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slushiepizza · 1 day

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Lazy Bones

Relationship : Guy & Guy's Dad, Guy & his parents

Tags : Father-Son Relationship, Dysfunctional Family, Mental Health Issues, Angst, Hurt-no-Comfort, Executive Dysfunction, Guy is more similar to his dad than he thought much to his dismay, and he has to grit his teeth and move on Toxic Family Dynamic

Word Count : 1,772

ao3 notes: something something he's gonna make it through this year if it kills him /j; both guy and his father are hinted to have mental health issues that i didn't specify for fear of ruining the immersion, but i do have a specific condition in mind when i wrote them this way

Guy knew what sort of day it was as soon as he woke up that afternoon.

His small dorm room was a vacuum, where time moved both like molasses and the speed of light. The dollar-store curtains did little to keep the afternoon sun away from the room. The AC slowly hummed. He could hear laughter outside- probably people coming back from class. His bones were stationary, and the defeated sort of embrace of the blanket welcomed him like a home.

He mentally started counting down from ten and forced himself to move. He slowly made his way to the bathroom in the muted darkness, wincing when he accidentally kicked something plastic and sent it skidding across the floor. He’ll get it later.

Guy found himself in front of the bathroom mirror and recognized what was in his eyes as something pathetic. The look on his face was familiar, and he’d seen that look a million times before.

He hated what he saw.

—

Small hands slowly nudged a weary shoulder that early June. Everything was hazy in the heat of summer. A talk show- no, a sports program, was playing in the background from the CRT screen.

“Dad. Daaad. Play with me,” he whined at the fresh age of five. “I’ll be the fire truck, ‘an you’ll be the train.”

His Dad, a mountain of a man impossible to climb, laid himself against his chair. In that house, everyone shared everything except for that chair in the corner of the living room. That chair was his, and over the years, it’d soon mold itself into the shape of his body and its fabric would be stained with his beer.

“Why don’t ‘cha bother your mom, instead, huh?” he grunted, unmoving.

“She’s at the store,” Guy replied.

“Go outside, or something. Y’know when I grew up, we used to just go to the woods and just. Played with sticks. You young’uns are soft, always need coddlin’ and buggerin’. Can’t even sit still for a second.”

He looked up at his father’s stubbled, rugged face. Marred by the heat of the sun. “I can do that?!”

“Sure, son,” the man looked at him with an almost sad sort of look. His labored arm, wiry and thick from long hours at the auto shop, reached out to muss up his hair. “Your Pa’s… tired.”

Guy was hunting for bugs in the backyard when his mother came back home from the store and yelled at her husband for letting him get dirty. And for sitting there all day, never doing anything useful. And that she wished that she never married someone who’d give up so easily as him.

He remembered that his father was tired a lot.

—

Guy did the least he could do. He brushed his teeth and had a single slice of bread for breakfast. Anything is better than nothing, a dear friend told him. He guessed it was right because, on days when he felt like he wanted to let the mattress mold itself to the shape of his body, the only way he could survive was by keeping the ball rolling. A routine- or some form of it. What he did barely counted as one, but it was better than letting himself fall into the trap of falling back asleep.

He opened the laptop, checked the calendar, and mentally kicked himself.

The deadline was today.

Guy liked to believe that he was a capable, competent person. But as soon as he opened the word document to write the last act of his script- a task that he’d put off from days before- his mind was full of noise.

He craved mind-numbing comfort, so he sought it. He sunk into his chair and scrolled on his phone. In the back of his mind, he felt angry.

Business was rough for the auto shop, and it later closed when Guy was sixteen. His dad never looked for another job- and he soon took his role as a stay-at-home father.

The arguments soon died down, maybe because his parents had already worn each other out by that point. They barely saw each other anyway- his mother’s job at the hospital as a residential nurse kept it that way.

His father was itching for control- and home was the only thing close enough to that.

He was neurotic about where things were supposed to be. The chairs were supposed to be aligned with the floorboards, and Guy has had to sweep the floors multiple times. If a strand of his hair was found- it’d send his father into ballistics.

Hair was another issue.

“Isn’t it time for a haircut?” his dad asked as he vacuumed, without ever meeting Guy in the eyes.

"I like it this way,” he replied.

“Makes you look like a chick.”

—

The videos on his phone flashed colors and various soundbites. It felt incomprehensible to him, and his mind fell into the space between awareness and daydream- a thick fog.

He didn’t feel like catching the deadline. Maybe he should just give up and not do it. He could lie down and not do anything at all.

“This is how I stayed productive even on days when I was exhausted and didn’t have any motivation. The Eisenhower matrix can help you manage your time-” the YouTube video droned and Guy felt himself slip away.

He probably was just lazy. He needed one day to get himself together and he could train himself to have discipline and not rely on motivation, or start time blocking, or start writing bullet journals and get his life together.

—

Guy grew to realize that he hated his father. Hated the way he seemed to always park himself in front of the TV and not shower for days. Disgusting and good-for-nothing. The way he would only get up to go around the house and make sure that everything was in pristine condition. Unused, untouched. Guy hadn’t eaten in his dining room for ages.

His father could’ve tried if he wanted to. He could’ve applied for other jobs, could’ve cared more about him. But he wallowed in the unknown frustrating corners of his mind and let days pass him by.

He could see the weight sagging his mother’s shoulders-the exhaustion in her eyes as she picked him up from school before going to her night shift.

Guy’s biggest fantasy when he was growing up was for his parents to get a divorce. It never came, and in a sick and twisted way, they did need each other to survive. She needed the illusion of a family, and he needed the money.

“Why can’t you do it for me!” he yelled in a particularly heated fight.

“I’m doing this for you! What do you even want?! For this family to be torn apart and to become the talk of the town?”

“I don’t need you to stay together when all you do is yell at each other,” he pleaded.

“You don’t understand,” she said and ended their discussion there.

—

Before he knew it, it was dark outside and he hadn’t written a single word for his script. The deadline was in five hours, and he was sure that he’d be dropped from the project if he didn’t manage to make it.

He sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. A mix of voices rang in his skull: ‘The deadline is in five hours. You’ve done nothing, stupid.’ And ‘maybe you should eat something. You’re hungry, and you’ve only had bread.’ with ‘you should try starting now. You can still fight for this gig. It’s not over yet.’

Guy stood up and approached the pile of laundry on the corner of his bed. He mechanically folded them and arranged them in his drawer of clothes. It gave him the feeling that he had his life together. He hated the fact that he had to do such an ordeal just to do basic tasks. Double the effort for half the result.

Everything felt like a hill he had to climb. Strategies, timers, to-do lists, tricks. It was frustrating, the fact that he was so damaged that he couldn’t straightforwardly do anything.

Tears started to cloud his vision and all he could do was blink them away in anger. Anger at himself for being affected by people who do not care for him in the slightest (A lie, he will soon realize. They did care- but it was the only sort of care that they understood.) He hated that he was a carbon copy of his father despite having tried so desperately to be different.

He studied hard in school, and he worked double, and triple shifts at Max’s to support himself. But he couldn’t escape from what he was. This… sickness, the willingness to give up so easily was passed down from his father like a curse. It was in his blood, written in his bones. At the end of the day, he was still his father’s son.

—

The thing is, his dad did try. Between the narcissist, and the mid-life crisis-ridden man, there were glimpses of what he was underneath it all. What he could’ve been.

He remembered when it stormed all morning before he had to turn in a science project for freshman year in high school. He’d woken up late, and by the time he was at the bus stop, lugging poster board and styrofoam diagrams in a wheelbarrow behind him, it’d left.

His father had run to catch up with him with an umbrella.

“I’ll walk ‘ya to school. Don’t want ‘em to get wet when you’d barely sleep making them.”

It’d been embarrassing. For someone his age to be walked to school by his dad. But all he noticed was the fact that his father had leaned the umbrella completely over him and the wheelbarrow. He was drenched, and he’d never been too fond of the cold.

“I can wear my jacket,” he mumbled. “Just tilt it your way. You’re getting wet.”

“Doesn’t matter,” his dad replied. “The only thing that matters is for you to get to school okay. Get good grades so you don’t become a loser.”

—

Guy wiped his tears and sat himself back down in front of the laptop. He let the all-encompassing, overwhelming mix of anger and sadness run through him. He wasn’t going to fuck it up. He wouldn’t let anything get in the way of the work that he loved doing. He gritted his teeth and did it even when every part of him protested.

Despite his father, despite his restless mind.

Despite it all, he’ll die fighting, bruised.

#redacted audio #redacted asmr #redacted guy #redactedverse #slushiewrites #redacted fanfic

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