Since he was a young kid, Miles had always found comfort in video games. When his parents would argue about nothing and everything, he would escape to his room and turn on a game—usually something that required puzzle solving or world-building—and get lost in it for hours. He wasn’t a particularly skilled gamer—he wasn’t even sure if he would call himself agamer, exactly, at least not in any serious capacity—but they were more than just entertainment to him. He associated video games with safety and contentment in his otherwise unstable world.
Because of this, when he discovered video game streams, he tended to stay away from streamers who had “holier than thou” personalities, or who took their rules so seriously that theyforgot that games were supposed to be fun. Through a long process of trial and error, he had found the content creators he found personally appealing, but it always felt like a risk going outside his comfort zone to try out new creators. For a long time, Miles had known that Jun existed, but only tangentially. He’d known of him the way you would know of an extremely famous pop star whose music you’d never heard before in your life.
But then that chest cold happened. A nasty, vicious chest cold that then made a home in his lungs and confined him to bed with a serious case of bronchitis for an entire week.
Hacking up phlegm, unable to work or really do anything that required more than the baseline amount of cognition, Miles spent those seven days consuming more media than he had in the previous two months combined. Around day four, he’d officially run out of familiar content to keep his mind off his misery, and had decided to branch out, clicking on Jun’s profile as an act of desperation.
He’d been hooked ever since.
And that was why this whole… incident was more than a complete and total trainwreck. It was several trainwrecks at once. It was several trains, full of clowns, wrecking at a crossing and exploding into confetti and red rubber nose balls.
Because it was looking more and more like he had gotten pregnant by one of his favorite celebrities.
How could something that sounded like it had been plucked directly from his fantasies be such a nightmare in real life?
Fuck bronchitis, fuck Jun and his beautiful face and hilariously engaging livestreams, and fuck that pregnancy test sitting onthe bathroom counter that he swore he could hear mocking him from across the hall.
Rolling onto his back, he scrubbed his face with his hands and blinked back the stars that formed in his eyes when he removed them. He couldn’t just lie there and hope this problem would go away on its own. He knew that, because he had already tried it, and it was clear that things were only going to get worse the longer he lived in denial. Best to just take the test and deal with things from there.
That, and he also really needed to pee.
Besides, there was still a chance that it wouldn’t be positive. That all the various symptoms he’d been experiencing were just psychosomatic. Right?
The gurgle that roiled through his belly seemed rather pointed, and he sighed.
Okay, let’s count down from five,he told himself.
It was a trick a therapist once taught him. When you’re stuck because you’re avoiding a task, start at five and count down, and on one force yourself up, like you’re a rocket ship taking off.
Five,he said internally.
Four…
Three…
Two…
One!
With a groan, he stumbled ungracefully out of bed and headed to the bathroom, flicking on his bedroom light as he went.
Once he was actually in motion, the act of taking the test was fairly quick and simple, the process delayed only when he read through the instructions a couple times more than necessary in one last attempt to stall.
He’d snagged the test from the drug store earlier, face burning the entire time, as if anyone around him gave even the smallest amount of fucks about what he was doing there in the family planning aisle. Even still, he had thanked every god he could think of for the advent of self-checkout.
It was the cheapest test they sold, and supposedly took five entire minutes to show results. Five. Whole. Minutes. That was like… a lot of seconds—whatever, he was bad at math—but the point was, despite the hours he’d spent avoiding the test, five minutes seemed like an impossibly long amount of time to wait. He only had so much willpower; he needed to know how screwed he wasnow.
After snapping the cap onto the test and washing his hands, he brought the stick with him back into his bedroom, where he took out his phone and opened his Twitch app. Jun’s stream was listed right at the top, and Miles clicked into it, put it on full screen, then pressed his volume button until it was at maximum. As he propped the phone up on one of his pillows and sat crisscross in front of it, Jun’s gorgeous voice filled the room.
“Someone in the chat just asked why I haven’t done a livestream in a while,” he was saying, eyes glancing at where Miles knew the constant stream of comments was filtering past on his screen, before turning back to the game he was playing—Miles wasn’t even sure what it was, nor did it particularly matter to him. All he was seeking right now was comfort, and although Jun was right at the heart of his anxieties, Miles couldn’t help the almostPavlovian sense of calm that washed over him as he listened to him talk.
“Well, first off, I just got back from tour—big thanks to everyone who showed up, by the way, I had a great time,” Jun continued. He unconsciously brushed a strand of his jet-black hair out of his face, and Miles thought about how he had wrapped his fingers through those medium-length locks and tugged when Jun buried himself inside him all the way to the hilt. Jun shifted in his chair, his t-shirt riding up slightly, and Miles remembered the washboard abs that were currently hidden from view. They had glistened with sweat, making Jun taste like salt when Miles licked down his sternum.
His eyes wandered the screen and landed on Jun’s chest, and he smiled slightly to himself with the memory of the adorable Legend of Zelda flash tattoo that was inked into the skin of his left pec. It had been that tattoo—so tiny and innocuous, but so clearly full of memories and childish joy—that had made Miles a goner. That tattoo had humanized him, turning him from a famous celebrity to a sweet, albeit ungodly attractive man who was so diligent and thorough in taking care of him that Miles, a chronic insomniac, had slept like a fucking rock for the first time in ages.
“… also got a lot on my mind.” Miles, briefly distracted by his memories, tuned back in to whatever Jun was talking about. The corner of Jun’s mouth was in a slight downturn, and his thin, dark brows were knitted in thought. “This might be getting too personal, but have any of you ever felt a really intense connection with someone you’ve only known for a short time?”
Miles sucked in a breath, watching Jun scan the comments out of the corner of his eye.
