Half-Full of Hollow
Title: Half-full of Hollow (Part 8)
Pairing or Characters: Howince
Summary: Fed up with his increasing alienation from Howard, Vince decides to forcibly regress into his sunshiney days.
Word Count: 1877
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Don't own any of it. Not a droplet.
Author’s Notes: This chapter was obscenely difficult to write, and I'm not entirely sure why. It felt like I was bush-bashing through impenetrable dialogue at some points. But shh, I mustn't talk it up too much, or you'll be disappointed with the flat reality. :p Enjoy!
“Three days,” Howard muttered, hands receiving his forehead, fingers digging right into his cranium. “Three days, three days, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and then -”
And then (and then and then). Naboo would pick up a few odds and ends of juju from Shamansburys, some magical antidote would be brewed up in a garbage can (Bollo’s latest venture into the world of fondue had melted more than cheese), and then -
And then Vince would be, well, Vince again. Real Vince. Celebrity Vince, wreathed top to toe in the glittery garments of a rather whorish Prince of Camden.
Real Vince. Howard snorted. Real Vince had gone into hibernation for the past couple of years, all tucked away in his fluffy pink boots and bobble-topped beanie. Real Vince had recently re-emerged from his snarky slumber, and the clouds had finally parted, and the sun had splashed out onto Howard’s face again.
Howard didn’t quite know how he was going to face the cold on Monday. He had three too-short days left of sunbathing, but the tan wouldn’t even show come next week.
“Alright, Howard?”
Howard muttered something nondescript into his hands.
“Yeah, me too.”
Behind their cage of fingers, Howard’s eyebrows arched involuntarily. Just what exactly was he supposed to have communicated?
“I really miss the zoo,” sighed Vince, as if paddling along the same conversational waterway, so Howard allowed himself to nod. Just a little. It wasn’t as if he could let anyone know just how badly he longed for those crazy days of Fossil-type abuse, apathetic animals and Real Vince. The return of Zooniverse Vince had intensified these feelings tenfold in the past few days.
When Vince next spoke, his words came warm and close against Howard’s ear. “I miss it, and I’ve only been gone a few days. It must be much worse for you, Howard.”
Howard shook his head. He tried to inject some good solid breeziness into his voice, cringing when he heard the obvious falseness of his tone. “No, not so much, Vince. I enjoy my life here in the flat, don’t I?” He tried again. “Still got you, hey, little man?”
Vince shifted uncomfortably on the couch, and Howard groaned silently. Even if it was all a lie, and Howard didn’t in fact ‘have’ any form of Vince here in the Nabootique, Zooniverse Vince was completely innocent in the affair. He shouldn’t be strung out along an uncomfortable line of guilt.
“Don’t believe you,” said Vince finally, hopping up and crouching amongst the cushions beside Howard on the couch. Howard, head raised from his hands, automatic admonition on his lips, held the words back at the last minute. Instead of cutting forth with some scathing reprimand, Howard’s lips pulled into a reluctant smile.
“What?”
“Don’t believe that you don’t miss the Zooniverse, Howard,” Vince clarified, shuffling a little closer while swiping something from the back pocket of his trousers. “Why else would you have this thrust lovingly under your pillow, then?”
Howard made one desperate grab for the square Polaroid photo, eyes wide in sudden panic.
“Give me that, you little tart!”
Grinning widely, Vince clicked his tongue, holding the photograph right behind him on outstretched arm. He wiggled the little shiny square tauntingly through the air. Howard’s eyes wiggled back and forth in despair.
“You can’t just go scrounging beneath other peoples’ bedclothes, Vince,” he complained weakly, hands twitching in his lap. “It’s prima facie invasion of privacy, sir! Now, give me that photo or I’ll come at you like a six-foot court of law!”
“Don’t think I will, Howard,” said Vince, scuffling backwards through the cushions and perching lightly on the opposite arm of the couch. He held the photo close to his face and peered at the image with narrowing eyes.
Howard adjusted his shirt collar and thought hard about burying his face back in his fingers like an ostrich with its head in sand. He thought hard about burying his own head in sand. Cringing, he remembered the last time he had bodily parts buried beneath sand - but there wasn’t likely to be a coyote near the sandpit in the local park, now, was there?
“Why’ve you got this picture of Mrs Gideon under your pillow, Howard?”
Swallowing hard, Howard tried to ignore the clear note of petulance that had inexplicably settled into Vince’s voice. “It’s not a picture of Mrs Gideon, Vince; it’s a picture of me and Mrs Gideon outside the Zooniverse. And I didn’t put it under my pillow. It must have - well - fallen there from my Zooniverse scrapbook, alright?”
“What, fallen right into the pillow slip? Nestled itself snugly amongst the feathers? Tattooed itself with sketchy little love hearts right across the back -”
“You once found the mouthpiece of my favourite trumpet in the lining of your mattress, Vince. Don’t talk to me about the improbability of these incidents.”
Vince sighed, fanning himself with the Polaroid like a dispassionate French aristocrat knocked forwards a few centuries. “Don’t ask me how your golden knob found its way into my bed, Howard. Just admit that you’re still madly obsessed with Mrs Gideon. All these years later. And after she got off with the panda, and everything.”
Howard flushed bright red.
“I’m not still hung up about that woman, Vince! I just like that particular picture, alright? Your gargantuan nose takes up most of the photo anyway - you can barely see Mrs Gideon, can you?”
“I couldn’t help it! I wandered by at the wrong moment, Howard. By the time I saw the flash, it was too late! I was captured forever in your sentimental photograph. If that’s not a prima donna invasion of privacy, I don’t know what is.”
“That’s not gonna swing it, you muppet. You were the one who took the photo.”
Vince swung his boot over his knee and crossed his legs, hunching forwards over the Polaroid in question with a notable absence of cheeky grin.
“Shouldn’t’ve trusted me with the camera, should you? Like you said on the day, I wouldn’t know a Polaroid from a polar bear - though frankly, as we’re zookeepers and all, that wasn’t much of a solid argument.”
It was far too easy to see through Vince’s strained jab at a return to normal banter, and Howard decided that he couldn’t really even pretend to ignore it. Not without weathering a few crashing waves in the ocean of shame, anyway. Not if he wanted to take back a bit of the Old Howard, the Howard who had been the true all-or-nothing best friend of Vince back in the Zooniverse. And so, Howard, trying very hard to regress, floundered forward through the stormy waters.
“Not that it’s any of your business, really, Vince,” he started rather haughtily, then checked himself at the sight of the pointy little downcast face at the end of the couch, “but, well, the photo wasn’t under my pillow to remind me of Mrs Gideon, alright? You can’t even see her in the photo, really, can you?”
Howard glanced back up, and was rather taken aback at the expression of utmost revulsion now parading across the fairground of Vince’s features.
“Maybe Gideon’s taken a backseat, but I think - no. Christy, I think that’s Fossil, there, right in the background, coming out of Bainbridge’s office - naked.”
Clapping his hands over his ears, Howard leapt to his feet. “I’ve slept with that photo under my pillow for three years!” he cried, moustache dancing excitedly in his agitation.
“That’s well wrong, you know that, right, Howard?” said Vince, and his face didn’t show much sympathy, though his smile had evaporated entirely. “Snuggling under the covers with Fossil in the dark - sounds a right freak show.”
“Oh, stop it,” Howard said, mortification morphing into embarrassment which then flung itself in the path of anger and caused him to barrel on without really considering his words. “You’re just being petty, Vince. You’re all jealous at the thought that I still carry a torch for Mrs Gideon.”
“Am not,” Vince shot back, words slightly too quick, voice slightly too high. “Word on the street is that you’re still Fossil’s bitch, Howard - but then, you’ve always been someone’s bitch, haven’t you? Mrs Gideon’s, Fossil’s, Mine-In-The-Future; you can’t get enough of rejection, can you?”
“That’s not fair, sir! And it’s not true, either, at that!”
Fists clenching, Polaroid scrunching, Vince leapt from the arm of the couch and began advancing on Howard with a finger jutting out towards the northerner’s chest.
“Nicey nicey zoo zoo, for him and her and me and you, nicey nicey -”
“Stop it, stop it!” Howard shouted, panicking, stuffing his fingers deep into his ear canals and desperately attempting to block the cacophony.
“- for him, and her, and me -”
“We left all that behind, didn’t we, and thank God we did!”
“You haven’t left anything behind, Howard! You’ve got the past stuffed under your pillow to seep into your head at night! You act like you hate everything you’ve found outside the Zooniverse, but how are you going to improve things if you just anchor yourself to your old mistakes? Why don’t you take a risk for once, forget Gideon, and haul yourself an inch closer to reality? She never liked you, Howard. Are you ever going to get that?”
Without another word, Vince marched right out of the room, lobbing the crumpled photograph directly into Howard’s face. Shakily, Howard pulled his hands from where they had been hovering beside his ears, and leant down to pick up the Polaroid. He smoothed it out promptly, wincing at the wrinkles now distorting the shiny surface.
He swept an index finger over the colourful square, touching the dimpled cheek that sprawled in a cheeky 2-D fashion over most of the photo.
Really, Howard didn’t know how to take this most recent development in his sojourn back to a memory of an echo of Zooniverse life. There was a good slab of irony to be found in the fact that Vince-from-the-past was urging Howard to embrace the future, whatever that concept entailed.
Sighing, Howard paused his finger over the confused-looking eyebrow of an otherwise invisible Mrs Gideon. Now, there had been a failure of the past - but obviously, even he had moved on from the muse of his Cream poetry after the Panda Bear Affair. No, this photo had earned its place beneath his pillow on other merits.
Ultimately, it was a snapshot of Zooniverse life, containing a sweet and artlessly selfish Vince, and a frowningly superior Howard. And they were together, captured in a candid moment of their everyday life, happy and self-satisfied (and entirely unaware of a blurrily naked Fossil behind the bushes).
And this photo stayed within the feathered innards of Howard’s pillow to comfort him, remind him that the bonds of friendship simply had to hold strong forever. A few years of gradual distancing, constant bickering and polar interests couldn’t possibly splinter the bond that had connected this swaggering duo from the Zooniverse, could they?
Could they?
And at this thought, Howard glanced rather unhappily towards the closed bedroom door separating him from Vince.
Three days. Three days to fix up the old mistakes of the past before the future caught back up with him.
Pairing or Characters: Howince
Summary: Fed up with his increasing alienation from Howard, Vince decides to forcibly regress into his sunshiney days.
Word Count: 1877
Rating: PG
Disclaimer: Don't own any of it. Not a droplet.
Author’s Notes: This chapter was obscenely difficult to write, and I'm not entirely sure why. It felt like I was bush-bashing through impenetrable dialogue at some points. But shh, I mustn't talk it up too much, or you'll be disappointed with the flat reality. :p Enjoy!
“Three days,” Howard muttered, hands receiving his forehead, fingers digging right into his cranium. “Three days, three days, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and then -”
And then (and then and then). Naboo would pick up a few odds and ends of juju from Shamansburys, some magical antidote would be brewed up in a garbage can (Bollo’s latest venture into the world of fondue had melted more than cheese), and then -
And then Vince would be, well, Vince again. Real Vince. Celebrity Vince, wreathed top to toe in the glittery garments of a rather whorish Prince of Camden.
Real Vince. Howard snorted. Real Vince had gone into hibernation for the past couple of years, all tucked away in his fluffy pink boots and bobble-topped beanie. Real Vince had recently re-emerged from his snarky slumber, and the clouds had finally parted, and the sun had splashed out onto Howard’s face again.
Howard didn’t quite know how he was going to face the cold on Monday. He had three too-short days left of sunbathing, but the tan wouldn’t even show come next week.
“Alright, Howard?”
Howard muttered something nondescript into his hands.
“Yeah, me too.”
Behind their cage of fingers, Howard’s eyebrows arched involuntarily. Just what exactly was he supposed to have communicated?
“I really miss the zoo,” sighed Vince, as if paddling along the same conversational waterway, so Howard allowed himself to nod. Just a little. It wasn’t as if he could let anyone know just how badly he longed for those crazy days of Fossil-type abuse, apathetic animals and Real Vince. The return of Zooniverse Vince had intensified these feelings tenfold in the past few days.
When Vince next spoke, his words came warm and close against Howard’s ear. “I miss it, and I’ve only been gone a few days. It must be much worse for you, Howard.”
Howard shook his head. He tried to inject some good solid breeziness into his voice, cringing when he heard the obvious falseness of his tone. “No, not so much, Vince. I enjoy my life here in the flat, don’t I?” He tried again. “Still got you, hey, little man?”
Vince shifted uncomfortably on the couch, and Howard groaned silently. Even if it was all a lie, and Howard didn’t in fact ‘have’ any form of Vince here in the Nabootique, Zooniverse Vince was completely innocent in the affair. He shouldn’t be strung out along an uncomfortable line of guilt.
“Don’t believe you,” said Vince finally, hopping up and crouching amongst the cushions beside Howard on the couch. Howard, head raised from his hands, automatic admonition on his lips, held the words back at the last minute. Instead of cutting forth with some scathing reprimand, Howard’s lips pulled into a reluctant smile.
“What?”
“Don’t believe that you don’t miss the Zooniverse, Howard,” Vince clarified, shuffling a little closer while swiping something from the back pocket of his trousers. “Why else would you have this thrust lovingly under your pillow, then?”
Howard made one desperate grab for the square Polaroid photo, eyes wide in sudden panic.
“Give me that, you little tart!”
Grinning widely, Vince clicked his tongue, holding the photograph right behind him on outstretched arm. He wiggled the little shiny square tauntingly through the air. Howard’s eyes wiggled back and forth in despair.
“You can’t just go scrounging beneath other peoples’ bedclothes, Vince,” he complained weakly, hands twitching in his lap. “It’s prima facie invasion of privacy, sir! Now, give me that photo or I’ll come at you like a six-foot court of law!”
“Don’t think I will, Howard,” said Vince, scuffling backwards through the cushions and perching lightly on the opposite arm of the couch. He held the photo close to his face and peered at the image with narrowing eyes.
Howard adjusted his shirt collar and thought hard about burying his face back in his fingers like an ostrich with its head in sand. He thought hard about burying his own head in sand. Cringing, he remembered the last time he had bodily parts buried beneath sand - but there wasn’t likely to be a coyote near the sandpit in the local park, now, was there?
“Why’ve you got this picture of Mrs Gideon under your pillow, Howard?”
Swallowing hard, Howard tried to ignore the clear note of petulance that had inexplicably settled into Vince’s voice. “It’s not a picture of Mrs Gideon, Vince; it’s a picture of me and Mrs Gideon outside the Zooniverse. And I didn’t put it under my pillow. It must have - well - fallen there from my Zooniverse scrapbook, alright?”
“What, fallen right into the pillow slip? Nestled itself snugly amongst the feathers? Tattooed itself with sketchy little love hearts right across the back -”
“You once found the mouthpiece of my favourite trumpet in the lining of your mattress, Vince. Don’t talk to me about the improbability of these incidents.”
Vince sighed, fanning himself with the Polaroid like a dispassionate French aristocrat knocked forwards a few centuries. “Don’t ask me how your golden knob found its way into my bed, Howard. Just admit that you’re still madly obsessed with Mrs Gideon. All these years later. And after she got off with the panda, and everything.”
Howard flushed bright red.
“I’m not still hung up about that woman, Vince! I just like that particular picture, alright? Your gargantuan nose takes up most of the photo anyway - you can barely see Mrs Gideon, can you?”
“I couldn’t help it! I wandered by at the wrong moment, Howard. By the time I saw the flash, it was too late! I was captured forever in your sentimental photograph. If that’s not a prima donna invasion of privacy, I don’t know what is.”
“That’s not gonna swing it, you muppet. You were the one who took the photo.”
Vince swung his boot over his knee and crossed his legs, hunching forwards over the Polaroid in question with a notable absence of cheeky grin.
“Shouldn’t’ve trusted me with the camera, should you? Like you said on the day, I wouldn’t know a Polaroid from a polar bear - though frankly, as we’re zookeepers and all, that wasn’t much of a solid argument.”
It was far too easy to see through Vince’s strained jab at a return to normal banter, and Howard decided that he couldn’t really even pretend to ignore it. Not without weathering a few crashing waves in the ocean of shame, anyway. Not if he wanted to take back a bit of the Old Howard, the Howard who had been the true all-or-nothing best friend of Vince back in the Zooniverse. And so, Howard, trying very hard to regress, floundered forward through the stormy waters.
“Not that it’s any of your business, really, Vince,” he started rather haughtily, then checked himself at the sight of the pointy little downcast face at the end of the couch, “but, well, the photo wasn’t under my pillow to remind me of Mrs Gideon, alright? You can’t even see her in the photo, really, can you?”
Howard glanced back up, and was rather taken aback at the expression of utmost revulsion now parading across the fairground of Vince’s features.
“Maybe Gideon’s taken a backseat, but I think - no. Christy, I think that’s Fossil, there, right in the background, coming out of Bainbridge’s office - naked.”
Clapping his hands over his ears, Howard leapt to his feet. “I’ve slept with that photo under my pillow for three years!” he cried, moustache dancing excitedly in his agitation.
“That’s well wrong, you know that, right, Howard?” said Vince, and his face didn’t show much sympathy, though his smile had evaporated entirely. “Snuggling under the covers with Fossil in the dark - sounds a right freak show.”
“Oh, stop it,” Howard said, mortification morphing into embarrassment which then flung itself in the path of anger and caused him to barrel on without really considering his words. “You’re just being petty, Vince. You’re all jealous at the thought that I still carry a torch for Mrs Gideon.”
“Am not,” Vince shot back, words slightly too quick, voice slightly too high. “Word on the street is that you’re still Fossil’s bitch, Howard - but then, you’ve always been someone’s bitch, haven’t you? Mrs Gideon’s, Fossil’s, Mine-In-The-Future; you can’t get enough of rejection, can you?”
“That’s not fair, sir! And it’s not true, either, at that!”
Fists clenching, Polaroid scrunching, Vince leapt from the arm of the couch and began advancing on Howard with a finger jutting out towards the northerner’s chest.
“Nicey nicey zoo zoo, for him and her and me and you, nicey nicey -”
“Stop it, stop it!” Howard shouted, panicking, stuffing his fingers deep into his ear canals and desperately attempting to block the cacophony.
“- for him, and her, and me -”
“We left all that behind, didn’t we, and thank God we did!”
“You haven’t left anything behind, Howard! You’ve got the past stuffed under your pillow to seep into your head at night! You act like you hate everything you’ve found outside the Zooniverse, but how are you going to improve things if you just anchor yourself to your old mistakes? Why don’t you take a risk for once, forget Gideon, and haul yourself an inch closer to reality? She never liked you, Howard. Are you ever going to get that?”
Without another word, Vince marched right out of the room, lobbing the crumpled photograph directly into Howard’s face. Shakily, Howard pulled his hands from where they had been hovering beside his ears, and leant down to pick up the Polaroid. He smoothed it out promptly, wincing at the wrinkles now distorting the shiny surface.
He swept an index finger over the colourful square, touching the dimpled cheek that sprawled in a cheeky 2-D fashion over most of the photo.
Really, Howard didn’t know how to take this most recent development in his sojourn back to a memory of an echo of Zooniverse life. There was a good slab of irony to be found in the fact that Vince-from-the-past was urging Howard to embrace the future, whatever that concept entailed.
Sighing, Howard paused his finger over the confused-looking eyebrow of an otherwise invisible Mrs Gideon. Now, there had been a failure of the past - but obviously, even he had moved on from the muse of his Cream poetry after the Panda Bear Affair. No, this photo had earned its place beneath his pillow on other merits.
Ultimately, it was a snapshot of Zooniverse life, containing a sweet and artlessly selfish Vince, and a frowningly superior Howard. And they were together, captured in a candid moment of their everyday life, happy and self-satisfied (and entirely unaware of a blurrily naked Fossil behind the bushes).
And this photo stayed within the feathered innards of Howard’s pillow to comfort him, remind him that the bonds of friendship simply had to hold strong forever. A few years of gradual distancing, constant bickering and polar interests couldn’t possibly splinter the bond that had connected this swaggering duo from the Zooniverse, could they?
Could they?
And at this thought, Howard glanced rather unhappily towards the closed bedroom door separating him from Vince.
Three days. Three days to fix up the old mistakes of the past before the future caught back up with him.