League drunkdrabbles, batch 1
Title: League drunkdrabbles (1)
Fandom: League of Gentlemen
Characters: *Geoff, Mike, Brian *Benjamin and the Dentons *Iris and Judee *Les and Thom *Hilary, Sam, Maurice
Pairings: *Val/Benjamin *Les/Thom
Warnings: Incest. Twice, somehow.
Disclaimer: Not mine. Also, I'm sorry.
Author's Notes: Five drabbles done on two seperate occassions, after I had stumbled home (once shoeless) to vegetate in my bed. Spelling and grammar tweaked. Once again nobody cares because I write fic for things that nobody has ever heard of.
*Geoff, Mike Brian
Since Brian’s wife had left he was almost never turning up to work. Almost half of the time he was there, and God, as much as he wanted to, Mike couldn’t keep making excuses for him.
And Geoff was still making his jokes. Geoff had been taking the odd week off ‘sick’ for years. Geoff on his own had been manageable, even without the doctor’s note (that he could have had but refused to get, out of principal, because everything was always “fine, Mike! Stop pushing me!”), but with Brian too... Mike was failing as a supervisor and if he weren’t careful it’d be all three of them up a creek. A hat trick of failure- harsh but true.
Mike wished he could laugh with the other two. Geoff with his achingly painful, cutting, hate-filled notes that he would accidentally leave on the sinks in the toilets or would find slipped in with the reports left on his desk on a Friday afternoon, and it even happened sometimes where they’d meet by chance on the high street and Mike would ask what he’d been buying, casually, and there’d be the white carrier full of paracetamol, or sleeping tablets, or Stanley knife blades, and as he quietly took the bags or gave the notes back he wished he could laugh with Geoff. ‘You fell for that one!’ he choked out, shoulders shaking.
And Brian- he’d invite him over for tea (Cheryl always cooked too much anyway) or stay out drinking with him that bit longer (Cheryl didn’t mind that either) because he just dreaded the thought of him going home to a cold, empty house- but either way he’d be blindingly drunk and would end up speaking of her, and he’d laugh as he insisted that she hadn’t left him, and he’d laugh as he told him it was the circus that’d taken her, and he’d laugh as he insisted that he’d get her back.
Geoff was one thing, but if it could happen to Brian it could happen to Mike, and he was afraid.
*Benjamin and the Dentons
Val undressed him with her eyes. She watched him eat, she always seemed to be outside his door when he dressed after showering, she insisted on washing his clothes so he know she’d been handling his underwear. The way the girls looked at him told him that they knew something was going on, and the way Harvey treated him was just short of terrifying. The whole household behaved as if he and Val were having an affair- the whole household seemed to be in on it apart from him. That was unnerving in and of itself, but he’d had a dream once that he had been a part of it, and since then he’d taken to holding his door shut at night when he went to sleep by dragging the chest of drawers in front of it.
In the dream his room had seemed very much the same as it always was when he woke in the middle of the night- bar the candles. There had to be close to a hundred candles, illuminating the room and everyone in it with a guttering half-light. He was naked, and he couldn’t move. Not because he was restrained in any way (it wasn’t quite one of those sorts of dreams) but it felt more as though the will to do anything had leaked out of him. Val was riding him. She was naked too, of course. So were the twins, who watched from one side of the bed, nonplussed; as was Uncle Harvey, who stood back to one side. He held a paint brush that something dribbled down the side of, slowly, and he realised then that he had been painted on. He didn’t know what had been painted on him, but if it was words he couldn’t read them. He smelled wax, and iron.
When he woke the next morning he ached pretty much everywhere, and that was understandable, because the dream was awful, frightening. When he dressed and went down for breakfast the girls laughed. Val served up glasses of pulpy green juice that she said was nettle, cucumber and dandelion. Uncle Harvey shook his head.
*Iris and Judee
“Bills.”
There was a terse silence for a few seconds. Iris finally knew for certain why Judee never liked her picking the post up off the mat.
“Bills?”
Iris looked to the stack of letters in her hand. The first couple were catalogue reminders. The last three were red-topped utilities ones. Iris tried to keep her thoughts neutral when it came to Judee but felt most of the time that her life was wickedly fun to watch- better than Bold and the Beautiful. She felt rather excited and didn’t bother trying to hide it- Judee wasn’t going to get them bills paid.
She waved them about and Judee took them.
“...Oh,” she said, looking frightened.
Iris picked her duster back up and started buffing the hall mirror again.
“I expect your Eddie’ll pay all them, missis L.”
Judee’s reflection looked winded.
“Ah...” she ran a hand- the one that wasn’t holding a wad of final reminders- through her hair. “Ah... Yes. Yes he will.”
“Goodness, what would we do without husbands, eh?”
“Oh I... I don’t know. What would we do without-”
“I suppose we’d have to get jobs.” With a flourish Iris breathed on the glass and made a show of polishing it off with her own sleeve. “Course, I’ve already got a job...”
“Yes, well you’d barely manage without one-”
“Well, we’ve not once had Lisgoe’s lot in, so we must be doing alright. Me and Ron’ll only spend what we know we can afford to pay back...”
“Lisgoe?” asked Judee. She phrased the question airily but the look on her face was grave.
“Joseph Lisgoe. Does loans. Has a caravan in the field near the hospital.
“...Nelson’s Crescent?”
“That’s the one.”
*Les
“I’m goin’ now, dad,” he called from the hall. Les thought he heard him squeeze his feet into his trainers. He never undid the laces- he never would now, at this age. He listened for the quiet shuffling behind him over whatever vinyl it was he’d put on earlier and was meant to be listening to.
He heard the rustle of a coat being put on, waited through the hesitation and the double check of his pockets for money and keys, and then the creak and click of the door being opened and taken off the latch.
“Thom,” he called out. There was another moment of hesitation, where Les imagined his son waiting, standing there with the door open, half in and half out. He might have been trying to decide if he could get away with just leaving and pretending he hadn’t heard. But then there were the faint sounds of the door closing carefully, and the noise of the traffic disappeared, and the slow treading of trainers back down the hallway. The hall light silhouetted him as he appeared in the doorway.
“Yeah.”
“Come an’ give your dad a kiss,” he said, throwing his arms out with a sheepish grin.
It took a second for Thom to move out of the doorway, but when he did Les could see the pinkish tinge of his cheeks. As Thom bent down Les kissed him on the lips.
*Hilary
“How is your Missus, Hilary?”
As much as he wanted to, he couldn’t help himself panicking and the tying of the twine around the belly pork slowed. For Hilary, and, most likely, Sam, the atmosphere grew heavy and sickly as treacle.
As he reached for his scissors Hilary frowned.
“She’s fine.”
Sam probably shot him a look, and it probably would have frozen mercury, but Maurice smiled on, amicably.
“It’s just, you know, with her headaches and her colds and the like...”
“Yes.” Hilary tied a final knot and cut the string.
“Eunice is always going on about meeting her- your wife.”
Whatever it was he’d been trussing up was set aside and blindly, Hilary picked up another cut of what he presumed was belly pork.
“Yes.”
“Wives, eh?”