Chapter Text
The Grump office at 2 o’clock in the morning looks so eerily different than how Arin is used to seeing it.
Without all the crew members running around—filming, eating, laughing, chatting, pulling pranks on each other—it now feels like a completely foreign space to him. It’s so dark and still, the silence watchful. Somber, even. Arin briefly recalls a conversation he and Dan had once, where Dan talked about how the spaces that we surround ourselves with often reflect how we’re feeling inside.
At the time, Arin had dismissed this with a stupid joke.
He ducks into his small office and sits down in his desk chair with a heavy sigh, rubbing both hands down his face before letting them rest over his mouth for a second. He looks around at his hodgepodge of trinkets, figurines, and knickknacks that he's grown attached to over the years. The stacks of sketchbooks and convention badges. The crooked shelf crammed with ugly off-brand Sonic figurines, all poorly-painted smiles and lopsided eyes. His office is a damn mess, but it’s exactly the way he likes it. And, usually, seeing all his memories and passions laid out like this is enough to calm him down.
His eyes catch on a small pair of dolls sitting near the monitor. Him and Dan. Little stitched smiles. Dan's curls spooled from yarn, the notch in his eyebrow. The pink stripe in Arin's hair. A sweet fan had knitted them and gifted them to Arin at a convention years ago.
He scratches at his beard, feeling an odd sense of dread pooling in his body—an ache in his stomach that’s been lurking there all day, now being stoked.
He drums his fingers against his cluttered desktop. Stops. Checks his phone even though there's nothing there. Ten minutes pass. Then fifteen. He thinks about Suzy at home, in bed under her weighted blanket with the sound machine on, sleeping peacefully. How easy would it be for him to just get back in his car and go home to his wife? He could even stop by Del Taco on the way. Let that be the only bad decision he makes tonight.
By tomorrow morning the weird, antsy feeling would probably already be smaller. Something he could shove down beneath work and errands and obligations and recording sessions and every other thing constantly demanding his attention.
That's what a normal person would do.
Well, actually, a normal person would never let themselves be in this position to begin with.
He sits there for a while longer, still performing the illusion of indecision.
He stares at the dolls again, then immediately looks away from them.
“Jesus Christ,” he mutters under his breath.
Finally, knowing he was always going to do this to himself, Arin pushes himself upright.
The office chair rolls backward across the floor. He steps out of the office, but instead of turning right towards the exit, he makes a left and walks down the narrow hallway to the editing room at the far end.
Arin pushes inside and is instantly swallowed by darkness. The room smells vaguely of dust, electronics, and stale coffee. He reaches blindly along the nearest desk until his fingers find the small lamp, which casts a soft amber glow across the editing bay. It doesn't illuminate much. Just enough. And the shapes emerge in pieces—dual monitors, sticky notes clinging to the edges of screens, abandoned energy drink cans, a sweatshirt slung over the back of one chair. The rest remains hidden in shadow.
Arin sits down heavily, boots up the computer, types in the password. The screen blooms awake behind his reflection, washing his face in cold blue light.
He already knows where everything is. Through a series of rapid clicks, he navigates through the chain of nested folders, finding the backlog of raw media files from the past week of Grumps sessions, ready to be imported into Premier Pro and cut into episodes.
Beside the monitor sits a pair of studio headphones. He stares at them for a second before reaching for them. And once the worn padded cups settle over his ears, the room is muted into a dull, insulated hush.
He mouses over the audio file for the session they had just recorded hours earlier, and double clicks.
Static crackles ever-so-slightly through the headphones.
Then his ears are immediately filled with the warm, quiet laughter of Dan, somewhere in the recording room far away from the mic while Arin makes last-minute adjustments to the setup. The beginning of every recording is always a little loose like this. It's usually just Arin cursing as he fiddles with cables and settings, fixing tiny issues that only matter to him. While Dan watches in amusement, munches through a snack, or chats excitedly because it’s the start of a new day and he’s full of fizzy enthusiasm, even after all these years.
“Why is this doing this?” recording-Arin groans, distant.
Dan snorts. “Because it senses fear.”
A small clatter follows.
“God damn it.”
Dan laughs again around a mouthful of chips.
These are the moments that normally get edited around, tossed in the bin—the small, unimportant pieces of existing together with no performance.
The headphones make every sound strangely intimate—the drag of fabric as they sit on the couch, the rustle of a snack wrapper, Dan’s laughter arriving directly into Arin’s ears like he’s sitting beside him in the dark.
And although Arin could probably listen to the dulcet laughter of his best friend for hours, he knows what time stamp he’s searching for, more or less. So, he scrubs ahead. Around eight and a half hours in, at the point they'd really started getting tired and letting their guards down.
He taps the right arrow key over and over, jumping through the recording in five-second increments until the conversation turns familiar, sending a small pang of recognition through his chest. Dan’s voice comes alive in his ears, much closer than before.
“—have many regrets in my life."
Arin stills instantly. The cursor hovers forgotten over the timeline.
"In fact, I try very hard to live without any regrets, but I do wish I could just go for the big things more often, and not, you know, chicken out.”
Arin remembers this part. Or, at least, he remembers how little attention he’d paid to it at first. At the time, he’d still been leaning back on the couch, half-distracted, fumbling through a janky little puzzle-platformer he'd found on Steam, already knowing this was going to be a one-off episode.
“What the hell are you talking about?" Arin cuts in, taking the opportunity as the game loads back in to actually focus on what Dan is saying. "You’re a freakin’ rock star. You took a chance and followed your dream, and look at everything you’ve accomplished because of that. Because you were brave over and over again, every time you took the stage.”
Now, the shift in Dan's tone seems painfully obvious.
“Aww, well that’s very kind of you, Arin. And I see what you’re saying, I do. But I don’t know, I can be a pretty big pussy when it comes to certain things—”
Arin interrupts him. “Like what?"
“—You know what I’m saying?”
“No!”
Danny takes a pause here. “…Are you really gonna make me say it?”
Their voices are loud and crystal-clear through the headphones, in that tickle-in-your-ear kind of way. Every quiet laugh and pull of breath feels like it’s happening directly inside Arin’s head. It feels like Danny is actually in the room with him. He even glances over his shoulder just to make double sure he's alone.
“Dude, I literally have no clue what you’re talking about. You’re one of the bravest motherfuckers I know. Who—who else can do what you do?”
"Alright," Dan laughs. “I appreciate that, man.”
Listening back now, he can hear Dan easing off of the subject, retreating the second he realizes Arin isn’t picking up on it.
“You literally go out in front of thousands of people and perform.”
“Yeah, well… I don’t know. This is different.”
“…Well, tell me, Daniel, how it’s different.”
Dan laughs, thinner this time. “Well…” He clears his throat, takes a moment to carefully choose his words.
Silence crackles softly through the headphones.
"Fuck," Arin mutters quietly, after what must be his character dying in the game.
Dan laughs again, a little distracted now.
Then comes another pause. Long enough that Arin can now pinpoint the exact moment Dan almost backs out entirely.
“Okay," he says finally. "I’ll say this."
And Arin feels himself sit up a little straighter without meaning to.
"Without giving too much away, I’ll just say that... I have a friend. Who’s a girl. And we’re really close friends. We’ve known each other for many years.”
“Yeah?” Arin says easily.
“And I really like this girl. I guess you could say I have feelings for her.”
“Awwwwww.”
“And, I don’t know. It feels like love."
On the monitor, the audio waveform pulses steadily across the timeline as Dan talks—small blue peaks and valleys rolling endlessly forward on the media player, rising and dipping with every scrape of nervous laughter and lag of hesitation.
Arin finds himself staring at it instead of the rest of the screen. It’s easier, somehow. To watch the conversation happen than actually listen to it.
"The feelings—they’re—they’re really strong, you know?" Dan goes on. "And I’m too much of a pussy to go and talk to her, or, you know, say, ‘hey, you wanna go on a date.’ But, it’s hard. Because—when you have such strong feelings, it seems so terrifying.”
“Oh, of course.”
“You don’t want to fuck anything up. And you know—you know—you’re gonna fuck something up somehow.”
Arin lets out a quiet laugh.
“So, you just do nothing. But—God—there’s always that regret that you’re missing out on… the best thing of your life.”
“Yeah.”
“I don’t know.”
Arin can hear the tiny deflation at the end, how Dan has talked himself all the way to the edge and then suddenly seems embarrassed by his own honesty.
“Well," Arin says carefully, finding his voice again. "I can say this. I’m pretty sure I know who you’re talking about—”
“Oh, I know I said too much. I’m sure the girl in question, if she ever somehow hears this—she would know immediately this is about her.”
“Yeah?”
“But that’s the magic of editing. It will be like this conversation never happened!”
“Yeah. We won’t… I actually didn’t know what you were going to say, but yeah, we can cut this part out, whatever.”
Somewhere in the background, Arin's character must die again.
“Oh, fuck this game. I don't even care anymore," he mutters, voice trailing away from the mic as he leans past it, followed by the hollow clatter of a controller being thrown down on the coffee table. "Cut the whole thing."
“Oh, thank God.”
“But back to what I was saying—”
“Right, sorry.”
At this point, the recording was forgotten and they were just simply talking, the line between content and real life dissolving without either of them noticing. This happens more often than fans would ever realize. Sometimes conversations just go off the rails, things get too personal, something is said that shouldn’t be said, or maybe they’re just losing gumption midway through an episode and need to regroup.
Most of it just gets cut away and wiped off hard drives.
“I’ve seen how you two interact with each other," Arin says. "Um… how she looks at you and all that.”
“Yeah?”
“And I think… I think there’s a real shot there. I think it’s very likely she shares your feelings.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. And of course—I don’t know that for certain.”
“Oh, totally.”
“It’s just speculation. But… go for it, man. You only get one life. And I can see by the way you talk about her that you really like her.”
“I do. I really do.”
Arin stares hard at the moving waveform on the monitor.
“So tell her, you goof!”
“But see, that’s the problem. That’s how this entire conversation started. I’m a straight-up pussy.” Danny laughs. “I’m just not one of those kinds of dudes that can just go for it like that.”
“Well, that’s not being a pussy, dude. That’s just being cautionary. You’re nervous because you know how important she is to you. But you were just saying that your one regret in life is not going for it, right?”
“Right… Oh god, I just got the—the shivers up the spine.”
And Arin can hear the nervousness in his voice, can still see the way Dan had ducked his head, smiling sheepishly now that everything suddenly felt real.
“You’re so goddamn adorable, Dan.”
Dan laughs. “This is fucking terrifying for me, man," he says, his voice pitching up an octave. "I am so scared she doesn’t feel the same way. She’s such an amazing person, and I’d hate to screw it up with her.”
“Who couldn’t love you, Dan? You’re fucking amazing.”
The waveform flattens briefly. For a second, Arin has to look away from the screen entirely.
“Awww, Arin.”
Another silence follows, filled only with arbitrary mic sounds and the distant, repetitive chirping of paused game music.
“I just had an idea," Arin says.
“You did?”
“Instead of cutting all of this out, why don’t we leave it in?”
“What? Are you serious?”
“Yeah… I mean… I think so.”
“I don’t know, dude. People are going to be wanting to know what happens, and if she doesn’t feel the same way… and I don’t want her to feel pressured just because it’s now this, like, public thing—”
“Hmm, yeah, you’re right," Arin concedes, "I just think everything you’ve said is so endearing. The last five minutes have been just your raw, sincere feelings. How you really feel, no embellishments, no nothing. It’s really sweet. Anyone would be happy to hear that.”
“You think so?”
“I do.”
“Well, what if we… sent her the episode first, so she’s not pressured? Or maybe just this part, so we’re not prefacing it with twenty minutes of sexy pelicans or whatever the hell we were talking about earlier.” He laughs.
“Hey, I resent that comment. But, yeah, sure. Whatever you want to do.”
“But wouldn't that be weird? To just, like, email her an audio file to listen to?”
“Dude, you’re a musician! Just tell her it’s a song you’re working on or something and you want her opinion.”
“Okay… I… I guess?”
“I mean, you don’t have to. It’s your life, dude.”
“No, I think it could be good. I think… do we just… how do we end it? Do I just speak directly to her?”
“That’s up to you, dude.”
Another long silence follows.
“Do you want me to leave?” Arin asks.
“No, I think I like you being here. I feel less like I’m gonna shit my pants with you here.”
Arin closes his eyes briefly. The headphones suddenly feel too warm against his ears.
“Here, just pretend I’m her."
Dan laughs. “Yeah, that doesn’t make it awkward or anything.”
“Hey Danny.”
Dan laughs again, a little helplessly. “You bastard.”
Another pause.
“Okay, I…”
He takes a deep breath.
“I know this is… crazy… to listen to. You must be thinking how weird this is. But… we’ve been good friends for a while now. I’ve had these feelings brewing—”
“I’m sorry, are you talking to me or—”
“Sh-shut up, Arin. I’m talking to her.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”
“Way to ruin the moment. Um… right…" He collects himself, again. "You’re really great. You make me happy. You make me smile every day. I just want to spend all my time with you. We have formed such a strong bond. I literally couldn’t imagine my life without you.”
At this point, Dan had looked right at Arin, a sudden seriousness in his eyes that made Arin's heart kick up. Then his expression slowly fizzled away into laughter again.
“Oh my God, it really does sound like I’m just talking directly to you, dude.”
A strange warmth crawls up the back of Arin’s neck. He stares down at the keyboard, one hand dragging across his forehead, shielding against the brightness of the monitor.
“Dude, I’m telling you! You’re giving me all the feels right now.”
“We’re cleaning this up before we send it to her, right?”
Arin laughs. “No! That’s the whole point. It’s your feelings, raw and unedited.”
Dan clears his throat. “Okay, fine. I’m talking to her. Just… give me a moment.”
He takes another deep breath, this one longer than the last. Shakier.
“I have… totally fallen in love with you.”
Arin squeezes his eyes shut as he continues to listen.
“I have felt this way for a while now, just too afraid to do or say anything. I have suspected at times you felt the same way, but if you don’t…. just know that it’s totally okay. Don’t feel obligated to, you know, just because of this recording. I will totally understand. No matter what, we will be okay. I just… life is too fucking short to not take chances. So, this is my chance.”
Another long pause.
“How do you feel?” Arin asks.
“I actually feel good. I think… I think it will be good.”
Arin pulls the headphones off and sets them down. The silence that floods back into the editing room feels strangely hollow now.
For a minute, Arin just sits there in the dim amber glow of the desk lamp, rubbing both hands hard over his eyes.
The first thing he thinks is that he did a pretty good job hiding it.
Acting normal.
His voice sounded casual enough. He'd said all the right things. Made all the jokes he would normally make.
For that, at least, he can feel relieved. Especially considering how surprised he'd been in the moment. He’d suspected at times the feelings Dan was referring to, but never knew for certain. And during the recording, he’d mostly just wanted to support his friend. Get through it.
But in the back of his mind he knew he would have to deal with this later, that it would be big enough to drag him out of his bed, across town, and into the Grump offices at 2 am.
So that’s what he’s going to do. He’s going to deal with it, right now.
He’s going to burn this out of himself, no matter how much it hurts.
He places the headphones back on his head, and he scrubs backwards in the timeline. And he forces himself to listen to it.
Over and over and over.