Chaste (Epilogue)
Title: Chaste
Author:
ashamedbliss
Pairing: Belldom
Rating: 18
Fic summary: Based on the following prompt from
mkmeme, which was: AU Belldom. Dom's in his early 20s, outrageously attractive (obviously) and a sex ed teacher. He's also a nervous virgin. Matt's a bold 17 year old student who discovers "Mr H's" secret shame. And he decides to take matters into his own hands.
Feedback: appreciated like death threats
Disclaimer: much as I and many other ladies would love to own Muse, I don't. This is totally fictional, I'm not making profit, and pretty please don't steal it *bats eyelashes*
Author's Note: I promised you a happy ending. I didn't mention whose.
Five years later
Matthew looks out over the endless blue ocean, that familiar aching feeling in his chest flaring up again. He swallows hard, turning his back on the view to face the courtyard of the school.
“Mathieu!” a little girl cries, perhaps four or five, and Matthew picks her up, swinging her high in the air as she giggles endlessly. “Puis-je apprendre les couleurs en anglais aujourd’hui?” she asks breathlessly, the last word a fast jumble of syllables that three years ago, Matthew would’ve balked at.
“Oui ma petite, bien sûr,” he replies, finding himself smiling. “Vas-y, j’ai un cours.”
He pats her on the back and she skips away to the rest of her friends, long plaits flying behind her. Matthew adjusts his casual shirt cuffs, the only thing smart about his outfit: the language school is perfectly happy for their teachers to wear shorts and flip flops in the heat, which is exactly what he does. He runs a hand through his hair, still as thick and fluffy as it was five years ago, and heads into the cool shade of his classroom where his group of sixth form aged students are waiting for him.
“Hi everyone,” he calls out as a smile grows on his face, the class responding in that wonderful kind of English that’s heavily tainted by a French accent. Since living in the country, he’s come to love everything about it, even the tiniest things that annoyed him when he began studying it at college, aged just seventeen.
He wished, sometimes, that he’d appreciated it more when he’d been young with a fantastic teacher. He shook those thoughts out of his head, especially with the lesson to come.
“Alright,” he says, making sure he doesn’t babble or use slang words. “Today, we’re going to talk about emotions, relationships, love, et cetera. Move the tables so we’re in a little circle.”
The students start moving around as Matthew looks through his notes on his desk. He puts his right hand on his hip, fingers absentmindedly pressing into the skin there, praying for courage or hope or a freak thunderstorm to get him out of this lesson. It’s the hardest one for him to teach, but at the same time it’s one of his favourites.
“Great,” he says to the students, eagerly sitting in a circle with their vocabulary notebooks on their laps. He’d never been that ready to learn as a student, until he left sixth form and went to college. “So, what is love?”
A few of the girls nervously titter, yet one puts her hand up. “Yes, Léna?”
“Love is...” she begins, slowly and surely choosing her words. “Love is when you cannot imagine life without the person you love.”
Matthew tries not to wince.
“When you want to pass each minute with the person you like,” one of the boys offers. Matthew leans against his desk, raising one slender finger in the air.
“Spend. You spend time with people, you don’t pass time. That’s a faux-ami. And remember, aime is simply like, and aimer bien is love, it’s a big difference in English,” he explains, and the teenagers eagerly write it down. He wonders briefly if his seventeen year old self would’ve ever believed himself capable of being fluent in French.
Then again, he wonders if his seventeen year old self had absolutely any idea quite how much his life would change.
The discussion continues, each of the students offering up their own opinion of what love is, or the relationships they’ve been in, and Matthew offers corrections where necessary.
“Matt, what do you think about love?” Léna asks eventually, and his stomach sinks and his chest gets tight; he’s been expecting this.
“I fell in love very young,” he starts, hand automatically coming to rest on his hip, rubbing his shirt into the skin below it. “I was seventeen, the age you lot are now, and I fell in love, absolutely, completely. I haven’t... that was five years ago, and I haven’t felt anything like it since. Not even close.”
The room fell silent, save for the cries of birds over the bay, and the sound of children laughing in the courtyard. “What had happened?” Léna asks, curious yet with sadness in her tone.
“We were going to move to Scotland. Buy a house, get a pet, start a life together.” Matthew pauses, swallowing hard. “He died. He was hit by a car.”
“Mes sincères condoléances,” Léna stutters eventually, too moved to speak anything but her native language.
Matthew nods, muttering a thanks under his breath. “He was a French teacher, so I decided to learn French in his memory... pour me souvenir de lui,” he translates, the students nodding. “I studied it for two years, then moved here to keep studying, and start teaching English.” Matthew’s smiling as he finishes explaining, wondering what Dominic would say if he were still here.
“Wait,” one of the other girls says. “He was a teacher, and you were...?”
She leaves the question unasked, but when Matthew laughs the other students loosen up a bit. “Don’t get any ideas,” he warns them. “Now, family relationships.”
The conversation continues, Matthew easily guiding them through topics until their hour is up. He watches them file out, his last class for the day, and after signing out with the main office he makes his way down onto the beach. The afternoon heat is soon too much, and as he sits down on the white sand he takes off his shirt, revealing all three of his tattoos.
“I need to get another one, soon,” he mutters. “Got that itch again. I would’ve persuaded you to have one, eventually.”
Matthew doesn’t quite remember when this beach became the place that reminded him of Dominic the most; he’d never even found out where in France his boyfriend had spent his summers as a student. He knew Dominic’s parents had scattered his ashes on the beach of his hometown somewhere in southern England, so Matthew hadn’t been surprised when he found himself drawn to this particular beach when he wanted to reflect.
His fingers trace the words on his right hip, something he’d spent months deciding on and had waited until he was eighteen to get it inked legally. His mother had contributed money to it, even though she’d never met Dominic; Matthew had explained, and his grief alone was enough to convince her. It had come as a surprise to them both when one day the idea just clicked, incredible in its simplicity.
He strokes the skin there tenderly, the black ink now just over four years old. The words “tu me manques toujours” are still there, just above where Dominic’s thumb would’ve come to rest when he held Matthew by the hips.
“I’m happy here, finally. I still miss you, of course I still fucking miss you. I don’t want to go out and find someone else, because all I want is you, still, after all this time.” Matthew sighs, his hand falling from his hip to drag a finger through the sand. “September’s always the hardest, not just because the school gets busy, it’s because...”
Matthew looks out towards the ocean, where a small child is playing with her father in the waves. “I wish you were here with me,” he mumbles, his grief rearing up again, the dark monster he’d just escaped when he’d been so young and the world had been so raw. “You’d be so proud of how I cleaned my act up, how I worked so hard, how I... it was all you. You changed my life, absolutely, you made me into a better person... Nowhere near as good as you are, but...”
Heaving a sigh, Matthew realises he’s been drawing a heart into the sand for the last few minutes. He smiles, then looks up to the cloudless sky. “Thank you, Dom,” he says. “For everything. Je t’aime.”
He hopes that Dominic hears him.
Author:
ashamedbliss
Pairing: Belldom
Rating: 18
Fic summary: Based on the following prompt from
mkmeme, which was: AU Belldom. Dom's in his early 20s, outrageously attractive (obviously) and a sex ed teacher. He's also a nervous virgin. Matt's a bold 17 year old student who discovers "Mr H's" secret shame. And he decides to take matters into his own hands.
Feedback: appreciated like death threats
Disclaimer: much as I and many other ladies would love to own Muse, I don't. This is totally fictional, I'm not making profit, and pretty please don't steal it *bats eyelashes*
Author's Note: I promised you a happy ending. I didn't mention whose.
Five years later
Matthew looks out over the endless blue ocean, that familiar aching feeling in his chest flaring up again. He swallows hard, turning his back on the view to face the courtyard of the school.
“Mathieu!” a little girl cries, perhaps four or five, and Matthew picks her up, swinging her high in the air as she giggles endlessly. “Puis-je apprendre les couleurs en anglais aujourd’hui?” she asks breathlessly, the last word a fast jumble of syllables that three years ago, Matthew would’ve balked at.
“Oui ma petite, bien sûr,” he replies, finding himself smiling. “Vas-y, j’ai un cours.”
He pats her on the back and she skips away to the rest of her friends, long plaits flying behind her. Matthew adjusts his casual shirt cuffs, the only thing smart about his outfit: the language school is perfectly happy for their teachers to wear shorts and flip flops in the heat, which is exactly what he does. He runs a hand through his hair, still as thick and fluffy as it was five years ago, and heads into the cool shade of his classroom where his group of sixth form aged students are waiting for him.
“Hi everyone,” he calls out as a smile grows on his face, the class responding in that wonderful kind of English that’s heavily tainted by a French accent. Since living in the country, he’s come to love everything about it, even the tiniest things that annoyed him when he began studying it at college, aged just seventeen.
He wished, sometimes, that he’d appreciated it more when he’d been young with a fantastic teacher. He shook those thoughts out of his head, especially with the lesson to come.
“Alright,” he says, making sure he doesn’t babble or use slang words. “Today, we’re going to talk about emotions, relationships, love, et cetera. Move the tables so we’re in a little circle.”
The students start moving around as Matthew looks through his notes on his desk. He puts his right hand on his hip, fingers absentmindedly pressing into the skin there, praying for courage or hope or a freak thunderstorm to get him out of this lesson. It’s the hardest one for him to teach, but at the same time it’s one of his favourites.
“Great,” he says to the students, eagerly sitting in a circle with their vocabulary notebooks on their laps. He’d never been that ready to learn as a student, until he left sixth form and went to college. “So, what is love?”
A few of the girls nervously titter, yet one puts her hand up. “Yes, Léna?”
“Love is...” she begins, slowly and surely choosing her words. “Love is when you cannot imagine life without the person you love.”
Matthew tries not to wince.
“When you want to pass each minute with the person you like,” one of the boys offers. Matthew leans against his desk, raising one slender finger in the air.
“Spend. You spend time with people, you don’t pass time. That’s a faux-ami. And remember, aime is simply like, and aimer bien is love, it’s a big difference in English,” he explains, and the teenagers eagerly write it down. He wonders briefly if his seventeen year old self would’ve ever believed himself capable of being fluent in French.
Then again, he wonders if his seventeen year old self had absolutely any idea quite how much his life would change.
The discussion continues, each of the students offering up their own opinion of what love is, or the relationships they’ve been in, and Matthew offers corrections where necessary.
“Matt, what do you think about love?” Léna asks eventually, and his stomach sinks and his chest gets tight; he’s been expecting this.
“I fell in love very young,” he starts, hand automatically coming to rest on his hip, rubbing his shirt into the skin below it. “I was seventeen, the age you lot are now, and I fell in love, absolutely, completely. I haven’t... that was five years ago, and I haven’t felt anything like it since. Not even close.”
The room fell silent, save for the cries of birds over the bay, and the sound of children laughing in the courtyard. “What had happened?” Léna asks, curious yet with sadness in her tone.
“We were going to move to Scotland. Buy a house, get a pet, start a life together.” Matthew pauses, swallowing hard. “He died. He was hit by a car.”
“Mes sincères condoléances,” Léna stutters eventually, too moved to speak anything but her native language.
Matthew nods, muttering a thanks under his breath. “He was a French teacher, so I decided to learn French in his memory... pour me souvenir de lui,” he translates, the students nodding. “I studied it for two years, then moved here to keep studying, and start teaching English.” Matthew’s smiling as he finishes explaining, wondering what Dominic would say if he were still here.
“Wait,” one of the other girls says. “He was a teacher, and you were...?”
She leaves the question unasked, but when Matthew laughs the other students loosen up a bit. “Don’t get any ideas,” he warns them. “Now, family relationships.”
The conversation continues, Matthew easily guiding them through topics until their hour is up. He watches them file out, his last class for the day, and after signing out with the main office he makes his way down onto the beach. The afternoon heat is soon too much, and as he sits down on the white sand he takes off his shirt, revealing all three of his tattoos.
“I need to get another one, soon,” he mutters. “Got that itch again. I would’ve persuaded you to have one, eventually.”
Matthew doesn’t quite remember when this beach became the place that reminded him of Dominic the most; he’d never even found out where in France his boyfriend had spent his summers as a student. He knew Dominic’s parents had scattered his ashes on the beach of his hometown somewhere in southern England, so Matthew hadn’t been surprised when he found himself drawn to this particular beach when he wanted to reflect.
His fingers trace the words on his right hip, something he’d spent months deciding on and had waited until he was eighteen to get it inked legally. His mother had contributed money to it, even though she’d never met Dominic; Matthew had explained, and his grief alone was enough to convince her. It had come as a surprise to them both when one day the idea just clicked, incredible in its simplicity.
He strokes the skin there tenderly, the black ink now just over four years old. The words “tu me manques toujours” are still there, just above where Dominic’s thumb would’ve come to rest when he held Matthew by the hips.
“I’m happy here, finally. I still miss you, of course I still fucking miss you. I don’t want to go out and find someone else, because all I want is you, still, after all this time.” Matthew sighs, his hand falling from his hip to drag a finger through the sand. “September’s always the hardest, not just because the school gets busy, it’s because...”
Matthew looks out towards the ocean, where a small child is playing with her father in the waves. “I wish you were here with me,” he mumbles, his grief rearing up again, the dark monster he’d just escaped when he’d been so young and the world had been so raw. “You’d be so proud of how I cleaned my act up, how I worked so hard, how I... it was all you. You changed my life, absolutely, you made me into a better person... Nowhere near as good as you are, but...”
Heaving a sigh, Matthew realises he’s been drawing a heart into the sand for the last few minutes. He smiles, then looks up to the cloudless sky. “Thank you, Dom,” he says. “For everything. Je t’aime.”
He hopes that Dominic hears him.