discoveredinalj | Discovered in a Christmas Stocking

Sneaking this in slightly more than an hour before the deadine - my apologies! Written around the stocking-stuffer for my day - felt tip pens - here's what happens when the lads write a lot but, being men, don't really talk. *g* Title taken from the ever-nifty Shakespeare, who writes these things far better than I do.

Happy holidays, everyone!

If I Chance to Talk a Little Wild

It is barely past noon when he first sees them through the smeared glass of a Woolworths window, bright colours half-obscured by a child’s wooden globe of pastel continents. The next fifteen minutes or so are spent exploring the wonderful world of felt-tip pens, and when he emerges again much later he has three paper-wrapped packages tucked under his arm instead of two (battered fish and soggy chips swathed in crumpled newsprint and grease stains: lunch) and a wallet that is exactly seventy-nine pence lighter.

=-=-=

Bodie, he discovers, finds the fact that he has bought them hilarious.

“Shut it,” he says grouchily, and tosses a half-bitten chip in the grinning man’s direction simply because he can, and because it nicely interrupts his partner’s spiel about These Artistic Types and their Toys (you could hear the capital letters). What follows next is one of the quickest food fights to be pitched within the hallowed halls of CI5, second only to the Brief Cabbage Skirmish of 1979. It finally ends with an elbow to his gut, his arm about his partner in a shoulder-lock, and an irate Scotsman peering into the rest room. The felt-tips go strangely missing that afternoon, and Doyle feels vaguely smug.

Their reappearance the following morning is unsurprising to say the least, their round plastic bodies neatly arranged on his table according to shade and hue for him to find, purple-blue-green-yellow-orange-red-brown-black. Proudly propped against the base of his lamp is a sketch of (he assumes) him: brown curls for hair, green circles for eyes, and an orange fist clutching what he suspects is a felt-tip pen wielded with (he guesses) great artistic fervour. The artist’s beret is a splotch of red ink, and the artist’s easel a rectangle of blank white delineated by four black lines meeting in four crooked corners.

There is also a message, he discovers when he flips the obviously-scavenged bit of card over, written in broad sloping strokes, in royal blue, in Bodie’s distinctive handwriting. It reads simply – Hi.

Doyle allows himself the pleasure of responding with an orange felt-tip and with the same kind of word economy. (Arse.)

=-=-=

They make a game of it.

Words find their way onto desks, onto mirrors, onto plates of chips, written on paper, on cards, on the back of shopping lists and the brown roughness of a torn paper bag as they are exchanged eight/five/four/nine/six-point-three/seven times a day. Notes slip into files, sneak beneath cups of tea and pints of bitter, creep into the glove compartments of Capris, and on one memorable occasion, lay craftily in wait between slices of bread and layers of cheese and pickle. They play with synonyms, autonyms, homonyms, with logical associations and with rhymes; Spanish curses are allowed by mutual agreement, but not French.

Two weeks in sees Bodie buying his own set of felt-tips, and the ex-mercenary celebrates by drawing hearts around all the dates of November on Doyle’s calendar beneath a scribbled Hah.

(He had tired of borrowing Doyle’s, he had claimed, and he had to know whether they worked. Doyle had retaliated by being incredibly stealthy one obbo and drawing hearts around Bodie’s nipples.)

Then, another month and exactly one hundred and thirteen other notes later, Bodie nearly dies.

=-=-=

You were lucky, the doctor says, after, and when they finally leave the hospital Doyle takes it up in a chant, lucky, lucky, lucky and Never again, Bodie, you hear me, never again you stupid sod.

Their first kiss happens almost by accident, each man drunk on adrenaline and high on life, the smells of gunpowder and of antiseptic to be rapidly forgotten. Their second is hard and wet, lips and teeth and tongue and syrupy ropes of saliva stretched thin, and when the lock to Bodie’s flat snicks open Doyle hooks his thumbs into the back pockets of the other’s trousers and allows himself to be dragged in, too busy with their third to care.

=-=-=

When they reach for each other again in the grey half-light of dawn they’re slow this time where they’d rushed before, fingers and mouths no longer frantic as they painstakingly commit to memory newly-charted paths across planes of muscle and warm, warm skin, private maps shared in secret between two. He drifts with an arm thrown possessively about his waist and a smile tugging at the corners of his lips, and he fancies Bodie does too.

The next time he wakes, Doyle simply stares at the man asleep beside him, watches the inevitable progress of sunlight (marching bars of muted gold and shadowed slats) across the broad expanse of a bared back and up the smooth curve of a shoulder. Then he leaves, clothing gathered in his arms and door a silent click shut in his wake.

It doesn’t take much to convince the Cow to let him join up with the mission up north in Birmingham which is just about to go to critical, nor to persuade Cowley that Bodie’s talents would be better utilised were his partner to remain in London.

=-=-=

He returns to London to find the note slipped under his door, Bastard scrawled so hard in red that the ink has seeped through the thin blue-lined note-paper in nine different places. Doyle crumples it in his fist, and then spends the next hour or so carefully smoothing it out against his thigh.

The next morning he doesn’t bother correcting Stuart when the other man tells any agent who will listen about Doyle’s encounter with the pretty barmaid (a grass, no more) up north, Susie I think her name was, spent the night with our 4.5 here and blimey you should have seen the state of him after. He even manages not too mind too much when he sees Bodie slip out of the pub that night with his arm around the petite blonde his partner had been speaking with half the night; the three pints he downs in rapid succession after their departure prove an unexpected but invaluable ally.

=-=-=

Sometimes he thinks of September, of summer drifting carelessly into autumn and of shared mornings in his kitchen: tea and toast and the day’s crossword spread out across the counter in a sea of white boxes and smudgy black puzzle-clues.

D-O-O-O-Y-L-E, Bodie had written once, tongue poking out in concentration and fingers curled around a green felt-tip as he had carefully filled in the white squares (seven-across, skinflint).

B-O-O-O-D-I-E, he had printed in turn with great relish (seven-down, a dastardly cad), the bump and curve of the O’s where the two words met oddly satisfying, Raymond you lousy bugger and Ger’off mate, elbows and knees and the scrape of chair-legs across feet-worn floorboards.

Bodie had given him a slice of freshly-buttered toast, as an Apology he had said, grin on his lips and butter knife dangling precariously between finger and thumb. Doyle had magnanimously refrained from hitting his partner with his book (German in a Month which he’d been reading for two) until he’d realised that the other man had just finished the last of the milk, and when they’d finally run out of his flat five minutes later than they should it was with laughter at their heels.

This, he had thought for a moment as their shoulders had bumped, this, this, this. Then he had thrown the door open, and his thoughts had scattered like the buttery spill of sunlight across the cracked pavement.

=-=-=

It’s November now.

It’s November, and he spends an afternoon staring at the tiny red hearts peppering his calendar before filling them in on impulse with the now-ubiquitous felt-tips, taking care to colour within the lines for luck.

=-=-=

Sorry, he writes, yellow ink on cream note-paper which he later regrets: in the late afternoon sunlight the word looked pale and insubstantial. He slides it beneath Bodie’s door and walks back to his Capri with his hands shoved into his pockets because he doesn’t like the sight of his fingers trembling.

(It had taken him two tries to pick the pen – selected by the complicated process of closing his eyes and blindly closing his fingers about one – up, three to pop its cap off, slick palms slipping on smooth plastic.)

He finds the same note on his table the next morning two days later, Git scrawled on the other side in a lurid purple. There is also a mug of tea waiting, milk and sugar just the way he likes and steaming hot, and when he surreptitiously slips the bacon sarnie onto his partner’s desk his smile isn’t so much of relief as it is of the strange quivery feeling he privately calls hope.

He leaves a faded postcard too, the tips of its corners unravelled (he tries not to think of it as a metaphor) and the word on its back smudged – Please.

=-=-=

It is cold when he enters the room, December chill seeping through a window left carelessly open.

He doesn’t try to be particularly quiet as he crawls into the bed, and Bodie grumbles at the sudden loss of covers, mattress shifting as the other man sleepily rolls onto his side.

“Hi,” Doyle rasps, and marvels for a moment at the fit of his fingers along the dip-swell of his partner’s stomach and the groove of his partner’s hipbones.

Arse is whisper-loud in the night-hushed silence of the room, but Doyle finds himself gently tucked against five-feet-ten of naked warmth as Bodie draws the covers up on them all the same.

Title: If I Chance to Talk a Little Wild
Author: Erushi
Slash or Gen: Slash
Archive at ProsLib: Yes please.
Disclaimer: The lads aren't mine, alas.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

msmoat.livejournal.com

Well, that's nice! Well done in twelve hours. *g* I like the courtship through notes, and the running, and the apology and the forgiveness that ends in "gently tucked against five-feet-ten of". Thank you!

From:

Discovered in a Christmas Stocking - Day 27

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