BRUH IDK IF YOU'RE STILL DOING PAIRING HEADCANONS BUT here i am requesting some malarkey/muck THANKS ILY
OH GOD i love the idea of this pairing but have no idea if i’ve paid enough attention to the details of their interactions to get it right, BEAR WITH ME SO MUCH PLS.
skip’s flirtatious right off the bat, but only when other people can’t see it. they just seem like instant buddies from the outside, and they certainly are, but skip is actually pretty aggressive the rest of the time; it’s still enough to brush off, but he’ll get very close and make suggestive jokes and put his hands in areas that are very borderline. when malark doesn’t say anything about it or shrug it off, just kind of taking it with baffled amusement, he doesn’t feel the need to stop. (there’s just something about “i won’t eat malarkey” that feels like very, very veiled innuendo, the kind no one else would notice, but malark would because he’s so much more explicit most of the time.)
what malarkey notices and takes more seriously is how protective skip can be. that glance back after sobel calls him “private bullshit” isn’t just an idle one - he’s pissed, which comes out the same way as his attraction, in jokes that have just slightly too sharp of an edge. malarkey actually reassures him that he’s not hurt or intimidated by sobel, and skip plays it off like he wasn’t being serious anyway, but it was something he needed to hear and he’s fiercely proud.
malarkey realizes he’s attracted to skip while they’re sharing a cigarette like they do so often, forever handing one off between them instead of smoking individually; it doesn’t feel intimate at all until malarkey catches himself looking at skip’s mouth right after he’s taken the cigarette back, the unique shape of it and how it settles around the filter because of that. he’s too dazed to notice when skip hands it back, and when skip nudges him to bring him back to reality, he laughs one of his goofy little laughs and says he was woolgathering or some such thing. but skip knows. he immediately knows.
one of skip’s favourite things to do is tell stories: about the rest of the company and what he’s heard about them, about home, about anything he can dig out of his mind. malarkey listens very intently - they all do, luz and penkala and everyone else too, but malarkey really seems to want to know more. it seems as though he’d like to fit himself right into skip’s experiences that don’t involve him, because he remembers details from them and brings them up when they’re relevant. it’s oddly touching. when skip finally decides it’s time to clear the air between them, he unfurls the whole thing as a story, watching how malarkey reacts: to the ideas of two men being together, their being together in the army, their being together intimately. this isn’t crude like his jokes, but focused on the more meaningful moments they’ve shared… until he ends it with something so raunchy that malarkey barks out a laugh loud enough to bring lip around for a gentle but firm reminder about noise discipline.
malarkey gets it. he asks how long skip’s been collecting things for this story, and skip says that the ending actually took the most time for him to come up with, to which malarkey says he’s having no trouble coming up with alternate endings so skip had better catch up. AND THEN THEY LIVE HAPPILY EVER FUCKING AFTER DON’T LOOK AT ME :“”“”’(
