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anti-vinsky, an open post
leave me prompts or starters
or simply refer to this as an extremely important reference list
for our future adventures ◕‿◕✿
|
leave me prompts or starters
or simply refer to this as an extremely important reference list
for our future adventures ◕‿◕✿
sorry this is a clusterfuck of gross cute things
clutches face :3
But Joseph doesn't think it worked that well. Despite that he is an optimistic kind of kid, he knows some things about bad habits, or at least he thinks he does-- drinking yourself to a stupor of sodden loathing every night for six months is a habit that he imagines will be hard to break. BUT IT'S OK. He has more ideas. In a spectacularly organized fashion, he even made a list of his ideas.
(He wrote it on his arm. About a third of them are smudgy now, but he can still read them.)
Some of his ideas left Ronan's hair (stubble) smokey-smelling earlier today. The fireworks. Mostly sparklers, though in the interest of cardio, he got a few rockets and Ronan had run back and forth with the lighter out, sometimes barely missing the launch into the night sky. The park had been very pretty; Joseph had thought about trying to see if Ronan would nap there, but he doesn't know Gansey and the others or even Ronan very well yet and he didn't want to be intrusive, you know, separating them, when he still feels slightly out of place visiting Monmouth now and then. Everybody is worried about Ronan's sleep. Everybody is worried about Ronan in general.
Irish boy's eyes flick open, and Joseph asks, "How you feeling?" He scoots his butt down so he can put his head on the near end of Ronan's pillow, balancing the book on his belly.
theY'RE SO CUTE AND GROSS i love it
They're on opposite sides of Ronan's friend spectrum. Gansey is stability, days filled with magic and searching, Monmouth and loyalty, the sort of brotherhood bonds that can't ever be broken. Joseph is excitement, a kind of recklessness that's pure and carefree, eerie and optimistic, something new and fragile and fun.
Both of these are things he needs. What he doesn't need, he thinks, is Gansey's quiet concerned gazes and Joseph's list of ideas to fix him. No amount of talking or fireworks or stress management is going to make him better. He just needs them to stick around. To not leave or give up. That helps him more than they'll ever know. He will get better; he's just not ready to yet.
"What are you, my fucking therapist? I'm feeling bored." He takes the book from Joseph's stomach, flips through the first few pages, scrutinizing and doubtful. It all sounds like a load of bullshit. "I liked the fireworks better."
The book is put back where it belongs, balanced carefully on Joseph's belly. Ronan does it gently, just to show he's not mad, despite his words and tone.
I KNOW I KNOW I KNOW >%O
He also seems content to lie there three inches from Ronan's skin and accept a book on his tummy. "We can do more of those tomorrow," he says. "Before like nine. That kind of stuff is activating and you gotta be winding down right now, man. Bored's probably good. I'm telling you, I used to have the worst insomnia." He is pretty good at not seeming pedantic when he gives advice and presses Ronan with help, more enthusiastic than anything. He raises his arm, holds it over Ronan's head so he can read the items. "Can we do like one more thing before you hit the bottle?"is the list. He got all the way up to the bend of his elbow, increasingly misshapen from the bad angle of the writing, and from smudges. It's not the longest list Ronan has ever seen Joe write, at this point; the Notes app in his phone is egregious, and the margins on all his school papers are cramped with tiny copperplate letters. Sometimes he remembers to put check boxes next to them, but he tends to forget to actually mark off anything.
*without gagging
uGH
Honestly, it's better if he just doesn't sleep. The insomnia is a blessing.
He reads through the list, squinting to see if he can make out the part Joseph scribbled out. He can't, though, so he continues.
"Engine noises are just gonna turn me on," he says helpfully. Some of them near the end are so smudged and slanted that he has to tilt his head to read them, and even then he can barely make them out. "What the fuck is heat yoga? You know-- never mind. I don't want to do it."
He lets go of Joe's wrist. There's ink on his fingers from where he further smudged the letters. "Let's do movies, I guess. Or Alice. Unless you wanted to play masseuse." He says 'play masseuse' like he actually meant to say 'play doctor', and he grins into the dim light of the room.
tiem to barf
And then Joe instantly begins to look distracted. Not in a sexy way, either. He has an idea! And Ronan can tell, it's like in his brain the gerbil's wheel accelerated faster than his little legs could have caught up. So he stops thinking about Ronan's handsomeness, sitting up. "I know you're hitting on me," he announces, already turning away from what was definitely about to be a moment, "but we could totally do all three. And maybe that'll work. Dude." He leans over, hoists his backpack off the bed, and in a moment there's a laptop up, out, open, on, screen up.
"Look. Boom." He pulls Ronan's -- head, his coarse fingers slipping over the shaven bowl of his skull. He has the Alice in Wonderland movie on his computer. The 2010 one, with Mia Wasikowska and Johnny Depp in it. It's not a great retelling, and probably more likely to rupture Ronan's mind with its inaccuracies than soothe him with its familiarity, but Joe is excited at the prospect of his own genius, so. "Boom." Well at least it appears he's about to get a backrub out of it.
what fucking nerds >:I
That Ronan is still alive, but buried so deep beneath so much shit that he's likely never coming back. He just has to learn how to move forward instead. Until then, he's stuck. Though Joe is trying valiantly to get him unstuck.
Joe gets that look, and Ronan knows what it means immediately. Another idea. The kid is fucking full of them, always making lists so he won't forget. At least it's probably a better use of his time than, say, drinking himself to death. Though, maybe, not better than allowing their moment and letting Ronan make a move.
He turns his head when Joe pulls at it, staring at the laptop screen. Naturally, the first words out of his mouth are, "Oh, come on. This is the shitty version." Though, to be fair, Ronan will always prefer to have it read out loud than watch any retelling of it.
no subject
This is actually inadvisable sleep hygiene, in case the audience is wondering. If you're trying to wind down for the night, you should not be watching movies in bed, never mind with jumpy boys who swing haphazardly between the urge to touch your beautiful body and try Eastern philosophical techniques. That really isn't going to condition the appropriate responses to bed and bedtime.
But now Ronan has a Joe leg on either side of him for am armrest, and a forefinger wandering up the back of his neck. The clouds above the Disney castle glow at him expectantly from the screen. "You're really heavy," he says, squeezing Ronan with his thighs; somehow manages not to sound like he's complaining. "On a scale of zero to ten where ten is you could pass out right now, how tired are you."
no subject
Not that he actually minds staring at Johnny Depp's face. He just prefers Captain Jack over the Mad Hatter.
He allows Joe to place the laptop in his lap, to rearrange the both of them into something more suitable for movie-watching-back-rubbing combos. It's not uncomfortable, despite how bony and angled Joe is, starkly opposite of Ronan's own lightly muscled frame.
"Everybody's really heavy compared to you," he says, settling back against Joe, frowning at the Disney opening on the screen. His arms rest lazily along the other's legs, fingers curling slightly around the underneath of his knees, thumbs brushing over bone through the fabric of his pants.
"I dunno, like--" He squints thoughtfully, his expression visible in the screen of the laptop when it dims to black briefly. "A four."
no subject
A hand on his leg, hooking underneath, broad fingers warming him through the denim. Maybe Joe should think about the logistics and fallout before he does things like, you know, offer to give a beautiful boy a backrub while they're in between his thighs. But logistics and fallout are really hard to think about when he's on the go.
The Disney castle glitters at them. The shooting star sparks over the steeple. Joe slides his fingers up the back of Ronan's neck slowly, thumbing around the subtle bump of vertebrates, trying to remember what he was thinking about. Umm. Sleepiness numbers. Yes-- a subjective rating scale. He feels for the tension he assumes is corded somewhere in Ronan's musculature. "You used to sleep good, right?"
no subject
Maybe he should, though. Or, at least, maybe he should start staying still long enough for Joe to do it. Even if he doesn't let anybody else.
He used to sleep well enough. Back when his life was more or less perfect, and he lived on a sprawling farm of cattle and barns, with a Disney Princess mother that cooked breakfast every morning and a father who came and went, but always returned with the most amazing gifts. Back before he found his father's broken body behind the BMW early one morning. Before his dreams were more nightmares than anything else.
He hates sleeping now. He really does.
adding to cute things bc i have a need
I LOEV THIS UNCOMFORTABLY MUCH X(=
he obviously doesn't know that he's ever been here before. he doesn't recognize the pie shop, doesn't look twice at the apartment complex he used to live in. when people accidentally say hello to him, he just looks a bit pleased. his tattoos came out different, somehow. all of the flowers and the bones and birds still there, but the lines somehow look finer, the colors and shadows deeper, like the ink drawings you'd find inside a book of fairy stories instead of the flat, jagged tribalism he'd favored before.]
--monks of Tibet can do it. Like I saw this video, and there was legit steam rising from the blankets even though there was snow everywhere. It was so fucking cool, you know, some serious mind over matter. Are we there yet?
[kavinsky— joe, actually-- had insisted on the blindfold and filming it, this thing that gansey had said 'looks really nice' and is 'not far from this skiing lodge i christmassed at once.'
the recording is because joe has a plan to start a streaming video website called "eudtube dot com" among his seventy or eighty other working ideas to keep himself entertained here, distracted from missing his family, who he is apparently very close to. he started talking about monasteries because he noticed gansey was driving uphill for a long time, increasingly curious, restless, chatty, and he turns the lens of his phone toward the other boy now. response please.]
you learn a new thing about me today i'm terrible at prompts
in actuality you're perfect
- that Mr. Parrish is an asshole.
- that Adam might need the money from tutoring algebra and certainly benefits from the shitty phone that comes with the program duties, but he probably doesn't realistically have the time or energy.
- that sex probably isn't going to happen anytime soon, considering Adam's propensity to drop off into a coma, mouth slightly open, within ten minutes of his head touching the pillow, no matter how talented the person is he's making out with.
Thus, when he hears the phone buzzing on the nightstand, Joe pulls his face away from the back of Adam's neck. Half-asleep himself, he nonetheless sits up carefully as he can-- as quietly as he can, and reaches over the other boy's bare shoulder, picking up the device. It's a local number, but it isn't saved in the phone, so he hits the green kind of automatically, in time to hear Mr. Parrish's voice spill out tinny into the church room's sluggish air--"—keep me waiting, when your mother's been worried sick. Do you have any idea what I had to do to get this num--"
And he hangs up, just as automatically, thumb flattening on the red button. Joe glances at Adam, just in time to wince when he notices him begin to stir.
yells no but this is
It's his father's voice that stirs him from his sleep, making his stomach lurch as he pulls himself up. His heart's already hammering when his eyes snap open, scrabbling for the phone first, and Joe second, when he realizes it isn't where he left it.
Fuck. Fucking fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck.
The words beat in time with his heart. He can't even enjoy the few moments he usually does, between sleeping and waking, when he's curled warm against Joe's side and they're both breathing evenly and deep. Joe is one of the few quiet spaces in Henrietta that Adam is fighting desperately to protect, although he doesn't know whether he has the proper tools. Safe bet he doesn't, because he's only ever been good with cars that way.
"Shit," he says, just to hear it aloud in the lazy air.
He hasn't looked at Joe yet. His entire body is primed for flight.
no subject
Guilt stabs him abruptly in the gut. He should have left the phone to vibrate. He should have maybe turned off the vibrate, and that was all. He should have told Mr. Parrish to fuck off? That seems rude; he isn't sure that Adam would have liked that, even if some of his own friends are infamously rude.
Slowly, he sets the phone face-down on the surface of the bed. He pushes it with his fingers, slides it gently over to Adam, under the bridge of his bent leg, so that it eases reassuringly into the other boy's view. He notices the curve of Adam's back jolting up and down from the pace of the breaths crashing in and out of him. "Sorry, man," he says. "You just-- you seemed tired." And if it would've been another prospective client, or Aglionby, or what if, what if. There were a lot of reasons to pick up, but none of them turned out to be true, and he shouldn't have.
His fingers curl on top of the phone, and then he moves his palm away. Very slowly, he walks his hand over, just a few inches across the mattress, hesitantly hanging a hold around Adam's bare ankle.
no subject
The way that Joe talks about his family - it's never bragging, it just seems to come up naturally in conversation - that's the kind of thing Adam used to envision for himself, when he was small enough to hide under his bed successfully.
"It's fine," Adam tries out the words, seeing whether the millionth time will make the true. "Me sleeping isn't gonna teach you algebra."
He yawns, twisting himself onto his back but keeping his lower body still, so as not to disturb that hand on his ankle. His eyes are still puffy with sleep when he looks over at Joe, expression softening into something inscrutable. It's easier for him to be hard on himself when he isn't looking Joe in the face, for some reason.
"You stayed."
Not that it's unusual. But Adam was asleep. He can't imagine it was all that interesting.
no subject
He skims his thumb up the back of Adam's calf, a little bit suggestive, mostly affectionate. Still watching the other boy carefully, seeing the tension leak gradually out of his narrow shoulders and elegant face.
It's a terrible thing, Joseph thinks. No justice in it. Before they started tutoring, he hadn't been the intrusive type who would try and see, but in retrospect lately he's wondered how many times in freshman year that Adam had come in, favoring one side, and he hadn't noticed. How exhausted from shiftwork that he'd been in the mornings, when Joe -- like the rest of the Aglionby boys -- had complained about having only seven hours and a seven AM wake-up, after a bedtime pushed back because of a particularly compelling video game.
"I like your bed," he notes. He doesn't say, Your bed is nice but Adam might take it that way, and he realizes this the next instant. So he adds, "It smells like you."