anti-vinsky, an open post

[pillz]

leave me prompts or starters
or simply refer to this as an extremely important reference list
for our future adventures ◕‿◕✿

pothead better driver naps! hyperactive tree, furniture, and church climber cries about anything eerie not dangerous less hairgel!!

Comments

you learn a new thing about me today i'm terrible at prompts

[mellori]

in actuality you're perfect

[pillz]

Adam always sleeps like the dead. It's slightly concerning, sometimes, especially considering that there are people out there who would-- who have barged in on his property uninvited; people who blacked his eyes and sprained his arm to a grapefruit-jointed mess even when they caught him at his most alert. Day-to-day, his exhaustion is painful to watch, difficult to ignore. Joe doesn't know him well, because they really run in different circles, but in that short time, he's come to understand the following:

• 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

[mellori]

Adam's dreamed of being dead, the kind of dream that sticks with you long after you've woken up. Sometimes he wonders what the difference is, when he's working himself to the bone for his education and his independence and that work's squeezed out everything of himself that makes him Adam. But he keeps on doing it, because quitting would be the real dying. Because in spite of Robert Parrish, there are gentle things in the world, and magic, and Adam's seen both of them firsthand.

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.

[pillz]

Tense from secondhand panic, Joe casts around for an instant. His algebra book is still tented at the foot of the bed, calculator leaning against the cover; somehow the pens and papers actually made it over to Adam's crude desk setup.

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.

[mellori]

Adam's smart, but it still takes him a second to work out what happened. He fell asleep. He's not in any danger. Not immediate. He's always in danger. He's been used to that ever since he realized his father wasn't like other people's fathers.

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.

[pillz]

"Yeah, but making out teaches me algebra." Joe's hand tightens when the other boy comes back into himself. He's careful, but not delicate where Adam is concerned. Sometimes, a squeeze is as necessary as a gentle touch, and the one he administers, warm palm and slightly rough fingers, to Adam's ankle is exactly that. "You open your mouth, I open my mouth. Makes me feel smarter."

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."