mayhaps 4. “You’ll play this game with me, won’t you?” for john/elliot?
BABES I AM. SO SORRY that this has taken so long but i am really pleased that i finally hit a stride with it and how it came out!! i hope you enjoy this absolute tooth-rotting fluff piece. i’ve been having a rough few days so it was so nice to get the chance to just write something sugary-sweet for once. (❁´◡`❁)
v. we can change or part ways ✤ pre-cult au
john/elliot + “you’ll play this game with me, won’t you?”, or: john picks a fight with isolde and immediately loses. hints of joseph/isolde mentioned very briefly. sort of a sequel to this oneshot!
word count: 2.3k of pure fluff. also, some john bullying.
warnings: does john being an idiot count?
“This is a stupid game.”
It’s eleven o’clock on Christmas Eve, Elliot is snowed in at the Seed Ranch, and Isolde and John won’t stop arguing.
It’s almost enough to make it all worthwhile; the fact that they’re trapped, or that Elliot didn’t even want to come to this family dinner because she hasn’t forgotten about John impulsively asked her to marry him and her kicking him out of her apartment shortly thereafter, or that Jacob keeps looking at her from across the living room like, so uh, this is the one, huh?
“It’s not stupid,” John defends. “It will prove the superiority of Elliot and I over you and Joseph as a couple, and I think that’s not stupid at all.”
“It is,” Isolde replies flatly, “because any couple that has me in it is far superior over any couple that has you in it. No offense, Elliot.”
“None taken.”
“Offense is definitely taken,” John interjects.
“My point is that it could be Elliot and I versus you and Joseph, and I would still win, because anyone with two eyeballs probably knows Elliot better than you know her.”
“Then there’s no reason why you shouldn’t want to play!” John snaps, and then he looks at Elliot. Something in his expression shifts—something that Ell can’t quite read, and she thinks it might be because they haven’t even really made up yet from their last argument but have sort of been forced to play nice in close proximity.
And then his expression clears, and he flashes his teeth at her in that crooked smile, and he says, “You’ll play this game with me, won’t you?”
Elliot stifles a sigh. The idea of the game is simple enough—a couple stands back to back, is asked a series of questions about who-is-more-likely-to-whatever, the person who thinks they are drinks. And so on, and so forth. It sounds like a quick way for Elliot to get pissed at John, and also get piss drunk—there’s like, five rules about making them both drink—but he looks so earnest and—
And, well. He’s been trying. And that has to count for something, doesn’t it?
“Yeah,” she relents at last, “I will. If you stop fucking whining.”
“See?” John says, looking at Isolde pointedly, needling, and she groans.
“Can’t wait to watch you get drunk off your ass because you can’t get on the same page as your girlfriend to save your life.”
John rolls his eyes, almost so hard that Elliot can hear it more than she can see it, but he reaches out and snags her hand to haul her off of the couch. Isolde is prompt in producing two glasses full of alcohol—champagne, if Ell knows Isolde at all, and by now she does—and they stand, back to back, in the center of the living room.
Elliot says, “This is stupid,” with a withering sound, and John reaches behind him and gives her hip a squeeze. She still hasn’t forgiven him for his impromptu proposal, and yet he’s finding himself awful comfortable acting like everything is completely fine.
“Don’t be a poor sport, hellcat, you already agreed.”
She cranes her neck to shoot him a dirty look, with half a mind to tell him that she’d like to instead dissect everything he’d once done to piss her off rather than play this stupid fucking game, but her thoughts are quickly interrupted by Isolde settling onto the couch next to Jacob, looking quite pleased with herself.
Probably because she’d wriggled out of having to play a drinking game.
The first few questions are easy; softballs lobbed in their direction to get them to more relaxed. Things like, who’s more likely to get injured doing something stupid (Elliot), or have an embarrassing tattoo (John), or sell all of their belongings and move to Tibet (in which neither of them drinks, so then the rules are that they both must drink). In hindsight, Elliot thinks that Isolde is sending these easy ones on purpose, just ramping up for something better, grittier.
Halfway through, Joseph brings her a glass of wine just as the questions shift a little; who’s more likely to forget the name of someone they hooked up with (John), and date two people at once (John), and go home with someone they just met. The last one, they both drink, thanks to their most fortuitous first meeting in the club, and because they both drink they must then both drink again.
“These questions feel a little pointed,” John snips out eventually, when he’s drank six or seven times in a row, and Elliot can see Jacob grinning at them from the corner of her eyes. She’s pleasantly warm, but certainly nothing close to how toasty she’s sure that John is—how he must be after heartily drinking expensive, highly alcoholic champagne.
“They’re just fun questions, John. Aren’t you always talking about how you’re the fun one?” Isolde asks playfully. Elliot swallows back a laugh—it would be cruel, of course, to laugh at John’s expense—but she can’t help it. He’s put himself into corners too easily. “Who’s more likely to have the highest number?”
“Oooof?” John prompts irritably. “Candles? Chris—Christmas ornaments? Dog hairs on their clothes?” All things that he knows Elliot would beat him in and thus, have to drink for.
“Bedwarmers,” Elliot says, at the same time as Isolde does, and now she can’t help but laugh at the sound that comes out of John; long, and suffering, and fully aware that had he not insinuated that he is superior to Isolde in any way, she would not be specifically targeting him.
He drinks. Jacob asks, “More likely to hit someone with their car?” And she can feel John’s shoulders sag in relief, because she drinks dutifully.
“Thanks, Jake,” John murmurs, his words slurring a little now after enduring an onslaught of pointed questions. Elliot sees Joseph lean towards Isolde, murmuring something into her hair.
“Joseph says I have to stop torturing you,” Isolde announces, resulting in another breath of relief.
“I only suggested perhaps John has reached his limit,” Joseph admonishes. “You enjoy twisting the blade, a little.”
“You’re right, that is very sexy of me.”
John finishes whatever’s left in his cup—which can’t be much and then sets it on the table, nearly taking a headfirst dive over to the other side, and Elliot steadies him and sets her own glass aside.
“Easy, Slick.”
“Unfair,” is what John whines at her in response. “Isolde likes—she—you better.”
Looking awfully smug, Isolde suggests, “Should probably get that one to bed, Elliot, it doesn’t look like he’s gonna make it much longer.”
She stifles a sigh. The last thing that she really wants is to spend Christmas Eve with John completely, absolutely shit-faced; though considering that she’s so much more of a light-weight than he is, it is nice to have there be that kind of disparity for once. Let John be faced with his crippling vulnerability that he’d can’t laugh off because he’s so toasted.
By the time Elliot gets him up the stairs and into his bed, John has moaned and groaned his way through seven different thoughts. He settles against the pillows and lets out a breath, eyes closing.
“Gonna be stuck here,” he says after a minute. “For a few days. ‘Cause—the snow.”
“I know,” Elliot replies, perched on the edge of the bed. And then: "Fuck, I hate this," the alcohol in her system making her painfully unable to filter herself. At her words, John laughs, sitting up and sliding his arms around her waist so that he can look at her at her.
Drenched in dimly-filtered moonlight, all sharp elegant lines and eyes so blue she thinks they might swallow her up—he’s infuriating. Infuriating. So handsome, and also somehow smart and dumb at the same time. The idea that John wants to marry her is incredibly absurd, not only because of their track record but—
"Do you remember," John begins, fanning out the blanket across their laps, "that storm? A few months back? Took out your, uh....?"
“Power?”
“Yeah, that.”
She does. Elliot hates the dark, and with the power out that meant all of the small little lights she'd spread throughout her house didn't work. "Yes. It was awful."
"I remember it fondly," he continues in that still-warm lilt of being inebriated. He settles more comfortably in his spot and thumbs the slope of her hip, easy and affectionate.
“That tracks. We tend to have different views on how things go.”
He narrows his eyes, but the gesture is playful; he seems to be in a better mood than before, the tension between them less aggressive, waning and waxing the way it likes to do. John will contest it to his death, but she thinks that maybe he had intended for them to be equally as inebriated, not one more than the other, when he suggested the game before.
“It was awful,” John concedes, “but also—good. A moment in time can be many things. Should I state my case?”
Elliot groans. She’s drunk, and he’s more drunk but also a lawyer, and there is no way she can out-talk him anyway. Not in a million years. “John, you know I can’t out-argue you.”
“Maybe you’ll end up agreeing.” The brunette shifts again, reaching out and taking her hand. He does it very easily, like the argument doesn’t exist, like she hadn’t told him to fuck off and kicked him out of her apartment those nights ago. “Consider this: you’re me.”
“Hate it.”
“You’re me, and you’ve been dating this girl,” John continues ceaselessly, winding their fingers together. “That you really like, and you keep—messing it up, but this is the first date since the last time that you messed up, and the power goes out.”
Elliot grimaces. Even like this, even with John leaning in so that there isn’t a lot of space between them, telling her the story like it was the greatest thing in the world—all she can remember from that moment in time is the panic.
“And she’s really pissed off,” he adds, for flavor. “So you light every single candle you can dig out of her cupboard, because if you don’t you think she might actually come unglued from hitting her berserk button so much. And when she finally calms down, she ends up falling asleep right against you, and just before she’s really asleep for good she says that she loves you.”
Oh, Elliot thinks, her chest tightening painfully. She doesn’t remember that. The adrenaline crash, sure, burying her face into John’s neck and smelling his cologne as she fell asleep; but that does sound like something half-asleep Elliot would say, the traitorous bitch.
“Stupid,” she murmurs after a moment, when she thinks she’s recovered. Her words elicit from John a half-cocked grin as he’s leaned in, studying her. “That you remember that.”
“I remember everything,” John replies, his voice pitching low, “about you, Ell.”
Bad. This is bad, a mistake. It’s cozy under a blanket, away from the bustle of his siblings, knowing how much it’s storming and snowing outside, and she keeps thinking about how he kissed her in her apartment that night he’d tried to sneak the proposal in—like he wanted more, like he wanted to kiss her more than that, but he was trying to behave.
He was trying.
“I can’t,” Elliot manages out, soft. “John, I can’t—this—back and forth, and—”
“I don’t want to either,” John insists. “I want you, Ell, I mean it—I meant it then, and now, and I’m sorry that I thought a ring would fix it. Or, not even fix it, just that I thought—”
Her chest feels tight, and hot, and she swallows thickly as he speaks before she interrupts. “It was really stupid, really really fucking stupid, like—the meanest joke you could—”
“It wasn’t a joke—”
“So what did you do?” she asks, suddenly, blurting the words out before she can stop herself. John blinks at her.
“What did I do?”
“That night,” she presses. “That night in my house, when the power went out. When I said...”
Her voice trails off. She knows what she wants him to say, deep down inside of her. She knows that she wants him to say, I love you, I loved you then and I love you now and there’s nobody else I want more than you, because she’s a hopeless romantic and there’s nothing that would make her life into a Hallmark movie than John whispering a profession of love like this, right now.
John starts, “Elliot, I’m—”
Panic. If he says it, it’s real, and then she will have to face it. Really, truly face.
“An idiot,” Elliot interjects, her words overlapping with his and strangling them until all she can hear is the tail end of him saying, “—with you,” and his mouth sets down in a deep frown.
She looks at their hands, intertwined. He’d been so sure of himself that night, sliding the ring on her finger, and it’s less that he seemed sure she would say yes but more sure that he thought he had been making the right decision. More than anything, all I want to hear is that you missed me.
“Go to sleep,” she says at length. “We’ll see how you feel when you wake up in the morning.”
John, true to form, heaves the most dramatic sound possible out of his body before he lays back against the pillows, still in his jeans and button up. Elliot stands, and leaves him like that, because there’s plenty of things that John Seed deserves and Elliot thinks waking up in tight jeans is one of them.
“Hellcat,” he says, when she reaches the door. She pauses, glancing back; he’s quiet for a moment before he says, “Mean it, you know.”
I’m in love with you. She knows that’s what he’d been trying to say before she’d spoken over him.
“I know,” Elliot replies softly. “We’ll see if you mean it tomorrow, too.”
