Christmas Spirits (Part 4)
Title: Christmas Spirits
Author: Concupid
Pairing: Dan/Jones
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: references to mild violence, language
Summary: Dan moves from uncomfortable situation to uncomfortable situation and learns very little.
Author’s note: I tried to finish it, but each section got a bit too long and I had to give in. One more chapter!
1994
Random alleyway in Shoreditch
Dan had never been dumpster diving before, and the process was making him feel oddly bourgeois. He resisted his desire to endlessly ask, “Should we be doing this?” At an intellectual level, he knew there was no reason for him to not recycle the garbage they found (other than it was probably illegal), but it still felt deeply wrong. It also smelled awful.
“Look at this!” Jones yelled. Dan watched as Jones hauled a mannequin free from an alley. Dan recognized the mannequin from his youth. It had been a popular model with an austere face, bald head and a healthy bosom. He flushed at the memory of sneaking a feel of her rock hard breast as a child.
“She is genius! Remember giving mannequins a feel-up when you were a kid?” Jones pulled a disturbing face, like a demented clown, as he slowly reached his finger over to poke one breast with his index finger.
Dan wanted to feign ignorance or even act appalled, but he remained silent.
“She’ll be perfect,” Jones promised as he arranged one of her arms so she seemed to be hanging on to Jones as he hoisted her onto his back. “This is going to be the best Christmas tree ever.”
Dan looked at the box of tree limbs and broken ornaments in his hands. He had no idea what Jones planned to do, but he was keen to find out. He was due for some new Christmas traditions to suit his new life.
Xxx
A Place that isn’t Shoreditch
2014
Dan constructed three gingerbread houses while Jones and Maya worked on turning them into the strangest homes ever seen. Jones had written GingerHouse of Jones on one and covered it in stick figure people with candy heads. Maya had turned one into a house-shaped cat with Window eyes and a string of popcorn for a tail. The third house had been given a full head of icing hair. Dan saw Claire’s eyes widen with concern as she looked at the strange houses, but she smiled and told Maya she was doing a wonderful job. Then she ordered Dan into the kitchen for a scolding.
Dan tried to sit up straight as he sat in the kitchen and watched Claire basting a turkey. She looked like such a proper adult, he felt a need to keep up.
“I talked to Nathan. He is willing to not press charges or release the video if you’ll just apologize.”
“Why would I apologize?”
“You tried to murder him, Dan! You were drunk and you tried to strangle him. That is not acceptable. That’s a crime. That could mean actual prison.”
“He was wearing my clothes!” Even Dan had to admit is sounded a bit weak, but he was only human. A man could only be pushed so far. His whole life had been co-opted by Nathan Barley. The only thing that had remained safe was is ‘wardrobe’. Nathan was never so desperate to imitate Dan that he’d wear an outfit that wasn’t from one of his trendy shops.
Claire grabbed a picture off of her refrigerator and slammed it on the counter in front of Dan. It was cut from a glossy magazine and featured a handsome young man with perfect hair wearing Dan’s stripy shirt, blazer and even his pink tee-shirt. Another male model was wearing the shirt Dan currently wore (minus all the bits of icing).
“What’s this?” Dan asked, sincerely confused. He looked at his stripy pink shirt and wondered if it was truly what the young and beautiful were wearing, and if it was, why did it also come in Dan’s size?
“It’s the advert Ned and I did for Topman. Mum bought you all of these outfits.” As she spoke, Dan realized that every outfit in the picture was familiar. “It might be the first time she’s ever been supportive of me. You and Nathan were both dressed like this model because you are both fucking mindless children. Now, apologize to Nathan for trying to kill him and let’s be done with this.”
Dan was a big enough man to admit when he was wrong, but he could never pretend that Nathan did not deserve to be throttled.
“I wouldn’t have gone after him if he didn’t constantly egg me on…”
“He’s not egging you on!” Claire cried. She flailed her arms and sent turkey juice flying in her anger. “He admires you. He wants to be close to you. I don’t know why, but he does. You could just talk to him and, I don’t know, sort him out instead of just making it worse.”
“He has humiliated me on countless occasions…”
“You do that to yourself! Nathan isn’t bright enough to torture you. You are the one making yourself miserable.”
“I just try to live my life and he’s always there, poking at me and turning everything to shit. You can’t see it because you love fucking those fucking idiots.”
Dan tried to chase away the disturbing images of Claire and Nathan and Ned and any other idiots she may have gotten off with over the years. Claire seemed to have a fetish for men nearly too stupid to function.
Claire had the decency to flush, but she wasn’t softened for a moment.
“If you can’t think about me, or Maya or our parents or anyone else, can you at least think about Jones? What is he going to do if you get locked up?”
Dan shrugged, “Who knows if Jones would even notice?”
Dan was imagining Jones turning Dan’s bed into a home for his strange collection of toys when Claire squirted him in the face with hot turkey juice.
“You are impossible!” Claire yelled. “Apologize to Nathan before I kill you and Maya has to become a ward of the state!”
Dan cleaned his face and hair the best he could and shuffled back into the living room. Ned was using his artistic skills to draw feet under the House of Jones as though it had fallen on and crushed someone, Wicked Witch of the East-style.
He looked up at Dan’s wet hair and shirt.
“Is Claire still angry?” he asked.
Dan shrugged. “I’ll just stay out here for a while to be safe.”
Dan watched Maya carefully color in one of the people on the GingerHouse of Jones.
“This is you,” Maya explained. She was using a gel icing to give him a pink shirt. Jones had already given him some shaggy licorice hair.
Dan asked about the woman next to him wearing a dress made of marshmallows.
“That’s Jones,” Maya giggled. “You’re getting married! I’m the flower girl!”
Maya pointed to the little figure between Dan and bride-Jones. Her hair was made of gumdrops.
“Boys can get married, you know,” Maya said in her know-it-all Claire voice. “Girls can marry girls, boys can marry boys, girls can marry boys and girls can marry nobody.”
Dan smiled at Maya and shot a quizzical look at Jones, but his flat mate was busy filling out the wedding party. Dan did not appreciate Claire’s Polo mint cleavage but he was impressed he recognized so many of the candy figures.
“You forgot Nathan Barley,” Dan joked as he looked at his bruised and scratched knuckles.
Dan grabbed the icing and began drawing a figure under Dan’s feet. Dan imagined marrying Jones with one foot on Nathan Barley’s neck. Any day that involved having his foot on Nathan’s throat was likely to be the happiest day of Dan Ashcroft’s life.
Xxx
1994
House of Jones
The mannequin’s arms had been replaced with tree branches. She looked elegant, but creepy, reaching out with her evergreen arms. Dan had spent hours nailing branches to her waist and legs to create a skirt. It looked pretty sad, but then Jones filled it in with smaller branches and a hot glue gun until her skirt looked like the bottom of a fir tree. Dan felt proud of what they’d accomplished through hours of hard work (and copious amounts of sweat and swear words). He wasn’t sure why they’d worked so hard to make a creepy tree lady, but there was still a sense of accomplishment in seeing the completed project.
“So… this is your Christmas tradition?” Dan asked. They hadn’t spoken in hours. They just worked in silence as Jones blasted a mixture of music and random noises.
Jones laughed.
“I’ve never done this before. Normally, I just make a little wreath. This is much better. I’m rubbish with a hammer. I hope you’re around next year.”
Dan flushed and stared at his hands. Jones hadn’t made a move since their earlier tryst, but Dan felt like he owed his host some kind of explanation.
“Jones, I just wanted to say… I really appreciate you letting me stay and… The thing is I’m… I’m not sure how to really…”
Jones grinned, “Professional wordsmith, you are.”
“I don’t want to mislead you.”
Jones suddenly turned serious and it made Dan profoundly uncomfortable. He wasn’t sure if Jones was constantly high or if he was crazy, or both, but it was alarming to see him looking focused when he wasn’t looking at his turntables.
“I’m not looking for a boyfriend. You can relax, mate.”
“What are you looking for?”
Jones grinned, suddenly back to his impish self. “I’m looking for a flat mate who knows how to use a hammer, what do you think?”
“You should talk to my dad, then,” Dan suggested. “He’s a DIY guy.”
Jones smiled, “Is he fit as you?”
Dan blushed at the compliment. Since moving out of his parents’ home, he’d been feeling like a child. He felt inadequate to care for himself and like a little boy passing himself off as an adult. Jones made him feel like a kid in the best possible way. He felt ready for adventure, full of hope and horny at random intervals.
Jones pressed a chaste kiss to Dan’s cheek.
“We can have it off when we feel like it. It’s not a big thing. Besides, I’m saving myself for David Bowie.”
Dan thought about Jones’s words as they reconstituted broken Christmas ornaments. Dan tried to return them to their original forms, but Jones was creating bizarre mini-sculptures. Dan had a vision of himself as a witty and urbane writer, living it up in Shoreditch until he settled down in a suburb with a wife who knew how to cook. He assumed children would be involved at some point. He’d never really questioned if that was what he wanted from his life, or just what he assumed was on the horizon. So far, spending time with Jones was the closest he’d come to really living the Shoreditch experience. He generally spent his nights alone or on disastrous blind dates. He’d always done all right with women in Leeds, but Shoreditch Dan was a million times more self-conscious, nervous and brittle than his former self. Second dates were a rarity.
Jones eventually blew a noise maker, knocking Dan out of his reverie, and announced that their tree was now complete, and “totally fucking genius!”
Dan instinctively put his hand on Jones’s waist and then wondered if the gesture was too intimate.
Jones grinned up at him and said, “Merry Christmas.” His face was pure joy. Dan didn’t think, he just kissed Jones by the light of the creepy but beautiful tree lady.
Author: Concupid
Pairing: Dan/Jones
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: references to mild violence, language
Summary: Dan moves from uncomfortable situation to uncomfortable situation and learns very little.
Author’s note: I tried to finish it, but each section got a bit too long and I had to give in. One more chapter!
1994
Random alleyway in Shoreditch
Dan had never been dumpster diving before, and the process was making him feel oddly bourgeois. He resisted his desire to endlessly ask, “Should we be doing this?” At an intellectual level, he knew there was no reason for him to not recycle the garbage they found (other than it was probably illegal), but it still felt deeply wrong. It also smelled awful.
“Look at this!” Jones yelled. Dan watched as Jones hauled a mannequin free from an alley. Dan recognized the mannequin from his youth. It had been a popular model with an austere face, bald head and a healthy bosom. He flushed at the memory of sneaking a feel of her rock hard breast as a child.
“She is genius! Remember giving mannequins a feel-up when you were a kid?” Jones pulled a disturbing face, like a demented clown, as he slowly reached his finger over to poke one breast with his index finger.
Dan wanted to feign ignorance or even act appalled, but he remained silent.
“She’ll be perfect,” Jones promised as he arranged one of her arms so she seemed to be hanging on to Jones as he hoisted her onto his back. “This is going to be the best Christmas tree ever.”
Dan looked at the box of tree limbs and broken ornaments in his hands. He had no idea what Jones planned to do, but he was keen to find out. He was due for some new Christmas traditions to suit his new life.
Xxx
A Place that isn’t Shoreditch
2014
Dan constructed three gingerbread houses while Jones and Maya worked on turning them into the strangest homes ever seen. Jones had written GingerHouse of Jones on one and covered it in stick figure people with candy heads. Maya had turned one into a house-shaped cat with Window eyes and a string of popcorn for a tail. The third house had been given a full head of icing hair. Dan saw Claire’s eyes widen with concern as she looked at the strange houses, but she smiled and told Maya she was doing a wonderful job. Then she ordered Dan into the kitchen for a scolding.
Dan tried to sit up straight as he sat in the kitchen and watched Claire basting a turkey. She looked like such a proper adult, he felt a need to keep up.
“I talked to Nathan. He is willing to not press charges or release the video if you’ll just apologize.”
“Why would I apologize?”
“You tried to murder him, Dan! You were drunk and you tried to strangle him. That is not acceptable. That’s a crime. That could mean actual prison.”
“He was wearing my clothes!” Even Dan had to admit is sounded a bit weak, but he was only human. A man could only be pushed so far. His whole life had been co-opted by Nathan Barley. The only thing that had remained safe was is ‘wardrobe’. Nathan was never so desperate to imitate Dan that he’d wear an outfit that wasn’t from one of his trendy shops.
Claire grabbed a picture off of her refrigerator and slammed it on the counter in front of Dan. It was cut from a glossy magazine and featured a handsome young man with perfect hair wearing Dan’s stripy shirt, blazer and even his pink tee-shirt. Another male model was wearing the shirt Dan currently wore (minus all the bits of icing).
“What’s this?” Dan asked, sincerely confused. He looked at his stripy pink shirt and wondered if it was truly what the young and beautiful were wearing, and if it was, why did it also come in Dan’s size?
“It’s the advert Ned and I did for Topman. Mum bought you all of these outfits.” As she spoke, Dan realized that every outfit in the picture was familiar. “It might be the first time she’s ever been supportive of me. You and Nathan were both dressed like this model because you are both fucking mindless children. Now, apologize to Nathan for trying to kill him and let’s be done with this.”
Dan was a big enough man to admit when he was wrong, but he could never pretend that Nathan did not deserve to be throttled.
“I wouldn’t have gone after him if he didn’t constantly egg me on…”
“He’s not egging you on!” Claire cried. She flailed her arms and sent turkey juice flying in her anger. “He admires you. He wants to be close to you. I don’t know why, but he does. You could just talk to him and, I don’t know, sort him out instead of just making it worse.”
“He has humiliated me on countless occasions…”
“You do that to yourself! Nathan isn’t bright enough to torture you. You are the one making yourself miserable.”
“I just try to live my life and he’s always there, poking at me and turning everything to shit. You can’t see it because you love fucking those fucking idiots.”
Dan tried to chase away the disturbing images of Claire and Nathan and Ned and any other idiots she may have gotten off with over the years. Claire seemed to have a fetish for men nearly too stupid to function.
Claire had the decency to flush, but she wasn’t softened for a moment.
“If you can’t think about me, or Maya or our parents or anyone else, can you at least think about Jones? What is he going to do if you get locked up?”
Dan shrugged, “Who knows if Jones would even notice?”
Dan was imagining Jones turning Dan’s bed into a home for his strange collection of toys when Claire squirted him in the face with hot turkey juice.
“You are impossible!” Claire yelled. “Apologize to Nathan before I kill you and Maya has to become a ward of the state!”
Dan cleaned his face and hair the best he could and shuffled back into the living room. Ned was using his artistic skills to draw feet under the House of Jones as though it had fallen on and crushed someone, Wicked Witch of the East-style.
He looked up at Dan’s wet hair and shirt.
“Is Claire still angry?” he asked.
Dan shrugged. “I’ll just stay out here for a while to be safe.”
Dan watched Maya carefully color in one of the people on the GingerHouse of Jones.
“This is you,” Maya explained. She was using a gel icing to give him a pink shirt. Jones had already given him some shaggy licorice hair.
Dan asked about the woman next to him wearing a dress made of marshmallows.
“That’s Jones,” Maya giggled. “You’re getting married! I’m the flower girl!”
Maya pointed to the little figure between Dan and bride-Jones. Her hair was made of gumdrops.
“Boys can get married, you know,” Maya said in her know-it-all Claire voice. “Girls can marry girls, boys can marry boys, girls can marry boys and girls can marry nobody.”
Dan smiled at Maya and shot a quizzical look at Jones, but his flat mate was busy filling out the wedding party. Dan did not appreciate Claire’s Polo mint cleavage but he was impressed he recognized so many of the candy figures.
“You forgot Nathan Barley,” Dan joked as he looked at his bruised and scratched knuckles.
Dan grabbed the icing and began drawing a figure under Dan’s feet. Dan imagined marrying Jones with one foot on Nathan Barley’s neck. Any day that involved having his foot on Nathan’s throat was likely to be the happiest day of Dan Ashcroft’s life.
Xxx
1994
House of Jones
The mannequin’s arms had been replaced with tree branches. She looked elegant, but creepy, reaching out with her evergreen arms. Dan had spent hours nailing branches to her waist and legs to create a skirt. It looked pretty sad, but then Jones filled it in with smaller branches and a hot glue gun until her skirt looked like the bottom of a fir tree. Dan felt proud of what they’d accomplished through hours of hard work (and copious amounts of sweat and swear words). He wasn’t sure why they’d worked so hard to make a creepy tree lady, but there was still a sense of accomplishment in seeing the completed project.
“So… this is your Christmas tradition?” Dan asked. They hadn’t spoken in hours. They just worked in silence as Jones blasted a mixture of music and random noises.
Jones laughed.
“I’ve never done this before. Normally, I just make a little wreath. This is much better. I’m rubbish with a hammer. I hope you’re around next year.”
Dan flushed and stared at his hands. Jones hadn’t made a move since their earlier tryst, but Dan felt like he owed his host some kind of explanation.
“Jones, I just wanted to say… I really appreciate you letting me stay and… The thing is I’m… I’m not sure how to really…”
Jones grinned, “Professional wordsmith, you are.”
“I don’t want to mislead you.”
Jones suddenly turned serious and it made Dan profoundly uncomfortable. He wasn’t sure if Jones was constantly high or if he was crazy, or both, but it was alarming to see him looking focused when he wasn’t looking at his turntables.
“I’m not looking for a boyfriend. You can relax, mate.”
“What are you looking for?”
Jones grinned, suddenly back to his impish self. “I’m looking for a flat mate who knows how to use a hammer, what do you think?”
“You should talk to my dad, then,” Dan suggested. “He’s a DIY guy.”
Jones smiled, “Is he fit as you?”
Dan blushed at the compliment. Since moving out of his parents’ home, he’d been feeling like a child. He felt inadequate to care for himself and like a little boy passing himself off as an adult. Jones made him feel like a kid in the best possible way. He felt ready for adventure, full of hope and horny at random intervals.
Jones pressed a chaste kiss to Dan’s cheek.
“We can have it off when we feel like it. It’s not a big thing. Besides, I’m saving myself for David Bowie.”
Dan thought about Jones’s words as they reconstituted broken Christmas ornaments. Dan tried to return them to their original forms, but Jones was creating bizarre mini-sculptures. Dan had a vision of himself as a witty and urbane writer, living it up in Shoreditch until he settled down in a suburb with a wife who knew how to cook. He assumed children would be involved at some point. He’d never really questioned if that was what he wanted from his life, or just what he assumed was on the horizon. So far, spending time with Jones was the closest he’d come to really living the Shoreditch experience. He generally spent his nights alone or on disastrous blind dates. He’d always done all right with women in Leeds, but Shoreditch Dan was a million times more self-conscious, nervous and brittle than his former self. Second dates were a rarity.
Jones eventually blew a noise maker, knocking Dan out of his reverie, and announced that their tree was now complete, and “totally fucking genius!”
Dan instinctively put his hand on Jones’s waist and then wondered if the gesture was too intimate.
Jones grinned up at him and said, “Merry Christmas.” His face was pure joy. Dan didn’t think, he just kissed Jones by the light of the creepy but beautiful tree lady.