark concludes.
*
Matt still comes to work. Mr Schue gets a few more numbers tossed his way, and everyone senses that it’s to take advantage of Matt’s voice and strength while it’s still there. Everyone throws forward their ideas for covering the absences that come later.
“Mr Schue marries Shelby, and has to split his time between New Directions, and raising the baby that almost everyone in Glee is somehow related to.”
“Mr Schue gets caught having inappropriate relations with a student-” there’s a cough that sounds an awful lot like ‘Finn’ “- and is suspended. We see him in the backgrounds of scenes around Lima, as the newest member of the hobo population.”
“April Rhodes comes back, and talks Will into going to Broadway with her, and it turns into a drug-fuelled search for the American dream.”
Cory is pretty pleased with his own suggestion. “Figgins starts taking the Glee club seriously, and hires a full-time coach, leaving Will to go back to his Spanish classes. He agrees that it’s the best move for their chances of winning Nationals, but still tries to be there for the kids when he can.”
Matt’s own suggestion? “Will takes a leave of absence and gets out of Lima after walking in on his mom having a drunken love session with Sue Sylvester.”
“I’m up for that,” Jane replies with a lazy grin. “I like Doodle.”
*
“You’re going to beat this, right?” Cory asks Matt.
It’s late, and Matt is flopped out on a couch in costuming as Cory unlaces his shoes. He is milking the ‘I have cancer’ thing to the max, and isn’t afraid to act like a weak and helpless kitten if it means he gets to be lazy for a few minutes more. He obligingly holds his arms over his head, and Cory strips Mr Schue’s button-up shirt off him. There are a few marks on his chest, small dots placed seemingly randomly that Cory had always thought were freckles. They’re tiny tattoos, to ensure that the doses of radiation are delivered to the exact same spot each time.
“Yeah,” Matt says at least. “Things are always easier the second time ‘round.”
Cory crouches down between Matt’s splayed legs. He presses a fingertip to one of the tiny tattoos, and drags it across Matt’s stomach, over his ribs. A solemn game of connect-the-dots. Matt’s eyes are closed, he looks like he could be asleep. Matt’s only four years older than Cory. He looks his age but thirty-one is just so fucking young.
Matt sits up a little, and pulls a t-shirt over his head, his movements a little clumsy, because it’s past midnight and Matt is too stubborn for his own good. He says the work makes things easier, that his life is hard enough without having to find his own entertainment. The late nights also make him a little softer around the edges, a little more honest, sometimes.
“I’ll be fine,” he says, as he settles the shirt over his stomach, hiding away his points of precision.
“Right,” Cory says. “Of course you will.”
And they both sit there in silence for a while longer, waiting to believe it.