Sign A New Agreement With iTunes [1a/4]
anonymous
August 24 2010, 14:30:06 UTC
OP, I am so late. - Internet-less vacation is a bitch. On the other hand, this is a lot of fun to write. :D :D I’m currently in the process of writing part 4 and editing parts 2 and 3, so the delay between updates should be pretty short, too. Hope you’ll, uh, enjoy?
(The title is mostly there for the lulz, btw. I could go on about words and meanings, but it’s mostly silly referencing. <3)
Sign A New Agreement With iTunes
Excerpt from Francis Bonnefoy’s master thesis on History of a mutual obsession: France & England from Hastings till WWII:
… Franco-British past history consists of Events - Joan of Arc burning at the stake, the evacuation of Dunkirk, Austerlitz and Waterloo - some with tremendous impact on each country’s political stance, some entirely without, each shaping both Nations into a continual comparison with each other. To understand the very unique relationship existing to this day between France and England, however, it is necessary to account for them not merely as political and European states, but also as the hosts to different cultures, different systems of value, different customs, which in turn influence, whether positively or negatively, one another.
Beyond the chronology of historical happenings, it is the little things - Shakespeare’s Henry the V and French clothing during WWII, tea and snails and crumpets and frog thighs, Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower, Voltaire and Edward Prince of Wales, weather reports and telegrams and Channel letters, influence and prejudice and stereotypes - the events of everyday life - that are the witnesses of the mutual influence of French culture and English culture upon one another…
- from the Introduction
On a sticky note pinned to the thesis’ pages, in Arthur Kirkland’s handwriting:
What a great load of well-phrased CRAP.
This is how the morning goes.
Arthur wakes at nine, by which time Francis is long gone, with a pot of fresh coffee left on the countertop. Arthur eyes it distrustfully - but the kettle’s out and they re-stocked on Earl Grey last weekend, and his morning bad mood dissolves in volutes of white smoke and the smell of lemon. There’s iced beer in the fridge and bread in the pantry, all last night’s dinner’s dishes in the sink waiting for a wash, Francis’ stupid sweet black cloves left on the table with his lighter (he’ll miss them, today). There’s a sticky note up on the windowpane, yellow-white against the glass.
(Francis discovered the wonders that are sticky notes in his second college year, and ever since litters them everywhere, with little messages of don’t forget the milk everyday truth; Arthur takes them down and reads them absently, piling them up on the table until there’s enough of them to sweep into the trash.)
They read I’ll be home late tonight and It’s supposed to rain tonight and It’s your turn to cook today, if you go for Indian takeaway again don’t go to the one down the boulevard, you don’t know what they put in their meat; when Arthur cleans sometimes he finds abandoned ones in unlikely places, under the sofa, in the seams of their two leather armchairs, wedged under doors, the unfinished parts of dislocated word-games.
He eats carefully, the way he always has because when he was small his brothers jostled him when he reached out for the jam. It’s different, here: Francis doesn’t like marmalade (blasphemy! a little snarky part of Arthur’s mind points out, every time) and stocks the shelves with disgustingly sweet chocolate paste, and his only morning visitor is the one pigeon who peeks at the window, cooing and petting, with a white rim over his beak and grey-dusted wings (and what does he know, it could be a different one, all birds are the same, after all - and mustn’t humans look just the same to them, too?) But he eats carefully, and gathers his crumbs after him, on the pads of his fingertips, lost in the pockets of the denims he pulls on, where they’ll gather for ages until he picks them out for laundry.
Sign A New Agreement With iTunes [1b/4]
anonymous
August 24 2010, 14:51:36 UTC
The bathroom smells of cologne from when Francis spent an hour grooming himself earlier; there’re clothes on the couch and history books on the coffee table and Arthur picks them mechanically. The flat carries traces of Francis everywhere, when he’s gone: it’s in the hair lotion bottles lined up on the bathroom sink, the neat, shiny shoes on the living-room carpet, the fashion magazine half-open on the couch cushions. When he goes to work, Arthur will leave traces of his own, mixed with Francis’, all over their flat, like exhibits at a crime scene.
(They were roommates through college because of an administration glitch, and money is tight after that, so they find a flat to share, on the fourth floor of a well-loved 80s brick building in downtown London. There’re cracks in the ceilings and the wallpaper is blue but peeling, and somehow, the first evening, they degenerate into a screaming match over whether Francis’ class books or Arthur’s CDs should be in the shelves above the telly. Which sort of figures, especially when you know them a little but not quite so much as to understand how they’ve lived together so long and not killed each other yet.
Except the next day Francis makes salmon buns for lunch, and Arthur smacks his arm and asks pass the pepper, please, and maybe that’s how it begins: in the kitchen, in the morning, with mismatched paper plates and Francis’ ankle brushing Arthur every time he stretches.)
The afternoon is Arthur’s. Francis has class in the morning but is too busy working on his master thesis to get a job at least until Christmas, or so he says; so he’s usually home early, except when he goes to the library or out to pick up in the evening. Arthur says from ten-thirty till five-thirty in the music store he’s been working at since they first got the flat, which makes it a little over a year now; the pay’s good enough for rent and food and the occasional délicatesse, as Francis calls them, and his boss is a surly, balding man who keeps giving him overstock. (He let him take home old Billie Holliday vinyls last winter, and Francis fell in love without a word, so Arthur has a pretty good idea what to get him for Christmas this year.)
He spends hours with Dylan or Bowie or the Stones, headphones over his ears or around his neck as he sorts CDs and rings up costumers; he’s had his share of invites from those who found him swinging his hips round the shelves to Leonard Cohen or Louis Armstrong. He says yes sometimes, just because.
He eats lunch at Yao's around the corner, in the second booth starting from the door, scalding his tongue with tea and inevitably making sweet-sour sauce stains on his lap because he forgets the paper napkin. He always, everyday, picks up a pair of takeaway treats for teatime; there's a kettle in the storeroom and his boss is almost more British than he is. He sells records and partitions and music magazines to people he can almost always strike up conversation with, and only feels a little left-out when his fingers graze the travels' guide he keeps under the counter.
Three days a week there’s rehearsal with the band, four streets down in the chilly, early October evening air. He arrives to find Alfred laughing at something stupid, Tino and Toris speaking quietly over music sheets, and Natalia silent, fiddling with her saxo; he kisses her hand in an old-times routine, and she almost smiles. Then Alfred demands to know why he can’t do the hand-kissing thing too, and Arthur says Be my guest, if you want her to have your guts for a necklace, and Toris looks up with an alarmed expression and that’s usually the sign that they’ve got to begin playing right now.
He comes home at eight to find dinner prepared and kept warm, Francis working away at his deck, stretching, smiling, waving him off with a hush or the hint of a tease that Arthur doesn’t even mind, he feels so good. (Once, one evening when he stayed out late to grab a beer, he found him asleep on his notes, blond hair splayed everywhere; Arthur eased his reading glasses off his nose and dragged him off to his bed, shutting the light off with a smile he’d stubbornly refuse to ever admit to, in the morning.)
Sign A New Agreement With iTunes [1c/4]
anonymous
August 24 2010, 14:57:38 UTC
Francis’ girlfriends (or boyfriends, for that matter, but Francis’ boy-relationships tend to last longer than anything between one night and a week, and are therefore rarer) usually like Arthur. He’s the considerate flatmate who’s always up early on weekends and sensibly lays out tea and toast and jam out for them; reads them their morning horoscope in the newspaper and lets them steal Francis’ shirt (the green one, the one he’s got tens of between he says it makes his waist look slimmer.)
Francis exactly calls one tenth of them again. Arthur has got it down, in diagrams.
“She break up with you again?” Francis asks from the doorway.
“T’rn the fuckin’ lights down,” Arthur blares, and then rolls and promptly falls off the couch, or very nearly. There are three empty bottles of beer on the carpet and one on the couch, on the cushions, one standing upright on the coffee table like a funny soldier and two presumably half-open, on the floor, pooling little puddles of beer on the parquet slats. Francis wrinkles his nose in disgust.
“Tosser,” Arthur says.
“St’p making that face,” Arthur says.
“You’re drunk,” Francis says, “and so very British.” He comes into the room prudently, glass clinking against his shoes (he takes them off, lines them up neatly by the door.)
“Shut up,” Arthur instructs, “am not,” and then: “didn’t br’k’p with me. I br’k’p with her,” he answers, somewhat disconnectedly, to the question of forever ago. He pushes his face into the cushions sullenly. “Was cheatin’ on me.”
“Bitch,” Francis comments laconically.
“Fffuck,” Arthur appears to consider the rest of the sentence for a moment, “you.”
“Anytime,” Francis says absently, slinking into the kitchen for the ready-brewed hangover remedy they keep in the pantry. Arthur is a lightweight, is ridiculously skinny, especially with those frayed denims and soft faded t-shirts he insists on wearing - so he’ll be hangover in the morning anyway, but Francis would be very glad to wash away enough of his bad mood to avoid a fencing match with the kitchen knives tomorrow.
He comes back out to find Arthur muttering a bleary B’tter off with’t her at the telly remote.
“I’m sure,” Francis murmurs, and hauls him up from the couch, dragging him off into a sitting position, one arm around the shoulders, pushing the brim of the glass against his lips. “Drink up - all of it, love, or else I’ll ram it down your throat - you’ll thank me tomorrow, see.”
“Piss off,” Arthur grumbles, but drinks obediently.
There’s a brief scuffle as Francis attempts to wrestle him into his room; gravity makes a heroic win, though, by tumbling them both back down onto the couch in a nice bustle of tangled limbs.
“Y’re heavy,” Arthur giggles, which doesn’t make any sense since he’s the one on top. Francis tries to push him off in the hope of salvaging his nice jacket and shirt, and then gives it up as a lost cause and knocks his knee in Arthur’s abdomen, just out of spite.
“Budge over,” Arthur grunts, settling in. “Sod off, man, go die in a ditch - except even the ditch wouldn’t have you, ah ha,” he says, and falls asleep like a stone.
There is a pause, just there.
“The things I put up with for you,” Francis murmurs, finally, pushing blond hair out of his mouth. Somehow, his fingers get tangled in it.
Arthur drools.
Arthur’s sexuality is a… complicated matter. He considers himself as bisexual with a slight preference for girls - mostly because girls have breasts and thighs and he likes the skirt thing. But then sometimes he falls in love with the sight of furling toes poking out from pooling jeans, so. So there’s that.
He keeps it a secret, well-hidden, British, safe. Alfred knows, but that’s only because he (Alfred) walked in on him (Arthur) and another guy (José) in a concert hall closet eight months ago. Francis doesn’t, because then he’d know everything about Arthur, and that - Arthur isn’t quite sure how he feels about that.
Sign A New Agreement With iTunes [1d/4]
anonymous
August 24 2010, 15:04:43 UTC
(They stumble through the front door, laughing, kissing, touching, breaths warm and damp with alcohol and each other’s mouth. They knock over two chairs on their way to the living-room and then slam into the door, hands wandering over thighs and hips and arses-
Nothing happens. There isn’t anything meant to happen. Anything. Ever. And even if there was they don’t remember it in the morning, anyway.)
There’s a moment.
Francis can pinpoint it to the minute, the second, the intake of breath, the exact moment when It Changes, shift and re-alignment, the afterburn of revelation. He catalogues for nights afterward, calculates the situation into mathematical sections, articulates it into enumerations and lists to give it perspective/sense/value/anything, really. The finished product, after much digressing and butchering and a complete re-enactment of numbers, goes something like this:
item a., evening rugby match on telly, the screen blueish, flickering, because the rain outside patters on the wire item b., i., dinner on the coffee table, consisting of spaghetti and meatballs and the sweet-sauce that only Francis knows how to make - just - right item b., ii., one pint of beer, half-drunk, foam on the brim item c., Arthur, curled on one end of the sofa, under a blanket, tired, sleepy, cheeks dark with warmth and cheap beer, eyes half-lidded and soft, one hand furled out to the side, and item d., pinkies. almost. touching.
And this: (unlisted, because listing requires comprehension and Francis has only a very vague and terrifying inkling as to what it means) the sudden flaring want to inch across that last centimetre of cushions and link their little fingers together.
Re: Sign A New Agreement With iTunes [1d/4]
anonymous
August 24 2010, 15:46:13 UTC
Holy shit, when I got the first couple of notifications for this I thought it was just spam. Because of the title, you know? I'm so fucking glad I checked to see what it was, because this is fabulous. I haven't seen anyone write this sort of realistic, nuanced uncertainty in a relationship in ages. I don't have time to give a really long review now, but I love this! Realistic AU FrUK? What is this madness? <3 And FrUK I actually like, for that matter? Inconceivable! ;D
Can I come back later to quote your own stuff at you? Y/Y
Re: Sign A New Agreement With iTunes [1d/4]
anonymous
August 24 2010, 16:23:55 UTC
Oh my god, I really hope for your sake that the title doesn't turn people off because this fic so far is magnificent. I've been waiting to see it filled since you claimed the prompt, and so far you have not disappointed at all. It's a weird way of saying it, but I'm incredibly charmed by this - your prose style, the subtle nuances of their relationship, the way you crafted both of their characters and lives, etc. Please keep it up!
And how much do I agree with the excerpt from Francis' thesis. What the hell, you managed to sum up a lot of what I love about FrUK in the FIRST TWO PARAGRAPHS OF THE STORY.
Re: Sign A New Agreement With iTunes [1d/4]
anonymous
August 24 2010, 16:47:03 UTC
Um, I'm the person who commented about the title above; I don't think there should be too many worries about the title turning people off. I was only deceived because I have comment notifications, and the subject line of her comment (the title) showed up as the subject line of the email. So I think only people with comment notifications would be confused, probably! Other people would just be seeing it on the Fills List with a nice handy summary and stuff, so it's all good. I was mostly just commenting to mock myself, a bit!
Re: Sign A New Agreement With iTunes [1d/4]
anonymous
August 24 2010, 17:05:03 UTC
Aah, sorry anon, I didn't mean to single you out or make you feel awkward or anything! I did read your comment and understood the circumstances, but I know that some people do judge based on title and this title is a little sillier than the fic is. (Not that I'm criticizing authornon for the title, either; s/he seems to know that it's silly too.) That's all.
Re: Sign A New Agreement With iTunes [1d/4]
anonymous
August 24 2010, 17:13:11 UTC
Ah, I see, then. No, you didn't single me out or anything; don't worry about it! ;D I'm just new to the whole comment notifications thing (on a particular thread), so I'm keenly aware that some people don't know quite how it works. Or even that it exists! (Like me just a couple of weeks ago, heh.)
Re: Sign A New Agreement With iTunes [1d/4]
anonymous
August 24 2010, 18:02:24 UTC
Ahhh, thank you so much for filling this! I absolutely love the idea of them being roommates. The UST and your writing style are lovely. Please continue!
Re: Sign A New Agreement With iTunes [1d/4]
anonymous
August 24 2010, 18:34:04 UTC
This is amazing, authoranon! I kinda want to see a lot more of this verse. Arthur working at a music store, and having a band composed of Alfred, Toris, Tino and Natalya is fan-tas-tic <3 (at least all these characters lend themselves to stories of their own, and all of them have family members that could show up too ^^)
You really brought home the feeling of 'home-iness' they have going on, their affection for one another, in simple touches. And it's great how absolutely themselves they still are. The beginning, with the thesis introduction, was an awesome touch ;)
I simply can't wait for the next installment! With Francis already onto what's changing between them, but Arthur still stubbornly keeping his taste for men a secret (though I wonder if someone as observant as Francis would already know, anywayXD), it's only going to become more interesting, next part!
Re: Sign A New Agreement With iTunes [1d/4]
anonymous
August 24 2010, 19:15:07 UTC
Oh the intricacies of their warped, little minds...
You made my day author-anon. I feel like another track on the broken record, but the details (blue, peeling wallpaper, par example) are astounding.
I love your ability to explore the differences in Arthur and Francis' lives without making it seem hokey; it feels real and true and like they've really been living together forever.
(The title is mostly there for the lulz, btw. I could go on about words and meanings, but it’s mostly silly referencing. <3)
Sign A New Agreement With iTunes
Excerpt from Francis Bonnefoy’s master thesis on History of a mutual obsession: France & England from Hastings till WWII:
… Franco-British past history consists of Events - Joan of Arc burning at the stake, the evacuation of Dunkirk, Austerlitz and Waterloo - some with tremendous impact on each country’s political stance, some entirely without, each shaping both Nations into a continual comparison with each other. To understand the very unique relationship existing to this day between France and England, however, it is necessary to account for them not merely as political and European states, but also as the hosts to different cultures, different systems of value, different customs, which in turn influence, whether positively or negatively, one another.
Beyond the chronology of historical happenings, it is the little things - Shakespeare’s Henry the V and French clothing during WWII, tea and snails and crumpets and frog thighs, Big Ben and the Eiffel Tower, Voltaire and Edward Prince of Wales, weather reports and telegrams and Channel letters, influence and prejudice and stereotypes - the events of everyday life - that are the witnesses of the mutual influence of French culture and English culture upon one another…
- from the Introduction
On a sticky note pinned to the thesis’ pages, in Arthur Kirkland’s handwriting:
What a great load of well-phrased CRAP.
This is how the morning goes.
Arthur wakes at nine, by which time Francis is long gone, with a pot of fresh coffee left on the countertop. Arthur eyes it distrustfully - but the kettle’s out and they re-stocked on Earl Grey last weekend, and his morning bad mood dissolves in volutes of white smoke and the smell of lemon. There’s iced beer in the fridge and bread in the pantry, all last night’s dinner’s dishes in the sink waiting for a wash, Francis’ stupid sweet black cloves left on the table with his lighter (he’ll miss them, today). There’s a sticky note up on the windowpane, yellow-white against the glass.
(Francis discovered the wonders that are sticky notes in his second college year, and ever since litters them everywhere, with little messages of don’t forget the milk everyday truth; Arthur takes them down and reads them absently, piling them up on the table until there’s enough of them to sweep into the trash.)
They read I’ll be home late tonight and It’s supposed to rain tonight and It’s your turn to cook today, if you go for Indian takeaway again don’t go to the one down the boulevard, you don’t know what they put in their meat; when Arthur cleans sometimes he finds abandoned ones in unlikely places, under the sofa, in the seams of their two leather armchairs, wedged under doors, the unfinished parts of dislocated word-games.
He eats carefully, the way he always has because when he was small his brothers jostled him when he reached out for the jam. It’s different, here: Francis doesn’t like marmalade (blasphemy! a little snarky part of Arthur’s mind points out, every time) and stocks the shelves with disgustingly sweet chocolate paste, and his only morning visitor is the one pigeon who peeks at the window, cooing and petting, with a white rim over his beak and grey-dusted wings (and what does he know, it could be a different one, all birds are the same, after all - and mustn’t humans look just the same to them, too?) But he eats carefully, and gathers his crumbs after him, on the pads of his fingertips, lost in the pockets of the denims he pulls on, where they’ll gather for ages until he picks them out for laundry.
Reply
(They were roommates through college because of an administration glitch, and money is tight after that, so they find a flat to share, on the fourth floor of a well-loved 80s brick building in downtown London. There’re cracks in the ceilings and the wallpaper is blue but peeling, and somehow, the first evening, they degenerate into a screaming match over whether Francis’ class books or Arthur’s CDs should be in the shelves above the telly. Which sort of figures, especially when you know them a little but not quite so much as to understand how they’ve lived together so long and not killed each other yet.
Except the next day Francis makes salmon buns for lunch, and Arthur smacks his arm and asks pass the pepper, please, and maybe that’s how it begins: in the kitchen, in the morning, with mismatched paper plates and Francis’ ankle brushing Arthur every time he stretches.)
The afternoon is Arthur’s. Francis has class in the morning but is too busy working on his master thesis to get a job at least until Christmas, or so he says; so he’s usually home early, except when he goes to the library or out to pick up in the evening. Arthur says from ten-thirty till five-thirty in the music store he’s been working at since they first got the flat, which makes it a little over a year now; the pay’s good enough for rent and food and the occasional délicatesse, as Francis calls them, and his boss is a surly, balding man who keeps giving him overstock. (He let him take home old Billie Holliday vinyls last winter, and Francis fell in love without a word, so Arthur has a pretty good idea what to get him for Christmas this year.)
He spends hours with Dylan or Bowie or the Stones, headphones over his ears or around his neck as he sorts CDs and rings up costumers; he’s had his share of invites from those who found him swinging his hips round the shelves to Leonard Cohen or Louis Armstrong. He says yes sometimes, just because.
He eats lunch at Yao's around the corner, in the second booth starting from the door, scalding his tongue with tea and inevitably making sweet-sour sauce stains on his lap because he forgets the paper napkin. He always, everyday, picks up a pair of takeaway treats for teatime; there's a kettle in the storeroom and his boss is almost more British than he is. He sells records and partitions and music magazines to people he can almost always strike up conversation with, and only feels a little left-out when his fingers graze the travels' guide he keeps under the counter.
Three days a week there’s rehearsal with the band, four streets down in the chilly, early October evening air. He arrives to find Alfred laughing at something stupid, Tino and Toris speaking quietly over music sheets, and Natalia silent, fiddling with her saxo; he kisses her hand in an old-times routine, and she almost smiles. Then Alfred demands to know why he can’t do the hand-kissing thing too, and Arthur says Be my guest, if you want her to have your guts for a necklace, and Toris looks up with an alarmed expression and that’s usually the sign that they’ve got to begin playing right now.
He comes home at eight to find dinner prepared and kept warm, Francis working away at his deck, stretching, smiling, waving him off with a hush or the hint of a tease that Arthur doesn’t even mind, he feels so good. (Once, one evening when he stayed out late to grab a beer, he found him asleep on his notes, blond hair splayed everywhere; Arthur eased his reading glasses off his nose and dragged him off to his bed, shutting the light off with a smile he’d stubbornly refuse to ever admit to, in the morning.)
Reply
Francis’ girlfriends (or boyfriends, for that matter, but Francis’ boy-relationships tend to last longer than anything between one night and a week, and are therefore rarer) usually like Arthur. He’s the considerate flatmate who’s always up early on weekends and sensibly lays out tea and toast and jam out for them; reads them their morning horoscope in the newspaper and lets them steal Francis’ shirt (the green one, the one he’s got tens of between he says it makes his waist look slimmer.)
Francis exactly calls one tenth of them again. Arthur has got it down, in diagrams.
“She break up with you again?” Francis asks from the doorway.
“T’rn the fuckin’ lights down,” Arthur blares, and then rolls and promptly falls off the couch, or very nearly. There are three empty bottles of beer on the carpet and one on the couch, on the cushions, one standing upright on the coffee table like a funny soldier and two presumably half-open, on the floor, pooling little puddles of beer on the parquet slats. Francis wrinkles his nose in disgust.
“Tosser,” Arthur says.
“St’p making that face,” Arthur says.
“You’re drunk,” Francis says, “and so very British.” He comes into the room prudently, glass clinking against his shoes (he takes them off, lines them up neatly by the door.)
“Shut up,” Arthur instructs, “am not,” and then: “didn’t br’k’p with me. I br’k’p with her,” he answers, somewhat disconnectedly, to the question of forever ago. He pushes his face into the cushions sullenly. “Was cheatin’ on me.”
“Bitch,” Francis comments laconically.
“Fffuck,” Arthur appears to consider the rest of the sentence for a moment, “you.”
“Anytime,” Francis says absently, slinking into the kitchen for the ready-brewed hangover remedy they keep in the pantry. Arthur is a lightweight, is ridiculously skinny, especially with those frayed denims and soft faded t-shirts he insists on wearing - so he’ll be hangover in the morning anyway, but Francis would be very glad to wash away enough of his bad mood to avoid a fencing match with the kitchen knives tomorrow.
He comes back out to find Arthur muttering a bleary B’tter off with’t her at the telly remote.
“I’m sure,” Francis murmurs, and hauls him up from the couch, dragging him off into a sitting position, one arm around the shoulders, pushing the brim of the glass against his lips. “Drink up - all of it, love, or else I’ll ram it down your throat - you’ll thank me tomorrow, see.”
“Piss off,” Arthur grumbles, but drinks obediently.
There’s a brief scuffle as Francis attempts to wrestle him into his room; gravity makes a heroic win, though, by tumbling them both back down onto the couch in a nice bustle of tangled limbs.
“Y’re heavy,” Arthur giggles, which doesn’t make any sense since he’s the one on top. Francis tries to push him off in the hope of salvaging his nice jacket and shirt, and then gives it up as a lost cause and knocks his knee in Arthur’s abdomen, just out of spite.
“Budge over,” Arthur grunts, settling in. “Sod off, man, go die in a ditch - except even the ditch wouldn’t have you, ah ha,” he says, and falls asleep like a stone.
There is a pause, just there.
“The things I put up with for you,” Francis murmurs, finally, pushing blond hair out of his mouth. Somehow, his fingers get tangled in it.
Arthur drools.
Arthur’s sexuality is a… complicated matter. He considers himself as bisexual with a slight preference for girls - mostly because girls have breasts and thighs and he likes the skirt thing. But then sometimes he falls in love with the sight of furling toes poking out from pooling jeans, so. So there’s that.
He keeps it a secret, well-hidden, British, safe. Alfred knows, but that’s only because he (Alfred) walked in on him (Arthur) and another guy (José) in a concert hall closet eight months ago. Francis doesn’t, because then he’d know everything about Arthur, and that - Arthur isn’t quite sure how he feels about that.
Reply
Nothing happens. There isn’t anything meant to happen. Anything. Ever. And even if there was they don’t remember it in the morning, anyway.)
There’s a moment.
Francis can pinpoint it to the minute, the second, the intake of breath, the exact moment when It Changes, shift and re-alignment, the afterburn of revelation. He catalogues for nights afterward, calculates the situation into mathematical sections, articulates it into enumerations and lists to give it perspective/sense/value/anything, really. The finished product, after much digressing and butchering and a complete re-enactment of numbers, goes something like this:
item a., evening rugby match on telly, the screen blueish, flickering, because the rain outside patters on the wire
item b., i., dinner on the coffee table, consisting of spaghetti and meatballs and the sweet-sauce that only Francis knows how to make - just - right
item b., ii., one pint of beer, half-drunk, foam on the brim
item c., Arthur, curled on one end of the sofa, under a blanket, tired, sleepy, cheeks dark with warmth and cheap beer, eyes half-lidded and soft, one hand furled out to the side, and
item d., pinkies. almost. touching.
And this: (unlisted, because listing requires comprehension and Francis has only a very vague and terrifying inkling as to what it means) the sudden flaring want to inch across that last centimetre of cushions and link their little fingers together.
..
Thanks for reading <3
Reply
Can I come back later to quote your own stuff at you? Y/Y
♥
Reply
The way you described their relationship, the details about their flat, work, clothes, routines, everything just perfect.
Will be stalking this and most probably cry with joy when I see an update.
Reply
And how much do I agree with the excerpt from Francis' thesis. What the hell, you managed to sum up a lot of what I love about FrUK in the FIRST TWO PARAGRAPHS OF THE STORY.
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
Reply
That was GORGEOUS, I loved every word of it.
Reply
You really brought home the feeling of 'home-iness' they have going on, their affection for one another, in simple touches. And it's great how absolutely themselves they still are. The beginning, with the thesis introduction, was an awesome touch ;)
I simply can't wait for the next installment! With Francis already onto what's changing between them, but Arthur still stubbornly keeping his taste for men a secret (though I wonder if someone as observant as Francis would already know, anywayXD), it's only going to become more interesting, next part!
Reply
You made my day author-anon. I feel like another track on the broken record, but the details (blue, peeling wallpaper, par example) are astounding.
I love your ability to explore the differences in Arthur and Francis' lives without making it seem hokey; it feels real and true and like they've really been living together forever.
Reply
Leave a comment