Dec 6, 2018
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betas are the unsung heroes of fanfic writing. thank you for all your hard work - you help writers keep writing
“Oww,” Nursey says. “Ouch ouch ouch oww.” Every step down makes his quads burn. He grabs the railing for balance.
“Baby,” Bitty teases from the bottom of the stairs.
“I will snap your legs like twigs,” he grumbles. “Watch me.” Bitty just laughs at him.
Behind him, Dex says, “Go backwards.”
“Huh?” Nursey pauses, foot in midair.
“Go backwards,” Dex says. “It hurts less.”
Nursey stares at him. He’s not sure if he’s being pranked. After a moment, he turns around and tries it. “Wow,” he says.
“Yeah.” Dex waits patiently as Nursey descends the rest of the stairs. “You should foam roller your legs, too. It helps.”
Nursey makes eye contact with Bitty. He tries to say ‘who is this pod person and what has he done with Dex’ in eyebrow. Bitty doesn’t get the full message. He raises his eyebrows back and looks confused.
“Y’all want coffee?” Bitty asks.
“Please,” Nursey says, pouring a generous slug of creamer into the bottom of a mug. Dex is already preheating the toaster oven and slicing bagels.
“Overdid leg day?” Bitty asks. The coffeemaker drips.
“Went running after leg day,” Nursey says. “I’ll be okay for practice. Just need to walk it off.” Dex shakes his head. “Don’t judge me,” Nursey tells him.
“I wasn’t,” Dex says, and takes the unsalted peanut butter and strawberry jam out from the fridge. He nudges the door closed with his hip. “I was going to offer you a massage, actually.”
“Wha--”
“--you should take him up on that,” Bitty says. He grins at Dex. “The Physical Therapy Club really paid off for you.”
Dex shrugs. “Everybody gets so tense.” He didn’t add the part about being touch-starved and freaked out, but Nursey filled it in silently. Look at him, trying to be better.
“Okay,” Nursey says. He sips his coffee.
And clearly he didn’t think this through, because suddenly he’s sitting on the couch in the living room. Dex’s fingers dig into the meat of his thigh. “Breathe,” Dex says. “That’s it.” Nursey breathes slowly.
When he stands, his legs feel more like muscle and bone, less like knots of pain. “Thanks,” he says unevenly.
Thinking of you.
That’s all the text says. Dex’s heart feels warm in his chest. Thinking of you. It’s so much more than Hey sexy or babe or behind the gym, 12:45.
He’s dated people before, he has. But this--rush of feeling, the way he finds his thoughts drifting, the way he’s getting conditioned to the buzzing of his phone--this is all new.
Y? he replies. The question mark makes it look friendlier. He puts his phone in his bag and zips it. He’ll check again after class.
He feels the vibration against his foot: a text message. The professor is still lecturing, PowerPoint slides marching on, and Dex is diligently taking notes, even though it feels like his bag’s an unexploded bomb at his feet. He’s not going to open it, he’s not.
As soon as the Professor Crawley says, “See you next week,” Dex’s hand is on the zipper.
i like you.
It’s not news. News was the first time they kissed, and Dex felt lit up from the inside out. But Dex’s family doesn’t do this--kind of open statement of emotion. He’s never doubted that Sarah and his parents love him; but they never say it.
u 2, he replies.
He’s crossing the Main Green diagonally when he sees Nursey, standing beside a bench outside the anthropology building, frowning down at his phone.
“Hi,” Dex says. He’s still too far away, but Nursey looks up, sees him, and grins.
“Babe!” Nursey’s smile is wide and open and so, so genuine. “How was class?”
“Not bad,” Dex says. The honest answer would be: I couldn’t stop thinking about you, but he’s not quite ready for that much honesty yet.
Maybe someday. Maybe soon.
In the meantime, he can still say it another way. He grabs Nursey’s bicep, leans in, and kisses him. I like you. I couldn’t stop thinking about you.
When they break apart, Nursey’s smile is almost shy.
“How was your class?” Dex asks.
“Good,” Nursey says, and verbally outlines his upcoming paper as they walk back to the Haus together.
"You broke into my apartment drunk..." prompt with Nursey/Dex or Ronan/Adam 👀👀👀
The knocking at the door is too loud, more like pounding. Nursey starts up off the couch. Pizza delivery was last night, and he’s not expecting a package. There shouldn’t be anyone knocking.
The doorknob rattles. Nursey’s throat closes, and icy calm descending over him. I’m not really a violent person, or much of a fighter at all. Ice hockey notwithstanding. Could you drive away an intruder by insulting them?
Besides, even if I punched someone in my own home, they’d argue it was self-defense. Like that off-duty cop, who shot Botham Shem Jean in his own living room.
He readies his phone, 911 emergency call, ready to go. The door shakes. Where are my neighbors?
He holds his phone in his right hand, lifts the tab to uncover the peephole with his left.
The phone thuds to the doormat. What the fuck?
“Stop breaking the door down,” he says loudly to the person on the other side.
"That’s the thing, there isn’t really a lot to tell. I like him a lot, he doesn’t know, and I’ll put my emotions in a small gay box until I inevitably die."
starting to get to me, playingforkeeps
December 1 - unexpected visitors (see the full prompt list here)
The door creaks. It’s the one thing Dex hasn’t fixed yet. It’s a feature, he keeps telling himself, not a bug. They don’t need to put socks on the door because the door itself is an advance warning system.
He realized, curled up on the full-sized air mattress next to the beer fridge, that he forgot to bring down clean underwear.
Hence the secret mission: get back upstairs, get into Nursey’s room, get clean underwear, get out.
Except--the door. It sounds like the shrieking of the damned, like the wailing of a tortured soul. “I thought it was supposed to be only the attic that’s haunted,” he mutters.
There’s a rustle, and then a sleepy voice says, “Nah, haven’t you ever heard Britney while you’re brushing your teeth? And you know Chow doesn’t play Britney.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” Dex presses a hand to his pounding heart. “I didn’t think you were going to be awake.”
Nursey snorts. Dex scrambles for possible translations. “You bonehead” is a strong contender, as is “Of course I’m awake; the barometric pressure is dropping and I have a broken bone.” Dex cracked the hall window as he came upstairs--the hall radiator is outdid itself. The air had smelled wet, like the impending snow.
Dex moves carefully across the floor, testing each step before he takes it. He has tripped over socks (his), a fountain pen (Nursey’s), and a diminutive plush shark (Chowder’s) in the dark before; he’s taking no chances.
“Your fort is sick,” Nursey says drowsily.
“The literal actual fu--are you sleeping in my bed?” Dex whisper-screams. He curls his hands around the edge of the dresser. It’s a nice piece--he found it on a run, half a mile from campus: the only thing wrong with it was that a couple of the drawer knobs needed replacing. The moulding feels reassuringly solid under his fingers.
“Hell yes,” Nursey says. He sounds more awake now.
Dex opens the drawer and grabs underwear by feel. Five pairs ought to do it, especially since he’s sleeping right next to the washing machine.
“I’m not going to risk my beautiful body climbing up that ladder,” Nursey continues.
Dex has a sudden, vivid memory of being ten years old and twenty feet up a silver maple, hiding in the Poindexter treehouse. Please don’t find me, please don’t find me, please don’t find me. It didn’t work then and it doesn’t work now.
“Because of your ‘sports injury.’” Making air quotes in the dark causes him to drop several pairs of underwear.
“I lost a bet,” Nursey says. “I owe Chowder a coffee; I bet him you wouldn’t come back up here until tomorrow.”
“I’m sorry,” Dex says, and bends down to pick up his underwear. It isn’t what he expected to say at all. Please don’t find me. He was ten years old, and all he wanted was...five minutes of privacy. One thing that was just his.
“For someone who has, like, enough siblings for a two-man advantage, you are crap at sharing,” Nursey says.
Dex picks up his underwear. “Got any more 2 am wisdom for me?”
The top of Nursey’s waterbottle clicks and liquid sloshes as he drinks. “Nope. Sleep well.”
Dex hesitates, shifting from foot to foot. He should say something else. He should do something else. “You too.” He clutches his boxes to his chest and pulls the door closed behind him. It shuts noiselessly.
“No,” Dex mutters, and burrows deeper into his pillow.
Nursey shakes his shoulder again. “Get up.”
“M’sleeping,” Dex mutters smearily. “Is the Haus on fire? Is someone bleeding out? Then leave me alone!”
It’s an impressively complex set of sentences for someone who is still asleep. Nursey chews his lower lip. “Well, actually.”
Dex sits up. “What? Where’s the fire?” He’s completely awake and down the ladder in an instant.
Nursey steps back. “What the fuck, dude.” Seriously. Dex was literally just dead to the world.
“Yeah?” Dex says. His voice is still rusty with sleep.
“Okay,” Nursey says. The fact that Dex can transition instantly to wakefulness is Useful Information, but it’s distracting him from his mission right now. “Tango says the stove isn’t turning on.”
Dex groans. “You woke me up for that?”
“Um,” Nursey says. “Well, actually, it was the furnace.”
“Oh my god,” Dex says, and scrubs his fists across his eyes. “You’re being weird. Why are you being weird?” He pulls on a pair of gray sweatpants, slides his feet into slippers (Dex wears slippers, like the old man he not-so-secretly is) and heads for the door.
“Aren’t you going to put on a shirt?” Nursey’s overtaxed pansexual heart cannot handle this.
Dex rolls his eyes. “No, I’m going to see the extent of the damage, and then if I need a shirt, you can get me one. Since you woke me up.”
“Okay, wow,” Nursey says, “Rude,” but he follows Dex out of the room and down the stairs.
The kitchen is clear and quiet. Dex goes straight to the stove and twists one of the burners. The gas comes on with a ‘pop.’ “Okay,” Dex says. “Not that one.”
Nursey makes a frantic hand signal.
Most of the SMH comes crashing in from the living room. “SURPRISE!”
Tango’s holding a coffee cake studded with candles.
Dex turns around, forgetting to shut off the burner. “What?”
Nursey grins. “Happy birthday!”
“Oh,” Dex says, and turns off the burner.
Tango sets with flaming cake down on the table. Chowder puts down a platter of eggs and bacon and beams.
“Wow,” Dex says. He’s clearly at a loss for words.
Nursey steps closer to him. Under the cover of giving him a bro hug, he says in Dex’s ear, “Is this okay?”
Dex shivers. “Yeah,” he says. “Yeah, I’m just...surprised.” He steps back. “Wow,” he says. “Thanks guys!”
Chowder grins. Whiskey begins setting up plates, and takes a platter of pancakes out of the oven.
Nursey nudges Dex. “Go on,” he says. “Get food!”
Dex takes a plate. “Thanks everyone. You made all this?”
Chowder is still smiling. “Most of it,” he says. “Bitty made the coffee cake--it’s been in the downstairs freezer behind the Coors. He says happy birthday, by the way.”
“Aww,” Dex says. His cheeks are pink. “You all didn’t have to--”
Chowder elbows him. “Don’t be silly,” he says.
“Okay,” Dex says. “Thank you.” The way he says it, all quiet and sincere, that makes Nursey’s heart skip a beat in his chest.