#turneyfrees

If there is one fact Ray knows about himself to be concrete, it’s that he has a immune system that is the absolute worst at its job. If there is one fact Ray never tells anyone, it’s that he has a immune system that is the absolute worst at its job.

Well, anyone with the exception of Ryan Haywood. In fact, Ray tends to make a lot of exceptions for Ryan for reasons unbeknownst to him. Ever since Ryan became a permanent part of the regular AH cast, he had become this mysterious and somewhat unearthly presence to Ray. He barely knew anything about Ryan despite working with him everyday, the only person who seemed to not have a life outside of the office aside from himself. It was strange to know a person, yes, to be around them constantly and think you understand them when really you don’t know a single thing about them.

However, that’s not the point. The point is that Ray gets sick a lot, and on one particular occasion of ill health, Ray discovered a couple things about the elusive Ryan Haywood.

When Ray arrived at work on Monday morning, he felt completely fine. Well, fine for going to bed at 2am, but he’s adapted. It was rather slow, considering that Gavin and Ryan hadn’t turned up by 9:30 so their typical beginning-of-the-week meeting was pushed back until Geoff had confirmation of their whereabouts. He ended up chatting to Michael for a while and got heavily sidetracked, just like their conversations used to before they joined Rooster Teeth, that neither of them noticed Gavin bursting into the office with Ryan hot on his tail.

“Oh look, breakfast and a show.” Michael comments under his breath, nearly drowned out by the sound of Gavin’s squawks of dismay. Ray snorts.

“Michael! Ray! Ryan’s trying to kill me!” Gavin’s cries for help seem to do nothing as Ryan has seemingly lost interest, already at his desk and logging onto his computer.

“Sure doesn’t look like it. Now, if you two assholes are done, we have a meeting to-” In the middle of his sentence, Ray tries to stand up from his chair but gets hit by a sudden wave of very strong nausea. Next thing he knows, he’s kneeling on the floor while Michael and Ryan surround him and he tries with all his willpower to not hydro pump either one of their faces.

“Hey, Ray, buddy, you alright?” The initial nausea has begun to subside and leaving the beginnings of a very nasty migraine in its wake but Ryan is gently touching his forehead, supposedly to check for a temperature. In any other situation, Ray would have pushed him away and told him to cut it out, told him that everything was alright. In any other situation, the feeling of Ryan touching him wouldn’t have made him blush like it did. Instead, Ray just shook his head and tried to stand up on his own. He didn’t need Ryan to father him.

“I’m fine. Advil in the first pocket of my bag, can you grab it for me?” In what seemed like no time at all, Ryan had the pack of Advil and a fresh bottle of water in his hands. Maybe it was so quick because he blacked out, he can’t really tell. Ray accepts the gifts with a small nod and downs the medication without a second thought.

“You know, you can always go home if you’re not feeling well.” Ray ends up scowling at Ryan after his comment, refusing to admit defeat. Even though it would be better to rest, he doesn’t care. He can fight through the sickness.

“Haha, ahaha, hilarious. I don’t see you taking any sick days, Haywood.”

“Well, I don’t need to because I never get sick.”

Ray’s expression shifts from annoyed to surprised to confused and back to annoyed. “What do you mean you don’t get sick. Everyone gets sick, that’s like a basic fact of humanity. Our bodies are shit, we get sick, everything sucks and we’re all slowly succumbing to death.”

Ryan looks just as bewildered at his outburst as he feels about this little factoid of information. “I don’t know, I just don’t get ill all that much. Maybe a bit of a headcold once a year, that’s really all.” He offers his hand and Ray takes it, jumping back up cautiously. The migraine is still persisting in the back of his head but that isn’t really the biggest problem to him right now.

The biggest problem is that Ryan Haywood, pretty boy perfect human James Ryan Motherfucking Haywood, doesn’t get sick.

To Ray, that sounds like a challenge. To Ray, that sounds like a challenge to get Ryan to be ill enough to take a sick day by Friday. And believe him, he’s gonna do it. Whatever it takes to get that asshole sick.

Well, hopefully not dying in the process would be good too.

By Tuesday afternoon, Ray has a full-on cold and no idea how to get Ryan ill without being completely obvious. Even in the face of these obstacles, he is still at work and (figuratively) trucking along. Trucking along in the extremely stubborn sort of way. Trucking along in the ‘it’s quite clear any attempts to persuade you to go home will not work’ way. It’s kind of the way he does things. Michael’s been giving him weird looks the entire morning, usually consisting of the odd glance whenever he breaks out in a fit of coughing. Ray suspected that Michael had caught onto his plan quickly and was subtly trying to tell him to quit it. Sorry, buddy, that’s not an option, he thinks to himself and continues on with his work. Nobody else really mentions the growing pile of used tissues on his desk, but then again, everyone else is distracted with their own work.

At one point, he leaves the office to get some fresh air and ends up relegating himself to the steps outside the main door into Stage 5. It honestly doesn’t do much to improve his mood or state of mind, he wasn’t really expecting it to. He just needed to get out of the way of everyone else and regroup his thoughts. Clearly, that wasn’t going to happen when he hears footsteps behind him and the door opening.

“Be honest, how obvious is it that I have ulterior motives for being at work?”

“Pretty obvious to me, dude.” Michael sits down next to him, but neither of them make eye contact. Ray had a feeling he was gonna get followed out here. “Why are you so determined to get Ryan sick anyways?”

“Because it’s not fucking fair! I mean, have you seen Ryan?! Why does it have to be that he doesn’t get sick and I end up with the plague every month. I’m looking for justice, Michael. Justice for the reason behind Ryan Haywood’s apparent perfection.”

Michael giggles a little. “You know that you sound like a middle school girl trying to thinly vein the fact she has a crush?”

“What? Dude, I don’t have a crush on Ryan.”

“Ray, if you go full tsundere on me, I’ll have to drag you back into the office and make you confess your undying love.”

“I don’t have a crush on him!” To be frank, Ray had never really thought about it. Sure, Ryan was kinda pretty. He used to be a model, for fucks sake, but Ryan? Ryan was too murder-y. He was too dark and broody, except for when he was going full dad mode on the lads. No, he didn’t like Ryan like that. Ryan was just… Ryan. That’s all he was ever going to be, ignoring all the R & R Connection shit. Just Ryan.

Yeah. Just Ryan.

“Aside from your crush business, do you even have any ideas on your plan for Ryan’s downfall?”

Ray opens his mouth, but promptly closes it upon the realisation that he didn’t have any ideas nor a smartass comment to throw back at Michael. “Uh, no. I have no fucking clue what to do. Please help.”

“Well, first step is you find a trash can, and then climb-”

“Haha, very funny, I’m glad my best friend is such a comedy genius.” Ray throws a light punch at Michael’s arm. Michael makes a face at him in retaliation.

“I have no idea either. You could always just like, pretend to accidentally cough on him? Like ask him over to help you with something and then when you have a coughing fit, just say you forgot to cough into your arm and instead you cough on him.”

“Oh. Hm, that’s, uh, that’s actually a pretty good idea.”

This time, Michael punches him in the arm, albeit quite heavier than when he did. “You’re a goof, y’know? A tsundere ass goof. Now get the fuck inside, you have work to do.”

“So do you.” Ray mumbles, hopping up onto his feet and wandering back towards the office behind Michael.

“Hey, uh, Ryan? Can you help me with something?”

“Sure, what’s up?”

“Well, um, I was trying to get this game to open, but it keeps freezing on the splash screen? Like I can’t tab out or move the mouse or anything and I just have to manually restart the computer to get out of it.” Ryan gets up from his desk and walks over, Ray pushing back slightly to let him perform his PC magic. As he played with settings trying to find a fix, Ray leaned over Ryan’s elbow and coughed as violently as he could muster.

Ryan pulls his hand up from the table and skids over a couple inches. “Ray, what the hell? You okay?”

Ray coughs into his hand one last time, trying to get it out of his system. “Yeah, yeah, I’m fine… Oh shit! Oh my god, I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to be that gross, I mean, I forgot about the whole coughing into my sleeve thing…”

“It’s alright, man. Happens to the best of us. Also, uh, your game’s booting up fine now.” Ryan’s voice seems slightly less sympathetic than usual and he’s hastily wiping the back of his hand on his jeans.

“Oh, right. Thanks.” Ray mumbled as he moved back into his usual position and Ryan walked away. He looks across to see Michael shaking his head at him and mouthing “You goddamn tsundere idiot”

“What the hell was I meant to do?!” He mouths back before turning towards his monitor. He didn’t even know what this game was, he just installed something randomly off his Steam account that he had no hours logged in. He was so pissed off now that he couldn’t even bring himself to play it.

“Also, Ray, you might want to run a Check Disk scan if that keeps happening.” Ryan calls out something from behind him but it falls on deaf ears. He’s not paying attention. He doesn’t care to.

Well, that went about as horribly as it could have.

Ray goes into work on Wednesday morning, filled with determination about his plan. Yesterday was a little bit of a failure, but hey, he still has three more days. No way in hell is he going to admit defeat. Needless to say, he ends up clocking off early and the story behind it is quite more complicated than he’d care to admit.

Michael drags him out of the office as soon as he walks in before they get settled into recording. Ray keeps kicking his feet into the ground to stop moving but his efforts are fruitless, with Michael taking both of them in the direction of the prop room. They stopped abruptly in front of an unmarked door and Michael swung his head around to check that they were alone. Confirming the coast was clear, he flicked Ray dead on in the forehead. “You’re the worst.”

“Hey, that’s uncalled for!”

“Yes, it is. ‘Cause you are the worst… holy shit, you look terrible.”

Ray blinked slowly at Michael a few times, not really paying attention to whatever he was saying. “Uh, yes?”

“You were up late trying to brainstorm ideas on how to get Ryan sick instead of focusing on your own illness and sleeping, weren’t you?”

“... Yeah. Yeah, I was.”

“It’s official, you’re the worst!”

“Hey!” Ray tries to reach out and punch Michael in the arm, but he ends up stumbling and grabs onto Michael’s leg instead to stop from falling over completely. Nausea had suddenly swept over him and there were stars dancing faintly in his vision. That’s not good. That’s not good at all.

Michael helped him to stand, keeping one hand on his shoulder in case he fell over again. “You good, Ray?”

“Yeah, I’m good.” He nodded half-heartedly, focusing more on keeping his balance. Okay, fainting. That was definitely not something he had factored into the equation. Okay, maybe he could work with this.

“Just make sure you’re drinking enough water, okay? We don’t want you passing out on us suddenly.” Michael seems genuinely concerned, but there is a hint of something else in his voice. A hint of something that seemed an awful lot like “faint in his arms and be all romantic you piece of shit” and quite a bit like passive-aggressive persuasion.

He tried it out during the filming of VS that afternoon but when he stood up off the floor too fast, he fell into the shelf of games rather than into Ryan’s arms. Even then, it was Jack who drove him home and told him to rest properly.

Ray tries to go to work on Thursday, but after crawling to the bathroom and throwing up literally 1 minute after he’s woken up, he decides against it.

It’s somehow Friday already and he’s running out of fucking options. He’s honestly worse off than he was on Monday and considering just straight up admitting defeat. Maybe it was true that he had a crush on Ryan and this was all just an act to prove that he wasn’t completely worthless. The more that he thinks about it, the more plausible it seems to be. It was just a dumb act to try and be noticed instead of just fucking admitting how he feels. This was a flawed idea in the first place, it was never going to work, it was stupid stupid stupid. As he stomps up the steps into Stage 5, he had a resolute plan in his mind to walk into the Achievement Hunter office and tell Ryan why he had been acting strangely all week. Just tell him. Just tell him.

When he walks into the office, Michael and Ryan are sitting on the couch talking quietly and the sight makes him freeze up in his spot. A million different scenarios and ideas run through his mind at once but he clenches the straps on his backpack a little tighter and mumbled a greeting.

“Oh, morning, Ray. Geoff, Gavin, and Jack are going to be late.” Ryan responds, giving him a small smile. Michael doesn’t say anything, simply glancing at him for a couple seconds before looking away. Ray nods once, looking down at the floor. Just tell him. Just tell him.

“Um, Ryan, can I talk to you about something?” Ray asks, gently scuffing his shoes against the ground. Without paying attention, he looks up to see Ryan now standing directly in front of him holy crap he’s tall. Just tell him. Just tell him.

“What’s up? Are you still ill?”

“Well, I… I, um…” Just tell him. Just tell him. Oh my god it’s not that hard just tell him Ray. The words were on his tongue, but he couldn’t speak and this was so cliche and dumb and pointless and he was never really aware how blue Ryan’s eyes looked in the light wait fuck.

“I’m not a fucking tsundere.” With that declaration, he stood up on his toes and kissed Ryan straight on the lips. His actions didn’t even sink in until a couple seconds later because initially it was lips and skin and beard scruff and he could gently feel Ryan pushing back until holy fuck, he’s kissing Ryan Haywood. He pulls away quickly afterwards, and he’s suddenly greeted to the sound of applause from behind him where it turns out Geoff and Gavin are standing.

“Before you ask, we saw the whole thing and I hope this doesn’t become a regular thing.” Geoff comments, pointing his index finger at Ray and waggling it slightly in a warning kind of way. For some reason, Ray can’t help but smile.

“It won’t. I think.” He responses quickly, trying to cover up his shaky voice and obvious embarrassment. He can practically feel how red his face is from blushing but he isn’t really fussed. There’s no way to cover up what just happened when they clearly saw it.

“Also, Ray,” Ryan leans down and says at a slightly hushed volume, “since bacteria generally spreads via skin contact, next time you might want to kiss me before I figure out what’s going on.”

“Fuck, are you serious?!” Ray yells, and Michael dissolves into a fit of laughs on the couch. He can’t even really be mad about his lack of subtlety because his lips are still tingling and he thinks that even if Ryan doesn’t get sick, he still won.

And while it initially seemed like a failure, Ray’s experiment brought up results in the end. He discovered that Ryan blushes profusely after he’s been kissed, and that the ends of Ryan’s hair curl up a little bit when someone messes with them, and that maybe he does have a little bit of a thing for Ryan but it’s okay because Ryan has maybe has a little bit of a thing for him back.

The best thing is the text he receives on Saturday morning, “I hope you’re proud of yourself” which is immediately followed up by “How do you deal with feeling like death all the time?”

A man walks into a bar and says:                                                Take my wife–please.                                                                        But you take him instead. You go to work the next day pretending nothing happened.            Your co-workers ask                                    if everything’s okay and you tell them                                                                                    you’re just tired.            And you’re trying to smile. And they’re trying to smile.

Life is hard, Dan was really under no illusions about that. It’s hard, it’s messy and it hurts more often than not. At his core though, he was still an optimist. He still liked to believe that there were good people in the world, people who could love and be loved. It was foolish for him to expect and he knew it but time and time again he failed to learn his lesson.

A year ago he had met a girl in the bar. Pretty, blonde, the most perfect smile. It was raining in London and yet neither of them seemed to notice as they danced through Trafalgar Square until they found themselves back in Dan’s flat, curled up with each other. It was the purest evening Dan had ever experienced and for a few short hours he felt his heart glow with a hope for the future. He hadn’t noticed the ring on her finger. He fell in love hard and fast until it broke him.

And it did. He was left in his dump of an apartment, curled up on his bed and staring at the water stains on the ceiling. For days he would fall asleep listening to the sounds of the man in the apartment above walking around and screaming into his phone. In the strangest sense he found it calming, as if a reassurance that misery was not confined to his own life. Maybe it was this building, maybe it was this city. Dan felt comfort in the misery for as long as he could before he started to drag himself out again. His smiles would never meet his eyes and his hands never quite worked as well as he wanted but it would do.

He doesn’t get better. He tries to, of course he does. Christmas comes and goes by without any visits. He moves from his lonely apartment to a crowded bar and somehow feels lonelier. He goes home alone, comforted only by the fuzz of alcohol in his system. It feels like an extra blanket, a substitute for the girl who once laid down beside him.

It’s a long time before he meets anybody new. His life feels like a turnstile – work, bar, home, work, bar, home – and no matter how many times he tries to tell himself that it’s just what life is, he doesn’t believe it. He wants more. No, it’s more than just wanting, it’s a craving he can’t quite ignore.

One day a man walks into the bar. He sits down next to Dan by chance and Dan is of course taken with him. He’s skinny and tanned, stubble overgrowing and a striking nose. He wears a wedding band that Dan silently resents. The new arrival is beautiful and it already hurts him. He watches as the man orders a whiskey and coke and then turns to him. Suddenly away of his prying eyes, Dan forces himself to look away.

They sit in silence for a while, both sipping on their drinks. Dan wants to say something. Anything at all. Except he can feel the girl behind him, every bit as spectral as she has been in his dreams for a year and he knows that the man is the very same weakness. He’s a moment and it’s all Dan can think even as he takes the dive.

“I haven’t seen you here before.” The man looks up at him, his eyes lighting up a beautiful green. Maybe it’s blue. Dan blames the alcohol. Either way they’re beautiful and he’s captivated.

“Because I haven’t been here before,” the man responds, a small smile on his lips. “Don’t tend to drink much, to be honest.”

Dan silently wonders what drove him to drink tonight.

“Just needed a strong one after the day I’ve had,” he explains as if reading Dan’s very mind. For a moment his eyes linger on the wedding band and Dan finds himself looking at it too. He wishes it wasn’t there.

“Anything you don’t mind confiding in a stranger?” he asks, hoping his voice is steadier than it sounds in his head. His fingers twitch around his beer bottle and he finds himself counting his own flaws, hoping they were invisible from the outside.

“It’s my wife. She’s perfect, she’s everything and I can’t make her happy,” the man admits, halfway between vulnerable and angry. “I want to, I do but I feel like she would be better without me.”

Dan can’t say that he knows the feeling. He’s never had anybody depend on him before, much less love him. So he gives the man a small smile and orders him another drink. The man thanks him and introduces himself as Gavin. Dan commits the name to memory and immediately adds it to a list of hopes dashed. He doesn’t need to wait, he already knows how the night ends because he’s seen it and lived it before.

Its a few drinks later when Gavin slips the wedding band off of his finger and hides it safely in his pocket. Dan pretends not to notice. He pretends like his heart doesn’t beat faster with hope and fear mixed into a deadly cocktail but he’s never been particularly good at hiding his feelings. They don’t talk about it. They sit in silence, enjoying each other’s company as they fill themselves up with more and more drinks.

When Dan decides that it’s time to leave, he invites Gavin to join him. It’s brazen and so unlike himself but he’s fueled by the alcohol and ultimately thankful for it when Gavin accepts.

They don’t kiss until they make it back to Dan’s apartment. When they do it’s like Dan’s heart is flooding throughout his body. He wants to remember every little part of it: the way Gavin’s hands rest on the back of his neck as he pulls him in or how Gavin’s stubble scratches against his skin. It’s not a feeling he’s experienced before but it’s one he tells himself not to forget.

For several fleeting minutes Dan feels okay. Gavin is pressed up against him as he explores the other man’s mouth and he foolishly makes himself think that this is what he needs. His hands find their way to Gavin’s hips, fingers sneaking up under the fabric of the shirt to feel his warm skin underneath. His fingers aren’t twitching either, they feel strangely at rest as if they were waiting for this very moment to calm. He’s thankful for it.

Dan doesn’t even care about the water stains on the ceiling or how ugly his grey bedspread is as he guides Gavin into his bedroom. He’s not focusing on any of that because all he can see is how beautiful the man before him is. It’s all that matters to him in that moment.

They make it all the way to the bed, Gavin pressed down beneath him before the man starts crying. Dan pulls away, already missing the taste of Gavin on his lips. He gapes in confusion, wondering what he can do. “I can’t, I can’t,” Gavin sobs. Dan doesn’t blame him. Maybe he can’t relate but he can certainly understand.

He stays still and silent, listening to Gavin’s sobs and absorbing the weak punches on his chest. He lets Gavin take it out on him, well aware that there may be bruises in the morning. If anything he welcomes them just so he can know that he experienced something real.

“This is wrong,” Gavin says after he’s calmed down a little and Dan agrees. He bows his head and allows Gavin to pull away from him, watching as the man flees the bedroom. The slam of his apartment door splits another crack down Dan’s heart while a few drops of water drop from his bedroom ceiling.

He starts counting the angry stomps from the apartment above him. Sleep doesn’t claim him, not even when he empties the remainder of his bottle of sleeping pills. He lays down on the tatty grey bedspread and stares up at the ceiling, wondering how quickly Gavin forced the wedding band back onto his finger after he’d fled the apartment.

There are dark circles under his eyes when he pads into work the next day. His colleagues watch him and smile sympathetically but when they ask if everything’s okay, Dan finds that there’s a wall blocking him from the truth. “I’m just tired,” he says finally, the corners of his lips turning up in an attempt at a smile that never meets his eyes.

The days pass in their usual monotonous fashion and Dan finds himself slow dancing through them all alone. He finds himself at the bar again but this time he doesn’t meet anyone. He ignores the red-haired girl asking for spare change, he ignores the man offering to pay for his taxi home. Instead he just orders another drink, makes it a double and prays that it will knock him out.

Dan takes himself down to the river and lets his feet dangle over the edge. The sole of his boots are submerged in water and he wonders how easy it would be to slip the rest of his body under the surface. The thought doesn’t scare him, nor does it feel right. It simply is. He’s not going to commit suicide, he knows as much but he also knows that he can’t walk away untouched from the experience so he takes off his watch, kisses it and throws it into the water.

He watches his watch disappear under the surface and feels his heart go with it. He closes his eyes and appreciates the moment. For the first time in forever he finally feels some sort of peace.

There are no noises from the apartment above that night. No angry falling of boots, no screaming or crying. Dan curls up on the bed and lets sleep claim him for what feels like the first time in forever.

He dreams of Gavin curled up with him. He dreams of Gavin’s soft smile as he shakes his head and whispers a simple “Goodbye”.

Dan stops going to the bar. His colleagues comment on how different he seems. How alive he is now. He sleeps more, he forces more smiles that eventually become genuine. He pours the alcohol he keeps under his bed down the drain and throws the bottle out of the window without a second thought.