stick close to the lines
Summary: A day in the life of Matt Donovan
Rating: pg
Category: Matt (appearances by: Vicki, Caroline, Bonnie and Damon)
Spoilers: general spoilers for season 3
Words: 1781
Notes: I started working on this a long while ago to a prompt on softly_me's ficathon that was something like "working class hero" and it just never sort of came together for me? I'm not sure if it's come together here because Matt is just a hard character to get but I can't really stand to think on it much longer. I wanted to play with the absolute banality of Matt's existence and his world falling apart at the seams and ways in which he clings to the normal or tries to. Thanks to Alta for reading this way back when. All mistakes are mine. What a godawful title, jeepers.
Matt wakes up each morning. It’s still dark outside, the sky tinged a deep indigo that fades into pale red on a horizon he can't see. Not through the scuffed kitchen window that looks onto the yard out back, with its lonely swing covered in peeling flakes of rust, and a crumpled ball, once bright yellow and now a sort of off-putting mustard orange, that lolls aimlessly in the tallish grass. He'll need to mow that-the neighbors get twitchy if he lets the grass grow out too long. Once, back in June, in the dead heat of summer, when he worked 16-hour shifts at a stretch, he came home to find a $100-citation for "uncut grass in violation of the town's ordinance" stuck to the front porch. The citation presently lies crumpled at the edges and unpaid amidst a pile of bills on the kitchen counter.
-
He has a routine-Matt’s always had a fondness for routine, there’s a comfort in it, in breaking his day into neat blocks, clear-cut beginnings and endings. Clear-cut.
5:55 Wake up.
6:05 Work out (sometimes he saves this for the evenings when he can sneak quietly into the gym at school, surrounded by equipment that carries the clammy, airless smell of layered sweat and old bodies, and loses himself in the rhythm of a treadmill or a weight).
7:00 AM Take a ten-minute shower (five minutes if the hot water heater’s not working, especially in the winter).
7:15 AM Eat breakfast (nothing exciting-cornflakes and milk, toast, if he can squeeze it in).
7:30 AM Head out (sometimes he gets in a little cleaning, or finishes the last paragraphs of a history assignment, a head-crunching equation or two, some reading for AP English).
The drive to town is monotonous and predictable-he could do it with his eyes closed. His truck moves along the road in fits and grunts. Visible from his rear-view is a plume of brackish black smoke billowing from his exhaust pipe, which is barely holding itself together with sticky tape and string and a little good luck. The radio emits a scratchy crackle, like the clearing of someone’s throat. He fiddles with the dial more out of habit than desire to listen to anything before flicking it off, relishing the quiet.
(He remembers the times he used to give Vicki a ride to school. The twitching of her always-restless fingers. She’d turn the dial in circles, searching for the right frequency for any station and get nothing but static before turning it off with an impatient huff. “You should get a stereo, Matty, this car needs some music.” Matt would laugh and joke that if she wanted music so badly, she’d have to listen to him sing. He’d tilt his head back and fill the cab with a discordant warble--a singer, Matt is not. Vicki would roll her eyes, a glimmer of amusement, a shadow of a smile that turned into a reluctant giggle, before she muffled his ‘singing’ with her hands and muttered, “Loser.”)
It hurts in his stomach, a burning sensation, to think about it-about Vicki, when a few weeks ago, they played the exact same game on the way to school. She’d sat right next to him, as tangible as if she was real and not a ghost. Living-almost and breathing-almost and now she was gone.
-
It’s a Saturday, no school but he does have the morning shift at the Grill. He’s got a routine to this too and it comes as naturally to him as performing plays on a football field.
He lets himself in through the back, the mustiness of the storage room with its rows and rows of plates and cups and knives and forks and napkins. He hangs his coat on a hook near the door, rolls his shoulders, and treads down the narrow aisle through to the kitchen and the front of the restaurant. First, switch on the lights, take down all the chairs and make sure the tables are clean, wipe down the counter, unlock the bar and the front door, open the windows, set the napkins on each table, make sure the cutlery is organized in the right compartments in each tray.
At this point, Larry, the chef, a reed-thin man with an angular, bearded face and a ready smile shows up, a stars-and-stripes bandanna knotted atop his head. Soon after, Juan, the dishwasher shuffles in, he’s young, a baby fuzz of stubble striped along his upper lip and dark hair that flops into his eyes every five minutes.
“Hola, Juan,” Matt says. Juan simply rolls his eyes, and with a completely unaccented voice, “How many times do I have to tell you, dude, I don’t speak Spanish.” Matt still laughs at the tired-out joke and Juan cracks a grin.
Mornings on a Saturday are pretty slow but soon the regulars start to trickle in. There’s Marlene, a lady who looks about fifty years old, with frosted blond hair and an outfit that’s always some variation of pale blue and a string of pearls that she plays with endlessly. She never smiles but she does drink her brandy neat without a grimace. Dexter Finchley, he works at the gas station a little way up the road, and shows up at around noon every single day to order the exact same thing-a chicken-and-mayo sandwich, on wheat, toasted, hold the pickle and tomato, a side of fries and a beer. Sometimes (often), Damon Salvatore shows up and drinks more than his weight in hard liquor, leans across the bar swirling a tumbler of whiskey and cracks jokes that make Marlene laugh. Matt doesn't do much but glare, the guy makes him nervous. (He remembers Vicki, all sick and pale in that hospital bed, lips cracked and still as a stone, talking crazy about "vampires" and what-not. And less than two weeks later she was gone--dead.)
Kids from school start showing up early in the afternoon and make themselves known with raucous laughter, herding around the pool tables.
There was a time when Matt hated this. Hated that he worked here of all places-everyone's favorite diner in Mystic Falls, where it was a given that he’d run into at least five of his classmates before lunch time on a slow day. He’d been a little embarrassed, if he was honest with himself, that he, Matt Donovan, who was friends with the likes of Tyler Lockwood and Elena Gilbert, who’d dated Caroline Forbes of all people was stuck doing this: wearing an apron around his waist, a dish towel over his shoulder, the faint scent of hot oil and onions and sometimes beer clinging to his clothes, and serving all of them.
He got over that pretty quickly.
-
Caroline and Bonnie show up in the evening. Bonnie to study, that heavy book full of her spells tucked under her arm. Caroline is clearly part-companion, part-watchdog, leafing through a magazine and scoping out the other diners with an alert air. He wonders why they’d come here of all places to do whatever it is they’re doing. But then, if he didn’t know what he knew now, he’d probably think nothing of it just like everyone else.
There is still a little awkwardness between all of them. He can’t look at either of them yet without feeling angry, sad, simply tired about all of it. And a little afraid.
(He has dreams sometimes, where Vicki screams when he sends her ghost away. And he thinks of the sound of it, the clawing sound of her and his name in her mouth. It reminds him of an eight year-old Vicki and a six-year old him. She had always been afraid of the dark, of sleeping alone, but she’d never liked to admit it. So he’d pretend he was afraid too. They’d hold hands and he would wait until she fell asleep, and then he’d close his eyes. He hadn’t been able to let go of her then, their small fingers clasped tightly until morning.)
“Hey, Matt!” Caroline waves at him, all pale-pink-tipped fingernails and a blinding grin. Bonnie is a little more subdued. She smiles and watches him closely as if she’s sifting through his insides. It makes him uncomfortable, he shifts on his feet and plops a menu on the table in front of them. Sometimes Bonnie can see too much and she’s not afraid to come right out and say it either when it comes to him.
He doesn’t linger long by their table. He’s become pretty good at that-walking away from them, from his friends and all their problems. He’s got enough of his own. So he hovers by the bar, ignores the looks they send his way right up until they finally leave; wipes down the tables, the piney fumes of cleaning liquid scratching at his nose. It’s an easy smell, familiar and normal. He can deal with normal.
-
He gets home late, darker than he left it hours ago, one shift more than he thought he’d do (extra cash, who was he to say no?).
The house sits in shadow. Now that he knows the things that he knows about monsters and stuff, the walk from his car to the door seems longer and weirdly loud--he picks up the pace just a little bit. (When he was a kid, it loomed. And the sound of his mother in mid-argument with one of her boyfriends, voice vodka-soaked and shrill as the crash of something breaking against the wall made him grip Vicki’s hand, afraid. She’d led him to the swing where they’d sat squeezed in on the narrow bench, side-by-side, her arm hooked over his shoulders until it all stopped.)
He trudges up the front stoop. There is a lump of mail propped against the front door. In the gloom, he can detect the red-lettered envelope of some bill he’s yet to pay, and he grimaces.
He unlocks the door, heads into the living room. He has a pack of food from the Grill (probably the best part of working there is rarely having to buy his own dinner on shift days), a cheeseburger and fries, nothing fancy. He plops down on the sofa; the springs protest loudly under his weight. Slouched down, his neck notched on the sofa arm, his legs sprawled so one sneakered foot rests on the table and the other on the floor, his dinner balanced precariously on his stomach. There’s nothing on but infomercials and local news; he puts the latter on low so the voices are a steady buzz that he can’t really decipher.
This is habitual too, there’s something comfortable in that, in the ease with which he performs the sameness of it all, of every single day of his life. He wonders if this is what it will always be: Matt Donovan living his life, day-in and day-out with the smell of cooking grease and beer stuck to his clothes.
And now there’s him draped on the couch, bathed in the synthetic glow of the television, chewing mechanically on an overly-salted burger, sipping on a flat, tasteless beer. He finishes eating, packs his dirty plate and plastic food wrapping away, and settles in to doze, flipping channels lazily until his eyes droop in the quiet. He falls asleep.
Rating: pg
Category: Matt (appearances by: Vicki, Caroline, Bonnie and Damon)
Spoilers: general spoilers for season 3
Words: 1781
Notes: I started working on this a long while ago to a prompt on softly_me's ficathon that was something like "working class hero" and it just never sort of came together for me? I'm not sure if it's come together here because Matt is just a hard character to get but I can't really stand to think on it much longer. I wanted to play with the absolute banality of Matt's existence and his world falling apart at the seams and ways in which he clings to the normal or tries to. Thanks to Alta for reading this way back when. All mistakes are mine. What a godawful title, jeepers.
Matt wakes up each morning. It’s still dark outside, the sky tinged a deep indigo that fades into pale red on a horizon he can't see. Not through the scuffed kitchen window that looks onto the yard out back, with its lonely swing covered in peeling flakes of rust, and a crumpled ball, once bright yellow and now a sort of off-putting mustard orange, that lolls aimlessly in the tallish grass. He'll need to mow that-the neighbors get twitchy if he lets the grass grow out too long. Once, back in June, in the dead heat of summer, when he worked 16-hour shifts at a stretch, he came home to find a $100-citation for "uncut grass in violation of the town's ordinance" stuck to the front porch. The citation presently lies crumpled at the edges and unpaid amidst a pile of bills on the kitchen counter.
-
He has a routine-Matt’s always had a fondness for routine, there’s a comfort in it, in breaking his day into neat blocks, clear-cut beginnings and endings. Clear-cut.
5:55 Wake up.
6:05 Work out (sometimes he saves this for the evenings when he can sneak quietly into the gym at school, surrounded by equipment that carries the clammy, airless smell of layered sweat and old bodies, and loses himself in the rhythm of a treadmill or a weight).
7:00 AM Take a ten-minute shower (five minutes if the hot water heater’s not working, especially in the winter).
7:15 AM Eat breakfast (nothing exciting-cornflakes and milk, toast, if he can squeeze it in).
7:30 AM Head out (sometimes he gets in a little cleaning, or finishes the last paragraphs of a history assignment, a head-crunching equation or two, some reading for AP English).
The drive to town is monotonous and predictable-he could do it with his eyes closed. His truck moves along the road in fits and grunts. Visible from his rear-view is a plume of brackish black smoke billowing from his exhaust pipe, which is barely holding itself together with sticky tape and string and a little good luck. The radio emits a scratchy crackle, like the clearing of someone’s throat. He fiddles with the dial more out of habit than desire to listen to anything before flicking it off, relishing the quiet.
(He remembers the times he used to give Vicki a ride to school. The twitching of her always-restless fingers. She’d turn the dial in circles, searching for the right frequency for any station and get nothing but static before turning it off with an impatient huff. “You should get a stereo, Matty, this car needs some music.” Matt would laugh and joke that if she wanted music so badly, she’d have to listen to him sing. He’d tilt his head back and fill the cab with a discordant warble--a singer, Matt is not. Vicki would roll her eyes, a glimmer of amusement, a shadow of a smile that turned into a reluctant giggle, before she muffled his ‘singing’ with her hands and muttered, “Loser.”)
It hurts in his stomach, a burning sensation, to think about it-about Vicki, when a few weeks ago, they played the exact same game on the way to school. She’d sat right next to him, as tangible as if she was real and not a ghost. Living-almost and breathing-almost and now she was gone.
-
It’s a Saturday, no school but he does have the morning shift at the Grill. He’s got a routine to this too and it comes as naturally to him as performing plays on a football field.
He lets himself in through the back, the mustiness of the storage room with its rows and rows of plates and cups and knives and forks and napkins. He hangs his coat on a hook near the door, rolls his shoulders, and treads down the narrow aisle through to the kitchen and the front of the restaurant. First, switch on the lights, take down all the chairs and make sure the tables are clean, wipe down the counter, unlock the bar and the front door, open the windows, set the napkins on each table, make sure the cutlery is organized in the right compartments in each tray.
At this point, Larry, the chef, a reed-thin man with an angular, bearded face and a ready smile shows up, a stars-and-stripes bandanna knotted atop his head. Soon after, Juan, the dishwasher shuffles in, he’s young, a baby fuzz of stubble striped along his upper lip and dark hair that flops into his eyes every five minutes.
“Hola, Juan,” Matt says. Juan simply rolls his eyes, and with a completely unaccented voice, “How many times do I have to tell you, dude, I don’t speak Spanish.” Matt still laughs at the tired-out joke and Juan cracks a grin.
Mornings on a Saturday are pretty slow but soon the regulars start to trickle in. There’s Marlene, a lady who looks about fifty years old, with frosted blond hair and an outfit that’s always some variation of pale blue and a string of pearls that she plays with endlessly. She never smiles but she does drink her brandy neat without a grimace. Dexter Finchley, he works at the gas station a little way up the road, and shows up at around noon every single day to order the exact same thing-a chicken-and-mayo sandwich, on wheat, toasted, hold the pickle and tomato, a side of fries and a beer. Sometimes (often), Damon Salvatore shows up and drinks more than his weight in hard liquor, leans across the bar swirling a tumbler of whiskey and cracks jokes that make Marlene laugh. Matt doesn't do much but glare, the guy makes him nervous. (He remembers Vicki, all sick and pale in that hospital bed, lips cracked and still as a stone, talking crazy about "vampires" and what-not. And less than two weeks later she was gone--dead.)
Kids from school start showing up early in the afternoon and make themselves known with raucous laughter, herding around the pool tables.
There was a time when Matt hated this. Hated that he worked here of all places-everyone's favorite diner in Mystic Falls, where it was a given that he’d run into at least five of his classmates before lunch time on a slow day. He’d been a little embarrassed, if he was honest with himself, that he, Matt Donovan, who was friends with the likes of Tyler Lockwood and Elena Gilbert, who’d dated Caroline Forbes of all people was stuck doing this: wearing an apron around his waist, a dish towel over his shoulder, the faint scent of hot oil and onions and sometimes beer clinging to his clothes, and serving all of them.
He got over that pretty quickly.
-
Caroline and Bonnie show up in the evening. Bonnie to study, that heavy book full of her spells tucked under her arm. Caroline is clearly part-companion, part-watchdog, leafing through a magazine and scoping out the other diners with an alert air. He wonders why they’d come here of all places to do whatever it is they’re doing. But then, if he didn’t know what he knew now, he’d probably think nothing of it just like everyone else.
There is still a little awkwardness between all of them. He can’t look at either of them yet without feeling angry, sad, simply tired about all of it. And a little afraid.
(He has dreams sometimes, where Vicki screams when he sends her ghost away. And he thinks of the sound of it, the clawing sound of her and his name in her mouth. It reminds him of an eight year-old Vicki and a six-year old him. She had always been afraid of the dark, of sleeping alone, but she’d never liked to admit it. So he’d pretend he was afraid too. They’d hold hands and he would wait until she fell asleep, and then he’d close his eyes. He hadn’t been able to let go of her then, their small fingers clasped tightly until morning.)
“Hey, Matt!” Caroline waves at him, all pale-pink-tipped fingernails and a blinding grin. Bonnie is a little more subdued. She smiles and watches him closely as if she’s sifting through his insides. It makes him uncomfortable, he shifts on his feet and plops a menu on the table in front of them. Sometimes Bonnie can see too much and she’s not afraid to come right out and say it either when it comes to him.
He doesn’t linger long by their table. He’s become pretty good at that-walking away from them, from his friends and all their problems. He’s got enough of his own. So he hovers by the bar, ignores the looks they send his way right up until they finally leave; wipes down the tables, the piney fumes of cleaning liquid scratching at his nose. It’s an easy smell, familiar and normal. He can deal with normal.
-
He gets home late, darker than he left it hours ago, one shift more than he thought he’d do (extra cash, who was he to say no?).
The house sits in shadow. Now that he knows the things that he knows about monsters and stuff, the walk from his car to the door seems longer and weirdly loud--he picks up the pace just a little bit. (When he was a kid, it loomed. And the sound of his mother in mid-argument with one of her boyfriends, voice vodka-soaked and shrill as the crash of something breaking against the wall made him grip Vicki’s hand, afraid. She’d led him to the swing where they’d sat squeezed in on the narrow bench, side-by-side, her arm hooked over his shoulders until it all stopped.)
He trudges up the front stoop. There is a lump of mail propped against the front door. In the gloom, he can detect the red-lettered envelope of some bill he’s yet to pay, and he grimaces.
He unlocks the door, heads into the living room. He has a pack of food from the Grill (probably the best part of working there is rarely having to buy his own dinner on shift days), a cheeseburger and fries, nothing fancy. He plops down on the sofa; the springs protest loudly under his weight. Slouched down, his neck notched on the sofa arm, his legs sprawled so one sneakered foot rests on the table and the other on the floor, his dinner balanced precariously on his stomach. There’s nothing on but infomercials and local news; he puts the latter on low so the voices are a steady buzz that he can’t really decipher.
This is habitual too, there’s something comfortable in that, in the ease with which he performs the sameness of it all, of every single day of his life. He wonders if this is what it will always be: Matt Donovan living his life, day-in and day-out with the smell of cooking grease and beer stuck to his clothes.
And now there’s him draped on the couch, bathed in the synthetic glow of the television, chewing mechanically on an overly-salted burger, sipping on a flat, tasteless beer. He finishes eating, packs his dirty plate and plastic food wrapping away, and settles in to doze, flipping channels lazily until his eyes droop in the quiet. He falls asleep.