[fic] Young And Naïve Still - 1/1
Title: Young And Naïve Still
Author: garnetice
Chapter: One of One
Pairing: Kendall/James
Rating: K
Warnings: Dirty words from thirteen year old mouths.
Word Count: 1,737
Summary: Boys are not supposed to be pretty.
Disclaimer: BTR is not mine.
Author's Notes: This is the other mildly fluffy thing I was working on when I started Your Love Is A Melody. They have nothing to do with each other, except in that they both take place when James and Kendall are kids in Minneosta. I make no excuses for how terrible I am at writing fluff. Also, freakishly, they are both the same length, right down to the word count. Title is from Young Blood by The Naked and The Famous (who are amazing, I cannot even stress that enough. Their album is owning my iPod rn. And by rn I mean since November).
---
James hates the way he looks.
He’s thirteen, sprouting long, spidery limbs all over the place. He’s got hair coming in the nooks and crannies his fifth grade health teacher warned about, and his feet sweat like a beast. But all that’s normal. His friends are going through the exact same things, and that, yeah, he can deal with that.
What he can’t deal with is the rosy hue of his cheeks, or the way his mom flat out refuses to buy him a stupid haircut until it’s halfway down his neck and curling around his ears, or the way girls keep telling him that he has the prettiest fucking eyelashes they’ve ever seen. He can’t stand that his teammates joke about his willowy figure or when his dad observes how lovely he looks in the mornings, hair still rumpled from sleep.
He’s a boy, goddamnit. If anything, he’s supposed to be handsome.
Aside from his natural good looks, James blames a large portion of the jokes on his mom, the sadistic bitch. She’s been dressing him in lace and bows since he was old enough to walk.
She told the neighbors she had a daughter until, in a fit of enraged passion when he was four, he decided to run around naked on their front yard. His mom says he did it because he was trying to escape bath time, but whatever, he thinks it was from a fit of enraged passion.
Point being, he might be a little sensitive to the whole thing. Boys are not supposed to be pretty.
On their most recent shopping trip, his mom tried to get him to buy these pink button down shirts instead of the awesome graphic tees he wanted. It was the last straw.
Even though James considers himself a Very Mature thirteen, he still kind of had a temper tantrum. He yelled and he faked tears and everything, until his mom caved and bought him some grungy looking pre-ripped jeans.
Not his finest moment.
It was a perfectly acceptable reaction, though. He’d like to see someone else feel differently, if all of their baby pictures involved frilly pink dresses.
Anyway, that was yesterday, and now James has been in a mood all day. His mom calls it that, like she can’t actually recognize that he’s pissed the fuck off. Like using less loaded words will somehow make his anger okay.
He’s supposed to be helping Kendall out, gathering shit in his backyard for a science project. Kendall didn’t want to work with him. James didn’t take it as an insult. They’d all tried to partner up with Logan, but Logan was onto them. He knew they wouldn’t do any of the work, and had already opted to spend the day with a pretty blonde girl who was willing to lift her own weight when it came to science. Which leaves James with Kendall, picking through the trash in the hopes that they can glue together something passable.
James has a ginormous back yard. It borders the woods, which go on for miles, long past the outskirts of town. He waits on the sidewalk outside of his house until Kendall’s dad’s pickup pulls up.
“Dude. Ever heard of a comb?”
Kendall tosses a black plastic comb from his dad’s glove box at James’s head.
“Don’t throw things,” his dad warns with a fond smile.
“Yeah, yeah,” Kendall rolls his eyes and hops out of the truck, coming to a stop on the curb in front of James, “You ready?”
“I don’t need a comb,” James says with a frown, trying to get Kendall to give it back to his dad. But Kendall won’t take it, and his dad’s already halfway down the road, his exhaust pipe making tiny little clouds in the freezing cold air. James tucks it in his mailbox, figuring the sad postal dude with the sadder comb over can make use of it.
“Yeah, you really do. I thought your mom didn’t let you out of the house looking like that.”
He makes a face at James’s rumpled t-shirt, peeking out from beneath his pristine peacoat. Kendall’s eyes reach James’s knees, peeking out of his fancy ripped jeans, and James can just see him thinking something practical, like isn’t he cold?
He is kind of cold. But ripped denim is in-fashion. For boys. James read all about it in his mom’s newest issue of In Style.
Making a statement is hard, sometimes.
“My mom is a fascist,” James says. Kendall blinks.
“Someone paid attention in history.”
“Logan’s been tutoring me,” he mutters, a little embarrassed.
“Well, whatever, if you want to look like a hobo that’s your prerogative. See, Logan teaches me things too,” Kendall says cheekily, and then under his breath mumbles, “I really hope I used that word right. Let’s go.”
James follows Kendall around the side of his house and out into the woods, behind the clearly marked line of demarcation between his neatly trimmed lawn and a long stretch of wilderness. He kicks a rock and wonders if anyone’s ever told Kendall he’s pretty.
Doubtful.
He’s not traditionally good looking. His nose has that bump from the time he broke it during playoffs when they were ten, and his eyebrows are really thick and bushy, and when he smiles it’s kind of impish; but James likes his face. He likes the way Kendall’s dimples have deepened the older he gets. He likes the obvious masculinity in the set of his jaw, even though his voice still cracks like a boy’s. He’s handsome, kind of, in this roguish, unexpected way.
At thirteen, Kendall’s everything James wants to be.
No one would ever try to stuff him in a pink shirt.
James stares at the thin wings of his friend’s shoulder blades through his striped sweater and wishes that he looked more like a real boy, like Kendall. That his eyelashes weren’t so long and his cheeks didn’t flush so easily and that his smile wasn’t so straight and pearly white. He knows ripped jeans and grungy hair aren’t ever really going to cover those things up.
“Right, so do you have any idea what we’re supposed to be doing?”
Kendall squints at his crumpled up assignment sheet, twisting it this way and that, like maybe a change in angle can unlock the secret of what it is their teacher wants.
“No idea,” James says, “Just start picking up whatever trash you see, and we’ll, I don’t know. Build something.”
Kendall rolls his eyes.
“Right. So we’re going to be making a beer can wind chime.”
“Basically,” James replies, knowing that the only thing they’ll find in the woods will be a rainbow of aluminum left behind by drunk high school kids.
A windchime probably isn’t what the teacher’s looking for, but whatever. He’ll give them a C minus if he wants their hockey team to go to nationals. The principal certainly does.
They’ve been scavenging for about half an hour when Kendall chucks an empty can at his head.
“Hey, watch it.”
“Make me,” Kendall says with a grin.
James crosses his arms.
“Don’t be such a priss,” Kendall laughs, taunting. He flicks the tab of the can at James’s head, and oh no, he did not just call James a priss. James dodges, easily. Kendall goes to grab another can.
With a flying leap, James tackles Kendall into the mud, laughing when the muck splashes up around them.
“Aw, aw, this is gross,” Kendall yelps, but James has his fingers twisted around the blond’s hair, and he’s rubbing Kendall’s head into the ground so that the mud’s going to be impossible to get off of his scalp. Kendall laughs and twists like an eel, bucking his hips until he’s got James on his back, and he’s the one whose head is getting caked with the dregs of the forest. Kendall goes the extra mile and rubs a big handful of dirt in James’s face.
James decides that dirt does not taste pleasant.
He throws out an elbow in the direction he thinks Kendall’s face is. He catches him in the throat, if the noise he makes is any indication. James wraps his arm around his friend’s neck and pulls him into the mud with him, wrestling for power until they’re both laughing hard, hitting and panting and generally seeing who can beat the other down harder. It’s been their one ongoing competition since they first learned how to walk.
Five minutes later, their wild thrashing has died down, and James can feel a black eye forming. They’re both lying on their backs, staring up at the canopy of the forest, trying to pick grody debris from their eyes.
“You look like swamp thing,” James accuses through staccato breaths, his heart pounding like a percussion drum.
Kendall snorts a laugh, breathy and high and delighted, still every inch a teenage boy. He opens his mouth to say something scathing.
Then, weirdly, he stops.
“James,” Kendall says, and James looks up, muddy sludge sliding from his eyebrow to his cheekbone, and yeah, he definitely feels a bruise forming. His mom will not be impressed.
He figures there’s probably blood in his smile when he asks, “What?”
“You’re, uh-“ Kendall bites his lip and then blurts, “You’re really beautiful.”
James blinks, glancing down at his mud caked jeans. A little bug eyed, he asks, “Right now?”
“Yeah,” Kendall smiles, and his face is filthy and James thinks he might be missing one of his teeth, but it doesn’t even matter because he’s the nicest thing James has ever seen. He echoes, “Right now.”
James is thinking that this is nothing, that Kendall will think he looks even nicer in those designer jeans his mom picked up a few weeks back, the ones he refused to wear. If he maybe did his hair and acted less surly, he bet he’d look really good. He wonders what Kendall will think then.
His stomach clenches when he catches where exactly his train of thought is headed, but for the first time, he doesn’t really mind. It’s weird, but suddenly, he really wants to be beautiful.
For Kendall. Anything to make him smile, just like that.
Later that day, after Kendall goes home, James grabs the comb out of his mailbox. He figures you never know. It could turn out to be some kind of lucky charm.
---
Author: garnetice
Chapter: One of One
Pairing: Kendall/James
Rating: K
Warnings: Dirty words from thirteen year old mouths.
Word Count: 1,737
Summary: Boys are not supposed to be pretty.
Disclaimer: BTR is not mine.
Author's Notes: This is the other mildly fluffy thing I was working on when I started Your Love Is A Melody. They have nothing to do with each other, except in that they both take place when James and Kendall are kids in Minneosta. I make no excuses for how terrible I am at writing fluff. Also, freakishly, they are both the same length, right down to the word count. Title is from Young Blood by The Naked and The Famous (who are amazing, I cannot even stress that enough. Their album is owning my iPod rn. And by rn I mean since November).
---
James hates the way he looks.
He’s thirteen, sprouting long, spidery limbs all over the place. He’s got hair coming in the nooks and crannies his fifth grade health teacher warned about, and his feet sweat like a beast. But all that’s normal. His friends are going through the exact same things, and that, yeah, he can deal with that.
What he can’t deal with is the rosy hue of his cheeks, or the way his mom flat out refuses to buy him a stupid haircut until it’s halfway down his neck and curling around his ears, or the way girls keep telling him that he has the prettiest fucking eyelashes they’ve ever seen. He can’t stand that his teammates joke about his willowy figure or when his dad observes how lovely he looks in the mornings, hair still rumpled from sleep.
He’s a boy, goddamnit. If anything, he’s supposed to be handsome.
Aside from his natural good looks, James blames a large portion of the jokes on his mom, the sadistic bitch. She’s been dressing him in lace and bows since he was old enough to walk.
She told the neighbors she had a daughter until, in a fit of enraged passion when he was four, he decided to run around naked on their front yard. His mom says he did it because he was trying to escape bath time, but whatever, he thinks it was from a fit of enraged passion.
Point being, he might be a little sensitive to the whole thing. Boys are not supposed to be pretty.
On their most recent shopping trip, his mom tried to get him to buy these pink button down shirts instead of the awesome graphic tees he wanted. It was the last straw.
Even though James considers himself a Very Mature thirteen, he still kind of had a temper tantrum. He yelled and he faked tears and everything, until his mom caved and bought him some grungy looking pre-ripped jeans.
Not his finest moment.
It was a perfectly acceptable reaction, though. He’d like to see someone else feel differently, if all of their baby pictures involved frilly pink dresses.
Anyway, that was yesterday, and now James has been in a mood all day. His mom calls it that, like she can’t actually recognize that he’s pissed the fuck off. Like using less loaded words will somehow make his anger okay.
He’s supposed to be helping Kendall out, gathering shit in his backyard for a science project. Kendall didn’t want to work with him. James didn’t take it as an insult. They’d all tried to partner up with Logan, but Logan was onto them. He knew they wouldn’t do any of the work, and had already opted to spend the day with a pretty blonde girl who was willing to lift her own weight when it came to science. Which leaves James with Kendall, picking through the trash in the hopes that they can glue together something passable.
James has a ginormous back yard. It borders the woods, which go on for miles, long past the outskirts of town. He waits on the sidewalk outside of his house until Kendall’s dad’s pickup pulls up.
“Dude. Ever heard of a comb?”
Kendall tosses a black plastic comb from his dad’s glove box at James’s head.
“Don’t throw things,” his dad warns with a fond smile.
“Yeah, yeah,” Kendall rolls his eyes and hops out of the truck, coming to a stop on the curb in front of James, “You ready?”
“I don’t need a comb,” James says with a frown, trying to get Kendall to give it back to his dad. But Kendall won’t take it, and his dad’s already halfway down the road, his exhaust pipe making tiny little clouds in the freezing cold air. James tucks it in his mailbox, figuring the sad postal dude with the sadder comb over can make use of it.
“Yeah, you really do. I thought your mom didn’t let you out of the house looking like that.”
He makes a face at James’s rumpled t-shirt, peeking out from beneath his pristine peacoat. Kendall’s eyes reach James’s knees, peeking out of his fancy ripped jeans, and James can just see him thinking something practical, like isn’t he cold?
He is kind of cold. But ripped denim is in-fashion. For boys. James read all about it in his mom’s newest issue of In Style.
Making a statement is hard, sometimes.
“My mom is a fascist,” James says. Kendall blinks.
“Someone paid attention in history.”
“Logan’s been tutoring me,” he mutters, a little embarrassed.
“Well, whatever, if you want to look like a hobo that’s your prerogative. See, Logan teaches me things too,” Kendall says cheekily, and then under his breath mumbles, “I really hope I used that word right. Let’s go.”
James follows Kendall around the side of his house and out into the woods, behind the clearly marked line of demarcation between his neatly trimmed lawn and a long stretch of wilderness. He kicks a rock and wonders if anyone’s ever told Kendall he’s pretty.
Doubtful.
He’s not traditionally good looking. His nose has that bump from the time he broke it during playoffs when they were ten, and his eyebrows are really thick and bushy, and when he smiles it’s kind of impish; but James likes his face. He likes the way Kendall’s dimples have deepened the older he gets. He likes the obvious masculinity in the set of his jaw, even though his voice still cracks like a boy’s. He’s handsome, kind of, in this roguish, unexpected way.
At thirteen, Kendall’s everything James wants to be.
No one would ever try to stuff him in a pink shirt.
James stares at the thin wings of his friend’s shoulder blades through his striped sweater and wishes that he looked more like a real boy, like Kendall. That his eyelashes weren’t so long and his cheeks didn’t flush so easily and that his smile wasn’t so straight and pearly white. He knows ripped jeans and grungy hair aren’t ever really going to cover those things up.
“Right, so do you have any idea what we’re supposed to be doing?”
Kendall squints at his crumpled up assignment sheet, twisting it this way and that, like maybe a change in angle can unlock the secret of what it is their teacher wants.
“No idea,” James says, “Just start picking up whatever trash you see, and we’ll, I don’t know. Build something.”
Kendall rolls his eyes.
“Right. So we’re going to be making a beer can wind chime.”
“Basically,” James replies, knowing that the only thing they’ll find in the woods will be a rainbow of aluminum left behind by drunk high school kids.
A windchime probably isn’t what the teacher’s looking for, but whatever. He’ll give them a C minus if he wants their hockey team to go to nationals. The principal certainly does.
They’ve been scavenging for about half an hour when Kendall chucks an empty can at his head.
“Hey, watch it.”
“Make me,” Kendall says with a grin.
James crosses his arms.
“Don’t be such a priss,” Kendall laughs, taunting. He flicks the tab of the can at James’s head, and oh no, he did not just call James a priss. James dodges, easily. Kendall goes to grab another can.
With a flying leap, James tackles Kendall into the mud, laughing when the muck splashes up around them.
“Aw, aw, this is gross,” Kendall yelps, but James has his fingers twisted around the blond’s hair, and he’s rubbing Kendall’s head into the ground so that the mud’s going to be impossible to get off of his scalp. Kendall laughs and twists like an eel, bucking his hips until he’s got James on his back, and he’s the one whose head is getting caked with the dregs of the forest. Kendall goes the extra mile and rubs a big handful of dirt in James’s face.
James decides that dirt does not taste pleasant.
He throws out an elbow in the direction he thinks Kendall’s face is. He catches him in the throat, if the noise he makes is any indication. James wraps his arm around his friend’s neck and pulls him into the mud with him, wrestling for power until they’re both laughing hard, hitting and panting and generally seeing who can beat the other down harder. It’s been their one ongoing competition since they first learned how to walk.
Five minutes later, their wild thrashing has died down, and James can feel a black eye forming. They’re both lying on their backs, staring up at the canopy of the forest, trying to pick grody debris from their eyes.
“You look like swamp thing,” James accuses through staccato breaths, his heart pounding like a percussion drum.
Kendall snorts a laugh, breathy and high and delighted, still every inch a teenage boy. He opens his mouth to say something scathing.
Then, weirdly, he stops.
“James,” Kendall says, and James looks up, muddy sludge sliding from his eyebrow to his cheekbone, and yeah, he definitely feels a bruise forming. His mom will not be impressed.
He figures there’s probably blood in his smile when he asks, “What?”
“You’re, uh-“ Kendall bites his lip and then blurts, “You’re really beautiful.”
James blinks, glancing down at his mud caked jeans. A little bug eyed, he asks, “Right now?”
“Yeah,” Kendall smiles, and his face is filthy and James thinks he might be missing one of his teeth, but it doesn’t even matter because he’s the nicest thing James has ever seen. He echoes, “Right now.”
James is thinking that this is nothing, that Kendall will think he looks even nicer in those designer jeans his mom picked up a few weeks back, the ones he refused to wear. If he maybe did his hair and acted less surly, he bet he’d look really good. He wonders what Kendall will think then.
His stomach clenches when he catches where exactly his train of thought is headed, but for the first time, he doesn’t really mind. It’s weird, but suddenly, he really wants to be beautiful.
For Kendall. Anything to make him smile, just like that.
Later that day, after Kendall goes home, James grabs the comb out of his mailbox. He figures you never know. It could turn out to be some kind of lucky charm.
---