The ink was pressed too hard there. The flow was too jagged there. The curves were too stiff there. He had wasted more cards than it was worth and it made him want to scream. Perhaps the price paid had ended up paying for itself in agony and finger pain.
There was no way to make these words look anything but pathetic.
But were they anything but? Years of connection capped by I'm sorry for wasting your time. was the saddest thing he had ever quite conceptualized. It was so pathetically poetic he had never even thought of using it for similarly heartbreaking situations in his fanfictions.
Not that he would ever dare take things to this extreme. He was fairly sure his fans would set him on fire, or burn him at the stake, or call him a witch, or maybe simply call him a b*****d and set him out for the fandom to eat alive in one of the typical fandom wars that he watched. He wasn't sure if he cared about any of those anymore. He wasn't sure if he cared about much of anything anymore at this point.
His eyes trailed up to the bouquet in front of him.
Honestly, he was annoyed at how good it looked. There was a part of him that was embittered that he had to do something like this for himself. There was no real way out of making this thing, not when it was specifically assigned to be dropped off to one Matt Gowan. His father would call that out right away. There were certainly ways around it, but it felt easier to call it out as his own assignment before even letting his father notice it and just let himself deal with the suffering even further. Of course, that did mean that he had to actually put some effort in.
Whites and blues and flowers that spoke of redemption–pure white lilies, passion flowers, lavender, apple blossoms. He mixed in a few other nice, softer colours, trying to keep his head over the ice flumes as he focused on this being a client project and not his fiancé’s last hurrah. He could almost hear his fiancé’s damn voice between sips of fine wines with commentary on some of the finer choices and questions on specific decisions to get to the nitty gritty on why Matt thought each specific choice was the right one and–
He shook his head and looked back down to the card.
Was it good enough this time? Perhaps. He hadn't even gotten to the worst part of all. Matt twirled the pen between his fingers before dipping it back in the ink. He hadn't asked for this. He hadn't wanted this. He wanted to pick up his phone and craft a text to Syrus. He wanted it to wax poetic about how soft his lips were, and how everything about him being an icy queen b***h was quite possibly the most false thing he had ever heard, and that his laughter warmed him from head to toe, and that his blond hair was the colour of wheat and that was a compliment, and it could be the colour of paneer in the right light and perhaps that was a compliment even more, and he wouldn't mind being invited over for a shower again even if it was for just a shower, again…
Matt nearly broke the pen in his frustration.
He needed to focus. Just write the damn thing. Write the damn thing, take the damn photo, find a ******** match. Easy enough. What the ******** else was he supposed to do with it?
Window display for the shop. Without the card on it. The card made it too personal, with the sloppily written With all my love, and he would have to start all over again.
This was torture. It was almost as much torture as the reminder that he was losing almost everything he held dear. Who did he have left beside for his family? Who was there? Matt had intentionally not made friends within the Negaverse. He certainly had none outside of it.
And now, he didn't even have any that straddled it.
He would quietly buy his father a new set of these cards. It was unlikely they would be noticed if they came out of his own pocket. Matt wouldn't miss the money. It wasn't like he did much. He had even less of a motivator, now. Where would he be going?
Over the past year and a half, his world had increasingly shrunken down. And now?
Now, it was a singularity.
Dip pen. Try again.
Dip pen. Try. Again.
Dip. Pen. Try. Again.
It finally looked good enough, by the end. Syrus Schreyer. Syrus ******** Schreyer. Matt's hand was twitching. He desperately wanted to throw the pen against the wall. He wanted to scream. He wanted to throw a tantrum. He wanted to do anything but set the card calmly on the card holder, facing out so Syrus could see the proof of Matt's handwriting, and back away from the bouquet.
There was a part of him that considered dropping it off in his room. The other part, the paranoid part, refused. It ended up sitting in the store’s backroom, against a white wall, fitting for the person it was supposedly from. Unthemed. Devoid of any colour. A lot like the Ikea apartment he had first walked into before he had started adding his own touches to it.
His laugh was bitter.
The bouquet stood bright against it.
He snapped the picture.
Shiningamisgirl
Thank you for being a customer of Farah’s Garden! We look forward to your future business!
Matt deeply wanted to edit it to say something like, love you to the moon and back or even it’s not personal, sy.
He didn't.
