Fic: The Movement of Language (4)
Title: The Movement of Language
Characters/Pairings: USUK(/US), ensemble (mentioned SuFin, NethCan, Frain, very mild GerIta, AusHun, DenNor, Romano->Belgium and past SpUK)
Rating: T - mild language
Summary: In a hypothetical experiment, a student takes reactant A (one grumpy English teacher) and mixes it with reactant B (one enthusiastic Physics teacher) in a glass beaker (life), stirring the mixture before adding substance C (updates and advice from strange friends, fed-up family, life, the universe and everything). The student witnesses a colourful reaction. Assuming all reactants are used up in the experiment, what would the end product be that is created from this reaction? (Answer: Two idiots, very slowly, very surely, just maybe realising that they might be falling in love.) Teacher!AU. KM de-anon.
Chapter: 4/?
A/N: Alternative titles considered for the section were ‘Where Friends are Derps’ and ‘Arthur’s Worst Morning Ever,’ but they lost out to something more mundane. I debated scrapping the piece altogether - but eh, it amuses me (shameless self-indulgence), and it serves as a reminder that Arthur and Alfred have lives outside of each other, especially at the moment (still). Think of it as the last ‘calm’ before the Alfred.
i. - xiii.
xiv. - xxiii.
xxiv. - xxviii.
*****
xxix. with friends like these
The weekend is noise. Francis is home most of the time; a new company’s doing something at the theatre where he works that leaves him twiddling his thumbs for a few days, clogging up the kitchen with fancy-sounding culinary experiments (on the Sunday morning he actually burns one. Arthur laughs at him until the poncy twat threatens to give away the strawberry shortcake he’d made to the neighbours as a goodwill gift. Eating one’s pride, Arthur had been forced to muse after he’d abruptly ceased all laughter, is a great deal easier to do when one can eat good shortcake along with it).
Sunday afternoon and Arthur digs out his old records to put on - Francis complains in the corner about how much space the dusty things take up (especially since Arthur has all the same songs on CD as well); Arthur ignores him until Hello Goodbye plays, at which point Francis grows too much to bear (“Arthur - must you?” “Yes. Piss off.”) and Arthur all but shoves him out the front door on a date with somebody. Anybody. Francis has no lack of takers, even last-minute. You say stop, I say go, go, go - there are plenty of idiots in the world.
Monday hops the frog home again to ribbet about some artsy-fartsy pretentious French film on the television (why must they defile the airwaves so?) while Arthur attempts to mark his students’ homework and then conduct a phone-call with his only sister - he gets revenge later when they order pizza, feeding the weird bits of topping he can’t recognise to the cats before dumping both fluffy bundles on his flatmate and watching the two immediately rip into each other and the man underneath.
They go out that evening - somehow, with Gilbert and Antonio tagging along although Arthur takes a swipe at both of the idiots’ heads within the first five minutes of them all being in the same club together and has to be restrained until Gilbert returns from the bar juggling a full cocktail jug, four glasses and what looks like an army of little paper umbrellas.
“…Amigo,” Antonio says after a few seconds, after he, Arthur and Francis have finished staring at the collection set on the table before them, clapping a conspiratorial hand on Gilbert’s shoulder, “I am sorry to break this to you in such a manner, but -”
“You are so gay.” Arthur’s response is flat as he pokes at one of the umbrellas on the table - Gilbert’s got to have brought back at least fifty of the damn things. Aside from poking out each others’ eyeballs, there’s really little reason for them to be there. “So, so much.”
Antonio just nods. “You miss only the glitter.”
Gilbert eyes both of them. “The awesome me doesn’t need to get this from the two guys who were all but eating each other for the first few months of me knowing them. And you,” Gilbert jabs a silencing finger at Francis, who has just opened his mouth to speak, “you just don’t say anything. Ever.”
Francis closes his mouth again, but none of them hide their smirks from Gilbert.
Arthur doesn’t recall much of the night after that. He drank a lot more, he knows that much, got up and danced where the dry smoke billowed out over the floor and the lights flashed green, red, white, bumped into Antonio there (smile), came back to the table and drank some more from time to time (umbrellas everywhere; Gilbert sat on one and shrieked like a girl), bumped into the others now and then. He saw Francis kissing a pretty girl one time, and the next time he saw Francis kissing another pretty girl, and he caught the tail-end of pretty girl one meeting pretty girl two and Francis getting a slap in the face. Gilbert hung off of Arthur and Arthur hung off a nearby chair and they both laughed at that, and later on Arthur saw Francis getting off with a pretty boy (cat’s eyes) at the bar instead. When the night had grown late, late, late or really fucking early (perspective, none of them had it) they’d somehow found each other and stumbled out of the club together - one night in one club, oh, where had their days of roaming gone - and Francis had been pouting with (purple, bruise-plum-purple, or maybe a bruise because Francis doesn’t put fruit on his face) lipstick on his cheek and Gilbert had still been laughing and Antonio had been warm and pondering strange things in Spanish as he’d stumbled into Arthur’s back (things that tripped and trailed and made Arthur think of sunny far-off oceans, endless sands stretching on under dream-blue sky with the water lap-lapping at his toes) - ‘Arthur,’ (roll the rs, oh) ‘the world is doing a spinny thing - is the world supposed to be doing a spinny thing?’ It had been raining, a fine drizzle that blurred the yellow-white streetlights and the club-lights flickering out onto the pavements, and Arthur had tilted his head up to the clouds and the stars and felt the droplets soak through his shirt, hit his skin, and felt - and felt -
Tuesday greets Arthur’s consciousness with the drumbeat of a hangover and what sounds like a pneumatic drill going off in his ear. He’s all tangled up with a lot of sheets, half a duvet and what feels like a large and heavy mutated octopus that has twice as many arms as usual and far too many pointy bits jabbing him in his stomach and shoulder and back - somewhat more used to the scenario than he’d like to be (certain bastards will insist on using him for a pillow) Arthur takes a few moments to work past his hungover state of first-thing-in-what-might-as-well-be-the-morning stupid and work out just which limbs in the tangled mess belong to him, checking both sets of limbs are still at least partially clothed (they are, thank God) and employing the use of motor skills straight after to wrap himself up more firmly in the duvet (it’s October and it’s cold), kicking the snoring piece of seafood attempting to deafen him off of where it’s attached to him and out of bed.
“Beschissener Hurensohn!!”
The obscene German following the thud informs him that the seafood is Gilbert.
“Arschloch,” Gilbert snarls, sits up on the floor with his hair all smushed-up and teeth white-sharp, “what the fuck was that for?!”
“Y’were snoring in my fucking ear, Beilschmidt,” Arthur slurs a little but kicks out again when Gilbert lays a cold hand on his ankle, not bothering to raise his head from the pillow he’s stubbornly burying his face into. His head hurts like bloody hell - it’s not his worst hangover ever, but it goes up in the records for being a memorable one. Gilbert’s grating voice isn’t helping in the slightest. “Now shut the fuck up, fuck off and let me sleep.”
“Jog on, Kirkland. If you think for one second that -”
“Let me rephrase.” Arthur raises his head at last (the world whirls uncomfortably and the wrongness of it all attempts to blearily set in) and glowers past his duvet-roll to where Gilbert’s sitting glaring at him on the floor, communicating the promise of a slow and lingering death with every thud in his aching skull. “Shut up and sod off before I gut you and feed your entrails to the cats.”
Gilbert just snorts. “You’re a grouchy bastard first thing, huh? Grouchier than usual, anyway.”
“Fuck off n’ die.” A short pause for consideration, in which Arthur drops his head again into softness and - and his pillow smells different than usual (maybe Francis had done the washing for once), lets his heavy eyelids droop once more. “...’The hell are you doing in here, ‘nyway?”
“Frankie and Toni nicked the other bed.”
Ugh. “We have sofas for you bastards.”
“The beds were closer, dummkopf,” Gilbert’s tone is mellower than it was - still inclined to the more disgruntled side of the scale, but more awake and still grating on Arthur’s headache. “Closer, comfier and less cat-infested. Last time I slept on one of your couches I woke up with back-ache and a cat on my head.”
“Good.” Arthur pulls the bed’s spare pillow over his head, curls into the dim, dark depths of drowsiness, summer-breeze fabric softener and what smells suspiciously like Francis’ aftershave. (Bastard needs to keep his spritzy crap out of Arthur’s bedroom.) “Now bugger off.”
Surprisingly, Gilbert actually buggers off. The complaints that start up in French and Spanish elsewhere in the flat a few minutes later announce just where Gilbert has buggered off to - Arthur tries, half-heartedly through the depths of half-sleep and the pillow over his head, to feel some sympathy for the duo beleaguered by Gilbert, but ultimately decides that it’s entirely too much effort and goes back to dreaming.
There’s always talking when he wakes again, once, twice - yelling, one of the cats yowling, the sounds of the chairs scraping in the kitchen -, easy to ignore and sleep through once more. The third time there’s the distant sound of the doorbell - and arguing, Spanish and French and German and English as the base, loud and annoyed and about coffee of all things so Arthur sighs and rises, sways a little in sleepiness and reaches out to grab the nearest t-shirt to hand without caring which one it is. He yanks it on and makes his way to the front door (has to orient himself when he misses the bedroom door first time first because clearly some bastard has moved it and there’s something wrong and annoying and niggling Arthur about that but he doesn’t quite get it because he’s still half-asleep and the doorbell is still ringing and his head still hurts fuck the world), muffling a yawn with one hand as he inwardly curses his two pain-in-the-arse houseguests (and bloody Francis) in the kitchen.
“Arthur! Boa tarde.”
And Gabriel dos Anjos is, inexplicably, at the door. (…Why…?) Awake and smiling and making the day seem warmer just by standing there, even though there’s a cool breeze in the corridor twining about Arthur’s ankles that distracts Arthur from noting the half-questioning, half-amused glance flicked at his torso.
“Boa ta-wait,” Arthur stops himself halfway through the greeting - ‘tarde’ is ‘afternoon.’ It can’t be - “What time is it?”
“2:42, by my watch.” When Arthur gapes Gabriel extends his wrist, digital numbers blinking at the befuddled Brit unforgivingly until Arthur groans, turns, and rests his forehead against the jamb of the door to try and make the world make sense again. His companion just laughs at him. “Never drinking again?”
“Never drinking again,” Arthur agrees (for the nth time), stepping back and gesturing vaguely for Gabriel to come inside the flat. The carpet is blessedly soft underfoot, Carabas’ paws (claws sheathed) just as soft as the cat slinks out of nowhere and casually walks over his master’s bare foot to greet Gabriel in the entryway, rubbing his head insistently against Gabriel’s leg until the Portuguese man crouches down to give him a stroke. Arthur looks down at him curiously, ponders the way dark curls slip down over Gabriel’s shoulder to bare the back of his neck and tries to think of the last time Gabriel had been in his flat. A party sometime - maybe last year? “I didn’t think you’d recall where I lived.” Never mind the fact he still has no idea what Gabriel is doing there. “Would you like something to drink?”
“Coffee, please, if you have it.” (Arthur’ll have it, certainly, if the idiots still making a racket in the kitchen have anything to say about it.) Gabriel rises once more, following after Arthur to the current origin of most of the noise in the flat and waving off the weak apologies Arthur tries - and fails - to mumble out about it. “Antonio texted me your address about an hour ago - he asked me to come pick him up.”
Arthur pauses at that, his hand on the kitchen door he’s pushing open and his eyes wide as he looks back at his friend. “…You know Antonio?”
Antonio, as ever, answers for himself.
“Hermano~!!”
A blur of tan and tomato-patterned boxer shorts shoves past Arthur as soon as the door’s open, leaps for Gabriel and buries the other man in a flail of limbs and babbled greetings that Arthur - just - manages to extricate himself from, backing up straight into a curious Gilbert’s chest.
“His bruder’s here?” Gilbert smells of coffee. Coffee and - Arthur’s stomach notes with a queasy lurch - bacon which means that he’d been allowed to cook (Francis won’t touch bacon first thing unless he’s that determined to keep Arthur away from heating implements, and Antonio just settles for eating all their fruit), which means that when Arthur turns around the kitchen is - undoubtedly - going to be a total mess, which explains why Francis had been helping make such a noise. Arthur thinks about the clean-up that’s always involved after one of Gilbert’s culinary experiments, and wonders why the world hates him so much this morning. “Hey, isn’t that-?”
“His brother?” …Oh. Oh damn - “He’s your brother?” Likely trauma is imminent, and Arthur has a horrible sinking feeling in his gut that just keeps on sinking when Gabriel emerges from the tangle of…well, Antonio, prying at the other man’s hands so Antonio is almost doing what can pass for an extremely enthusiastic hug rather than an outright chokehold around Gabriel’s neck. Behind Arthur, Gilbert just hoots. Arthur’s head hurts.
“Half,” Gabriel confirms in answer to the question, ignores the pouting on Antonio’s face and wraps his fingers in the Spaniard’s hair to try and yank the other off of him. “Unfortunately.”
“But -” Arthur says. Stutters. Stops. He’d known Antonio had a sibling, had known that when they’d started dating, but they’d never been introduced, never even been given a name. He’d tried to avoid taking about family with Gabriel, too, pleased to have a break from the stress of his relations with at least one friend, but - but - still-!
They’re teaching in the same school.
“Did no-one think it was a good idea to tell me any of this?” Out of friendship? Pity? Common courtesy?
When looked at, Gilbert just holds up his hands. “Don’t look at me, Kirkland; I didn’t know either. No-one tells me anything.” And then thinks about what he’s just said, before frowning and looking back at Francis, seated at the kitchen table with his head propped up on one hand. “Hey, how come no-one tells me anything?”
Francis, as usual, waves it off. (The coward’s way of saying ‘because you can’t keep your mouth shut.’) “I could tell you, cher, but then I’d have to kill you. Arthur,” for Arthur has switched his inquiring glower to the French git in hope of an answer (because like hell is Francis ever left out of the loop - the frog makes it his business to know everybody else’s business and then exploit it to its full potential), “I would’ve thought Antonio might have introduced you two before now.”
Gabriel looks confused at Arthur’s query, clearly puzzling through his co-worker’s reaction while still trying to pull Antonio (one of Antonio’s parents has to be a barnacle) off of him. (Antonio stubbornly clings on, true to form, not looking at any of them.) “Would you want to admit to having him for a brother?” (All present ignore Antonio’s whine of ‘hermaaanooo, you’re being mean’ again.) “…I wasn’t aware you and irmão were even that close. If anything, aren’t you both just loosely acquainted through Francis?”
Silence.
Gilbert starts laughing again, and Arthur elbows him sharply in the stomach.
What follows is…awkward, to say the least. Gilbert and Gabriel somehow block the escape routes for Antonio, who, sensing the shifts in the conversation going decidedly against him, stops clinging to his brother and attempts to make discreetly for the door. He’s foiled, of course, grabbed by Gabriel, and the two quickly descend into a rapid-fire conversation (argument) in Spanish, Portuguese, an unholy mixture of both that has Francis sigh, Gilbert whistle and Arthur groan, finally heading into the kitchen proper to hunt out some painkillers for his aching head. Arthur doesn’t speak either of the Latin languages well-enough to understand even a quarter of what the two brothers are saying, tuning out the noise until he finds an obnoxiously pink mug (one of Francis’ that Arthur’s sure he’d hidden at the very back of the cupboard until he could invent a good enough excuse for breaking the thing) shoved under his nose by a pale-white hand.
It smells of coffee. Black.
“What,” says Arthur.
“Breakfast,” says Gilbert, and just smirks at the glare he’s given for a) offering such a crappy excuse, and b) waving coffee (of all the evil things) in Arthur’s face. It’s an unusually subtle form of revenge for the hopelessly unsubtle Prussian-come-German - clearly, either Antonio or Francis had brewed the poison and Gilbert is shamelessly taking advantage of it. As always.
“It’s three o’ clock.”
“Afternoon tea?”
“With coffee?” Arthur fails to be impressed, and tries to nudge the hideous mug out of view. His morning’s bad enough without garish tableware burning through his eyes.
Gilbert just shoves the mug into his hand. “Kaffee und Kuchen, then. You’re out of loose-leaf, so it’s this or stale teabags, Kirkland.”
Arthur scowls at him, but - magnanimously, he feels - doesn’t drop the mug. (He doesn’t even kick Gilbert either for being a smug smirky sod, but that’s more due to the fact Arthur doesn’t have anything on his feet to make the blow actually hurt.)
He’s distracted from having to contemplate drinking the caffeinated tar by a sudden sharp exclamation from Gabriel, the cookery teacher turning expectant eyes on Arthur.
“Are you the one who burned down his bed last year?” Gabriel almost looks gleeful.
“Hermano!” Antonio interrupts - God, he’s a broken record this morning - , looking appropriately scandalised at his sibling’s delighted expression and rather disgruntled that they’ve switched back into English again. “And you ask why I didn’t introduce you?! You immediately side with him; you could at least try to be more sympathet-”
His brother ignores him, looking solely at Arthur. “Did you?”
Arthur colours, blossoming pink and setting down his coffee on the nearest bench. “…It was an accident?”
Antonio bristles at him - it’s possibly the most worked-up any of them have seen the Spaniard in over a year. “You hacked it into little pieces and burned it in my garden!”
It had burned beautifully.
Arthur shrugs. “The accident was you coming home before I could put anything else on to burn with it.”
“Malparido-!”
Antonio dives for Arthur. Gabriel goes to restrain his brother as Arthur, in turn, hastily moves behind the defensive blockade of Francis. Gilbert just tries to get out of the way of all of them, shooing a set of feline blue eyes peering around the kitchen doorframe before Louis can come into the chaos and get underfoot. (And they said households with pets were supposed to have lower levels of stress…)
Cats suitably shooed, Gilbert turns and regards the snarling tangle of people in the room with him again. “Hell hath no fury, huh?”
(Arthur’s cry of ‘just what the fuck do you mean by that, Beilschmidt?!’ comes out as the same time as Francis’ hissed ‘shut up, Gilbert’ - thankfully, Gilbert appears to cheerfully forgive both of them, seeing as how Antonio is still going for their throats, and swipes the coffee Arthur had abandoned earlier.)
Eventually - eventually - Gabriel succeeds in dragging Antonio from the room, half-shoved out as well by Francis (defending his kitchen, of course). Arthur doesn’t follow them to the door but hears Antonio start up another argument with his brother on the way out, stopping only to grab his discarded clothes of the night before and yank them on.
“You’d think,” Gilbert announces, sprawling out on one of the kitchen chairs and finishing off his - stolen - drink, “that he’d forget about the bed thing after a year. Didn’t he trash your car first, anyway?”
Arthur just settles for brooding as he fills up his kettle and switches it on to boil. Stale teabags or not, he’s having tea. “Just because he’s an idiot doesn’t mean he doesn’t have a temper.” He’d witnessed that first-hand, the year before - eight months of a ‘passion-filled’ relationship (Antonio’s wording, not Arthur’s), the last month being a slow-burning break-up. The bed had burned on Bonfire Night, a bright blaze for the kids in Antonio’s street to admire, a few days after Arthur had caught Antonio cheating on him again. (He’d been in the process of giving up smoking at the time - what could he say? He’d been tetchy, and Antonio had smiled a half-moon smile at him from the other side of the flames.) “And he drove it into a lamp-post.”
Arthur and Antonio hadn’t done ‘romance’ very well. Or competition, either.
The kettle clicks off and Arthur fills his teapot. Francis returns, frowning, and stands in the kitchen doorway looking meaningfully at Arthur’s back. Arthur can feel it.
Naturally, he ignores it. “You brought him here, frog.”
“Antonio…” Francis starts. Stops. Considers. Arthur fetches milk from the fridge. “’Tonio can be…a little strange, when it comes to his brother.”
“You don’t say.”
“Gabriel doesn’t return the favour, most of the time, so unless Antonio ventures information about his family himself…”
Milk poured into a new mug. “Nobody talks about it, got it.”
“He’s rather like you, in that regard.”
The fridge door slamming shut.
“The awesome me was left out of the loop too about Anjos, you realise.” Gilbert tries - and fails - to garner any sympathy. “I mean, it’s not like I had a crush on him -”
Francis is far too interested in the information. “Arthur liked him?”
“Half the staff has bets on it due to the rumours -”
“Please,” Arthur interrupts before Gilbert can go on, carefully pouring out his tea, “if the rumours are ever to be believed Kiku and Yao had a death-match battle in the middle of the school field a few years back and I’m banging that idiot Jones in the science cupboard every break-time.”
Silence.
Frowning, Arthur looks up at the other two.
Gilbert stares back at him. “You’re not doing it with Jones?”
“Good God - no!!”
“But he’s always hanging off of y-”
“I am not sleeping with Jones.” The slam of the teapot being put back down on the bench silences any further comments Gilbert might make - that, or the rather dire tone in Arthur’s voice. Beilschmidt isn’t a total idiot, hard as that is to believe sometimes.
“So who are you shacking up with?” Gilbert asks, and Arthur promptly retracts his thoughts about the supposed levels of Gilbert’s idiocy. Apparently, they’re limitless. “Because that’s sure as hell not your shirt, Kirkland - unless you’ve suddenly turned into a lover of French culture overnight?”
“Eh?” is Arthur’s oh-so-intelligent response (he blames lack of food, lack of tea, lack of painkillers and general stress), and he finally looks down at the t-shirt he’d yanked on for the first time that afternoon.
It’s white. White and grey and blue with a hint of pink, faded in the ‘fashionable’ way and covered in a looping French scrawl set beside the unmistakable silhouette of the Eiffel Tower.
Arthur colours once more, suddenly understanding the various looks he’d been given. “Francis -”
Francis, at another seat at the table, turns to Gilbert and affects a sigh. “Cher, did you have to tell him? I was waiting to see how long it took him to notice on his own.”
Gilbert shrugs, unrepentant, and Arthur scowls at both of them. Again. “Frog, what the hell were you doing dumping your clothes in my room?”
Silence. Again. Arthur’s almost beginning to hate the quiet as much as the stupid words it’s inevitably followed by.
And Francis smirks at him. “Mon petit, you’re not the most observant of creatures after you’ve just woken up, are you?”
“What?”
“Didn’t you notice your door was in a different place this morning?”
It -
Oh, bollocks.
Different clothes, different smells, different sheets.
Different layout.
Different room. Which meant that Francis and Antonio had been -
Ew.
“Beard-bastard, if you did anything in my bed apart from sleeping last night I’m going to kill you.”
Francis laughs at the proclamation but Arthur is quite, quite serious - if Francis has shagged anyone in Arthur’s bed no-one will ever find the frog’s corpse. There are rules.
God. His bed. His bed is full of frog germs. Frog and mosquito germs. Evil, crossbreeding frog and mosquito germs -
Arthur gives up. Up and in, accepting that his life has skipped the hand-basket en-route to Down Below and settled for flinging itself freefall into the flames. He abandons the kitchen and his companions to take refuge on one of the sofas in the living room, drawing his knees up to his chest and resting his head on his folded arms. Breathes - in, out - and feels a hand lightly touch the crown of his head.
“You forgot your tea.”
Francis.
(No rest for the wicked.)
“Sod off, frog.” Arthur irritably moves his head away from the other’s touch - but Francis persistently follows, setting down something on the nearby coffee table before taking a seat beside Arthur on the sofa, the cushions dipping under the Frenchman’s weight and his hand sliding down Arthur’s spine instead. Arthur looks up to glare at him. “Oi -”
“Drink your tea.” Arthur goes cross-eyed when Francis pokes him in the nose, Arthur uncurling from his huddle to swat the other’s finger away and being faced full-front with the insufferable smirk Francis has brought with him out of the kitchen. “Or should I tip it over your head, instead?”
“Do it and d-” Arthur blinks, distracted by the hand Francis waves to the coffee table, and the items upon it. “You brought me strawberries?” Half a punnet of them, leftover from Francis’ shortcake.
Francis chucks a foil-covered pack of paracetamol in his lap. “Your head still hurts from last night, yes? You shouldn’t take anything on an empty stomach.”
“How-”
“I’ve had to deal with enough of your godforsaken hangovers over the years, mon copain, to recognise when you have a headache.” Francis purses his lips when Arthur still looks somewhat suspiciously at the strawberries and tea. “I haven’t poisoned them, cher.”
Arthur grumbles under his breath (he wouldn’t put it past the frog, honestly), but pops two of the paracetamol caplets out of their tray and downs a mouthful of (lukewarm) tea to swallow them down. Gilbert saunters out of the kitchen with a tub of ice-cream he’s liberated from their freezer before Arthur has set his mug down again, snatching up the TV remote on his way past to steal the entire length of the other couch for himself and flick through the early-afternoon children’s cartoons.
Arthur debates tossing a cushion at him - but decides not to, not wanting to get ice-cream on the cushion. Or provoke another row of some sort. “Do make yourself at home.”
Gilbert’s indolent ‘ja’ in reply really sums up the mood for all three of them.
They watch cartoons together for a while like that, Gilbert steadily working his way through the ice-cream, Arthur drawing his legs back up onto the couch again and using Francis as a backrest. The colours on the screen are garish-bright but easy to ignore, Arthur drooping as the warm tea and paracetamol sets to work on his frazzled nerves, the sweetness of the strawberries he’d pulled onto his lap a pleasant distraction, red and yellow and green.
“We should go strawberry picking again, when the season rolls around,” Francis suggests, draws his fingers through Arthur’s hair, lazy petting that musses and smoothes the already messy strands again and again. As a token of thanks for bringing him tea Arthur doesn’t elbow him for the move, magnanimous until the very end. “Like we did when we were very small.”
“Mm,” Arthur hums, half-watching a singing monkey dance about on-screen, lazy and agreeable and not thinking as long as long as the petting continues because Francis is surprisingly comfortable when he’s not being a prat or a pervert - and then Arthur pauses, frowns, strawberry on his lips, realises what he’s said as memory hits. He can remember sunny days long, long ago, his brothers, his sister, a laughing blue-eyed boy and kicking that little brat in the shins. “Wait - no. You always stole all my bloody strawberries.”
“And you let a squirrel loose in my bedroom,” Francis leans over to take one of the last strawberries in the punnet Arthur is still holding - Arthur lets him have one and then moves the container away. “If we’re going to recount the many great travesties we’ve done to each other over the years -”
“We’d be here a fucking long time.” Gilbert interrupts them, waving his spoon in the air and drawing two sets of glares his way. “Mein Gott, you two are girls.”
Arthur snorts. “Says paper-umbrella man.”
“Oi, those umbrellas were awesome -”
Arthur gives in to temptation and tosses a cushion at him, hitting Gilbert in the shoulder. The German sulks and flops back into the sofa behind him, muttering what sounds suspiciously like ‘you just don’t have my awesome taste.’ Arthur rolls his eyes and ignores the muttering, turning back to the awful cartoons and - thoughtfully - pretending not to notice when Francis steals another strawberry again.
And, finally, it’s quiet.
Notes:
- We need a canon Portugal already. *quiet lament*
- Gilbert’s a little out with his suggestion that Arthur’s ‘meal’ should be Kaffee und Kuchen (coffee and bread/pastry/(simple) cake) - traditionally, the correct time for Kaffee und Kuchen is four o’ clock. Then again, Gilbert always struck me as an ‘eh, close enough’ type of guy, so three o’ clock probably suits him just fine. (There is never a bad time for cake. Or beer, in his case.) Afternoon tea, incidentally, is also traditionally taken at four (dinner, for the higher classes, being served at eight, and high tea for the lower classes around five, at the end of the working day) - although due to the modern work schedule, it’s nowhere near as common as it used to be.
- …Guys, don’t burn furniture without permission. I’m pretty sure that, at least in Britain, you’re supposed to either get the local council’s permission to burn large pieces (due to chemicals that may have been used in the construction(? - I’m not too clear on this myself, honestly), or order the usage of a skip to dump the piece. Arthur here only really got away without neighbours complaining/general reprimand due to the fact, on Bonfire Night, what’s one more blaze in the neighbourhood? And Antonio didn’t pursue the matter (much) afterwards.