Maybe You're a Mourner, Maybe You Deserve to Die

[delicateMachine]

((Michael Mitchellson had just wanted to go to the motherfucking aquarium, alright?))

First things first, he would’ve found the sharks, and he would’ve walked up to the sharks, and he would’ve stared the sharks down, and then, once the tension in the room had sharpened to a lava-razor’s edge, he would’ve nodded. Once. Solidarity between the most dangerous thing in the ocean and the most dangerous man on land.

Did the aquarium even have sharks? Fuck if he knew. He hadn’t bothered to ask. Life was better with surprises. Sure, he’d be a bit disappointed because that was some weak shit right there, what’s the point of a fish prison if you can’t even get a hold of a couple big-teeth boys, but that just meant he’d have to be the shark. The land shark. Like, the Daywalker of sharks, not some asshole that owned property and shit.

But noooooooo, “Michael, you don’t look so good today,” “Michael, I know I’m not a doctor but it doesn’t take years of medical training to recognize a sick kid,” “Michael, you’ve got a fever of 100 degrees so for the love of god just go back to bed.” Fuck you, too, Dad, being all responsible and concerned for his health and shit. Another hearty fuck you to his immune system, for failing him in this, his hour of need.

At least he had a spare body to fall back on. “HEY HEALTHY ASSJHHOLE, TAKE SHARK PICS”, he sent. A text message wasn’t quite ‘uploading your entire consciousness to the robotic skeleton that was totally hiding inside your friend for emergencies’ but he had to start somewhere, right? Daniel had responded with a thumbs up emoji, classic Daniel, and that was enough to let Michael stop being a grumpy prick for one entire minute so he could sleep off his fever, holy shit he actually felt like garbage.

Then Michael woke up, and there weren’t any shark pics in his notifications, so he sent Daniel a couple paragraphs about how much of a disappointment he was, because if Michael didn’t have any shark pics, how could he make a shark pit to throw his chucklefuck minions into when they inevitably screwed up, and by failing to Acquire The Sharks It Was That Goddamn Simple he’d - holy shit, that was it, Daniel was buying himself job security, because if Michael didn’t have sharks he couldn’t execute anyone, thus granting Daniel immortality, the glorious bastard, he’d get a promotion for this-

Then his dad came into the room with a serious look on his face and things weren’t funny anymore.

Michael barely left his room for the first couple days after it happened. Hell, he barely even left his desk. Empty energy drink cans claimed every empty surface as he sat hunched at his computer like a sick gargoyle, in every meaning of the word. He had news feeds running on both monitors, he constantly refreshed social media on his phone. His dad did his best, but after a while of painful, earnest efforts he resigned himself to “I’m here if you needs me”s and delivering dinners.

He couldn’t wrap his head around the fact that absolutely no one knew shit. Like, it was a fucking bus! Unless something went horribly wrong, busses stayed on roads, and people generally had a good idea of where those were! How the fuck did one just go missing?

It occurred to him that he’d probably be feeling less shit about this if Daniel’d been on a fucking plane that had vanished, and how messed up was that? At least when a plane went missing it was something that made sense! Like, it was in the air, and then it wasn’t, you don’t gotta do fucking calculus to figure out what happened there! And hey, sometimes people survived plane crashes! Daniel could survive a plane crash, probably! He’d be crowned king and just sit around on a leafy throne chowing down on coconuts, ‘cause shit, just look at that charismatic face, who’s gonna let that boy do any physical labor?

But a bus vanishing off the face of the fucking planet? There was an explanation for that, one explanation, he didn’t wanna fucking read it but boy oh boy did every worthless jackass on TV seem determined to talk about it anyway. A terroristic deathmatch? Like, what fucking world was he even living in? Just because it’d happened once didn’t explain why a group of murderous assholes had decided to come to Denton, New Jersey of all the fucking places in the world!

The days went by, and when he gave up, he didn’t even realize he was doing it. He couldn’t pinpoint an exact time where he’d lost hope, couldn’t put a fucking timestamp on the moment he realized his best friend was just… gone. He just knew that, eventually, he started keeping the news confined to one monitor. Eventually, he closed the streams entirely, went from refreshing the pages every five minutes to every thirty to every few hours, when he remembered.

It felt like a betrayal to try and keep his mind off of things. Like this massive fucking void in his life wasn’t worth thinking about anymore. Like Daniel’s... disappearance, it was still technically a disappearance, alright, wasn’t the most important thing in the world anymore. But he couldn’t keep up his vigil. He just wasn’t strong enough to be the tireless fucking faithful friend of a sailorman, waiting by the shore every night, lantern in hand.

One thought never left him, though, and hell if it wasn’t a classic. ‘What if?’ What if his body hadn’t saved him by fucking him over on that day? He knew that he was just a single dude who was kinda in shape, but that’s all it takes for a miracle, right? A single dude?

Or even if that didn’t happen, because let’s face it, that’s bullshit, what about after? What if he’d been there with Daniel, because holy shit that boy is not built for crisis situations? It’s not like Michael wanted to throw his life away or any shit like that, but… what if he could’ve done something?

((He could’ve done something.))