#thomavid

[weepylucifer]

Couples counsellor: "Try communicating what you're feeling in 'I' statements."

Thomas: "I want to fuck our therapist."

David: *happy gasp* "I want that too!!"

They highfive.

[weepylucifer]

For the shipping meme: Thomas/David: 11, 13, 24, Thomas/Peter: 12, 5, 26. (And I know I'm greedy... Sue me. :p)

Oh, greedy isn’t what I’d call it. After all, you’re enabling MEEEEE to talk about things I’m obsessed with!!

So, for Thomas/David:

11. What do they hide from one another?

You’re probably expecting something dramatic, most likely war-related here, but really I feel like it’s the mundane things. They’re partners in war crime. They realized at some point that if they keep battle-related things to themselves and let them fester between them, if there is any pretense or denial between them in this whatsoever, it will take over everything and break them. So this, they share.

But... David doesn’t actually like when Thomas teases him about his scientific work, even if it’s “just” friendly ribbing. He considers it belittling. But he doesn’t know how to bring that up, and is afraid that if he does he’ll be made fun of, so he doesn’t say anything. David’s fiercely envious of Thomas’s natural talent, and only applies himself so hard in the first place to be the Foremost Magical Empiricist bc he feels he’s playing catch-up with his boyfriend. He cannot tell Thomas that. Meanwhile Thomas only ever makes fun of David’s work because he cannot understand it and there are moments when that makes him feel stupid. Like all he’s good at is stuff that comes to him completely without thinking, magic and rugby and sucking dick while David is so smart. Both are sometimes lying up at night afraid the other will notice that they’re vastly not good enough and will leave. This is never ever discussed.

13. When do they realise they should get together?

Hmmm. Funny enough I think that’s not Casterbrook. That could plausibly be filed later under “schoolboys just goofing off this means nothing no homo old chap”. It takes them graduating, Thomas going abroad and eventually coming back. They take one look at each other, reuniting on a train station, Thomas with a fetching tan and a plethora of stories, and realize like a stroke of lightning just how much they have missed each other, not just having someone, but specifically each other. How they yearned and pined and fretted over every letter. They take that one look at each other and are simultaneously like “This is he, the one I love, we are going to exist as lovers together”

24. Where do they first have sex?

Like in their fuckin... dorm? Idk, where do boarding school people have sex

For Thomas/Peter:

12. What first changes when it starts getting serious?

The atmosphere at work. It’s like, do they or do they not treat each other differently when out on the job? Also, privately, Peter would be permitted insight into things as Thomas’s lover that he had no way of ever seeing as Thomas’s apprentice, even as they were sharing a house. This is when Peter truly learns what a deeply weird human being Thomas is. Like, he’s had up to zero socialisation for 70some years, apart from Molly, who is great but not really a shining example of normal human behavior. I bet Thomas had just a dizzying array of weird quirks and ingrained habits that developed in all the decades when nobody was watching him, and as his boyfriend Peter has to deal with all of this now. (Also “wow my boss has a tragic and heroic war backstory” is a bit of a different thing to handle than “my boyfriend, a veteran with PTSD, woke me up flailing and muttering in his sleep about killing nazis - again”)

5. Who says ‘I love you’ first?

God. Does anyone? Maybe as like a “Oh shit, I blurted this out in a dangerous situation or in the middle of sex, do we have to address this now?” thing. Probably Peter. Thomas would politely keep it to himself forever if it’s up to him.

26. Why do they need to have a serious chat?

Hmmm. Probably just getting into that relationship either requires serious negotiation, or they decide to just wing it and never speak about it, and then later they have to admit this didn’t pan out, and actually have a talk about what they are to each other. Later, they could have serious chats about any number of topics. Something to the tenor of “Get therapy” (could come from either side) for example. Other potential talking points include “Our Class Difference 101″, “There Will Be No Makeouts During Practice”, “Just Keep Your Bloody Phone On You Okay” and “David”

[weepylucifer]

For Thomas/David #74, pleeeeease :)

74: “I’m a monster.”

(Set in David Mellenby Lives AU, obviously. Tw suicidal ideation)

It was a cold January night, somewhere around midnight, when Thomas awoke to muffled sobbing from the other bedside.

David had been acting strange all day, absentminded not in his usual, really quite adorable distracted-professor-way, but in a manner that hinted at some trouble brewing, and distant and dismissive when questioned about it. Usually when David had a problem or was struggling with something, he insisted it be discussed and resolved immediately. That he hadn’t come out with it yet, and apparently waited to cry until Thomas fell asleep, was cause to worry.

“Davey?” Thomas asked softly.

David was seated on the edge of the bed, dressed in his pajamas, his favorite quilt draped over his shoulders. He was always cold these days, and layered on the blankets when he went to sleep until Thomas felt he must suffocate. Now David looked up from his hunched position, quickly scrubbing away tears, taking a shaky breath.

“Y-yes? Did I wake you?”

“Of course you did, going on like that. What’s the matter?” Thomas peeled himself out of the communal blanket nest and shifted closer towards David. When David didn’t give him a sign to back off, he rested a hand on his back.

David stared forlornly down at his hands. “It’s just... the anniversary is coming up. I can’t help thinking about it... all the time.”

Of course. Thomas tried to remember the current date. Were they really coming up on the nineteenth?

“Ettersberg.” It was a curse. The days leading up to the anniversary of the battle were never easy ones.

David nodded. “One feels... one should really put a bullet in one’s head. Properly, this time.”

Thomas couldn’t help but let his hand on David’s shoulder tighten for a second as he fought down a sudden wave of panic. David still had these thoughts sometimes, and Thomas wasn’t helping by making it all about him and how he couldn’t bear to lose David again, no, never again, he’d go insane.

“What makes you say that?” he asked, in a low voice, hoping to appear calm.

“When I think of Ettersberg...” David sighed, faltered. “You don’t know what it’s like for me, Thomas.”

Thomas cocked his head. “I very much was at Ettersberg.”

“No, I know that. But you were only doing as you were ordered, and trying to get the lads out. I wanted the mission. I wanted us to go there! When I think of Ettersberg, I think to how much I... contributed to that catastrophic loss of life there.”

Thomas stroked David’s back, attempting to soothe. David was sniffling again. “I don’t recall that being your decision to make.”

“I don’t just mean Operation Spatchcock.” David’s voice hardened, hollowed. “Without my research, my theories that I put into the world, Ettersberg could never have been built.”

Of course Thomas knew that. He’d known that since around about 1943, when some of the spells that practitioners from Abteilung Geheimwissenschaften were utilizing in the field to much devastation had started coming with a faint whiff of David’s signare, had started suspiciously resembling spells that David himself had designed.

David had shared much with his fellow scientists in the late 20s and early 30s, before Hitler had shown his colours. Theoretical stuff, mostly, as far as Thomas understood it, but the researchers of Geheimwissenschaften had, with that typical Germanic zeal, set to turning theory into practice. And, unlike David, they’d had no scruples to commit mass-murder to get there, to eviscerate and torture, to twist and malform and mutilate on a nauseating scale. They’d had so many ‘undesirables’ to experiment on, hadn’t they? What with Buchenwald, right there.

“I thought... I was convinced that the pursuit of knowledge, that scientific progress was in itself pure, free of ideological tint, that this should be furthered unfettered by ethical consideration,” David said. “How could science be bad, when it was my whole life? I was an idiot. What I saw... what we saw...” Tears were dripping from his chin now as his body heaved with sobs. “All those poor men and women... children... fae... the atrocities, the unimaginable tortures, all because of my ideas. Because of me. I did that. It could not have happened without me. It could not have happened if I had never lived.”

Thomas opened his mouth to protest, but it was impossible to get a word in edgewise. David groaned, burying his head in his hands.

“I’m a monster. I’m a monster.”

“David...”

Thomas looked at David there, bathed in moonlight from their bedroom window. David in his flannel pajamas, with his quilt and his sleep-mussed curls and that bit of pudge he’d gained back since the war. To an outsider, it would have been laughable, seeing the cuddliest-looking man in the world proclaim himself a monster. But Thomas had seen David in battle. He knew his lover; he knew this was no laughing matter.

“How could you have known?” he asked. “David, how can this possibly be your fault? Exchanging some theories with people you’d erroneously trusted does not amount to asking these people to build a concentration camp.”

“But I did what they did,” David sniffled. “I too made spells that would kill...”

“And I used them. Do you think me monstrous too?”

Finally, David turned around and faced Thomas. He looked horrible with the tear streaks down his cheeks, his face all red and blotchy from so much crying. Thomas felt a sting in his heart. He loved this man so much.

A long and silent look passed between them, and Thomas knew that David would not answer the question aloud. They had both, as a matter of fact, seen each other in battle. The answer was perhaps not wholly likely to be a heartfelt, truthful no.

“Would you do it again?” David asked.

And if it were Peter with him in the room, or most anyone else in fact, Thomas would take the cue he was being given and say no, no, of course not, those were desperate circumstances, and if I could turn back time I’d do it differently, do it by the book, reconsider, keep my humanity intact by remembering that of the enemy. But it was David, who deserved the truth, who got the truth.

“To fight the fascists? Yes,” Thomas said. “Without blinking an eye, yes.”

David nodded. Instead of recoiling, disgusted, he reached out, gripped Thomas’s hands and leaned in, resting his head on Thomas’s shoulder. Thomas embraced him, wrapping both arms around David tightly, relishing his warmth and his breath that was slowly evening out.

“I won’t have you hurt yourself,” he murmured. “Never on my watch.”

“Oh, Thomas.” David detached from his shoulder, giving him a watery smile. “As long as you’re with me, as long as you... understand, it’ll be alright.”

And they had their understanding. The war turned you monstrous, as it did me, and I love you, I love you, I love you.

[weepylucifer]

Headcanon concerning Nightingale + flowers

His love of general botany is something he retained from his mother. Being the youngest of six in an upper middle class household in 1900s England, he didn’t get a lot of quality time in with his folks, all things considered, so he fondly treasures the memories of his mother showing him around the garden, orchard and adjoining grounds, explaining all the plants, their names, their uses, and later, once he was old enough to read, introducing him to Victorian flower language. She’d press flowers in a little book and he’d watch and help her with that.

It was considered a bit of a girly hobby for an upright English lad such as himself and he was urged to take more of an interest in rugby and cricket, but he did use his knowledge of botany to impress David later on as a teen. Telling David about flower language was the first time Thomas ended up teaching David something he didn’t yet know about, gratifying Thomas and making David notice that there seemed to have been more to him than a two-braincell jock who happened to be good at magic. They’d use flower language as code around Casterbrook and later, when writing letters back and forth during Thomas’s postings abroad, slipping a pressed flower into the envelope or hiding little pointed references in the text

[weepylucifer]

Thomas and David. Big spoon, little spoon?

Except for the times when David had a nightmare or something like that, Thomas is the LITTLE spoon. I will not change my mind.

With David, he doesn’t have to go through the mortifying ordeal of asking to be held at night. David just does it, and loves it and is stellar at it. He’s soft, good for nestling against. And he loves the feeling of wrapping his arms around Thomas, feeling him present and safe within his arms

[weepylucifer]

David, drunk af and serenading his boyfriend: 🎶 your smile shines as bright as the new morning sun, but more than 300 nazis fell by your gun 🎶

[weepylucifer]

Ask Game: 2, 4 and 8 for Thomas x David! Love you ♡

2. Who is the most insecure and what makes them feel better?

Probably David has more insecurities. Thomas doesn’t have enough braincells to think about stuff like that. What makes David feel better is just straight-up words of affirmation, someone telling him he’s smart and his work has value and is groundbreaking. Another thing is when people (especially Thomas!) listen to him explain something he’s interested in, like an experiment he’s currently doing, and seem engaged and interested and tell him so

4. Who can’t keep their hands to themselves?

Both. Neither. They’re always at each other. Whenever they can steal a moment to themselves, they’re pouncing on each other and Initiating Contact bc they know from experience how every moment alone together is a rare and valuable gift

David always wraps his arms around Thomas’s waist or holds his hands or pulls him in for kisses or, if he’s feeling it, taps his bum. Thomas throws an arm around David’s shoulders, touches his knee, sneaks his hands under David’s shirt, or sort of just bumps gently into him. (When they were younger, he would rugby tackle.) Plus they both love to play with each other’s hair.

8. What do they like in bed?

So Many

David’s the softest service top. He likes lengthy prep time and just making Thomas feel splendid. Also rimming. David Mellenby eats ass. You heard it here first. He can dom a little when the mood strikes, but he’s not really hardcore about it. There sometimes is light discipline tho. They were both in the army + boarding school, let’s be real, what can you expect. He also likes Thomas with other men, while he watches. Shhh. Secret kink.

Thomas likes uuuhhhh being dominated a little bit. Just a space where he doesn’t have to maintain command and control at all. Some light corporal punishment. Being generally messed up and bruised a little. Generally more than one partner at a time. Surprisingly, dirty talk. Sucking dick, as everyone in this fandom is aware of. Crossdressing (Shhh!!! Very secret kink!) and lingerie (on himself, but there are some silk tights that David’s legs look delectable in). There have been light experiments with sex magic

[weepylucifer]

17 for Nightingale and Mellenby?

17. When they find a time machine, where do they go? 

What a question. Like there’s probably not much they’d want to do in terms of revisiting their pasts and making things right, they’d be too aware of how fucking messy that could get. David would want to go to the future, to see how things are there. The technical and scientific innovations, how magic is practiced, if gays have rights. They’d have several historical eras they would want to visit out of interest, like ancient Rome and Greece. Or they’d go have a chat with Isaac Newton, find out about magic in the past. Talk to historical famous gay people, try and have threesomes. They’d just have a blast with it.

Later Nightingale sans David would... well, want to go back to 1945 and stop David from killing himself I’d guess. Maybe go back to the war in general and save his friends.