#bbbreakdown

oh yeah no they were really emotional. They probably shouted a lot and cried--Arthur cried during the shouting, but Alfred is an after-fight type crier. Someone probably threw a chair. Stormed out. Someone called the other a coward and the other one a fucking bastard. The next morning they both had voice mails apologizing frantically but also saying "maybe we're not very good at this."

They never stopped talking, though. They just tiptoed around each other through emails and not looking face to face for a good few months after the initial breakup. But eventually they worked through the awkwardness and were able to salvage a friendship,since neither of them were wanted to let the other go entirely.

Alfred was originally supposed to die at 34. Then I changed it to 50 something? (I don't want to look at that fic right now to check bc I'll get sad, but I think he dies at 50 something) 34 was going to be the age he died at, and therefore the door he went through. Then when I was looking through it I thought having two numbers the same looked weird and that I'd made a mistake somehow and then I posted it before I realized it was intentional, it's such a lame excuse but I'm too lazy to change the numbers again, it's been too long D:

And if they didn't break up because "it was time" that means they broke up because it was past the time they should've. I don't know what you want to hear, honestly. D: Arthur's not a metahuman. He likes adventure and daring, and he likes his blood pumping... but he's in a lot more danger than Al is when they do stupid things, and after a while, Arthur probably just got tired of it. He wanted to settle down and write his books and drink tea in the morning and know what bed he was laying down in at night. He wanted to plant a rose garden and have a fence around his property and be interviewed by a radio station about his new collection of short stories. He wants to have a family again--and not the kind of family that would not only order a hit on him, but send other family members to carry it out.

Alfred wanted to charge into the fire and charge into the fire and charge into the fire until he's hurt so much that no one else in the world ever has to feel pain again, because Alfred's taken it all. There's no more hurt to feel. It's safe.Of course, pain doesn't work that way and Arthur can't always keep up. They still care about each other a lot, and they still exhange texts and emails, and Arthur sends Al a free copy of his latest book, but at some point they probably realized that they wanted fundamentally different things, and Alfred wasn't going to be happy without his coping mechanism, so they had to do something, and the thing that would make them both happiest would be to go their separate ways.

But what a wild ride they had in the meantime. 

Al probably dies early because of being a RLSH. Our world's RLSH mostly do things like help fight homelessness and hunger, help people cross the street or carry groceries home safely, and stage protests for causes like sexual harassment, etc. Very few physically engage criminals in the midst of a crime, because that's just super fucking dangerous.

Alfred does those things though. He bursts into drug lord's dens and runs into burning buildings, he volunteers himself as a hostage in hostage situations. He charges into the places that literally everyone knows not to go, usually risking his own life in the process, metahuman or not, because as much as Al can't take his own life out of his debt to Matthew, he also cares less for his own life than he does for the lives of others. If he could die so someone else would live, he would do that. There's no real set cause of death as much as a culmination of things, like stress and loneliness and drug addiction, and never really having access to medical care because no doctor can puncture his skin with out Mr. Bonnefoy being right there to relax his powers.