fic: repetition: a commonly used rhetorical device (rpf au) (1/3)
repetition: a commonly used rhetorical device
rpf. my days are long & my nights i don’t remember. a new roommate, some illegal drugs, hypothetical murder(s), a whole lot of innuendo, and a threesome: in sum, much like rihanna they found love in a hopeless place (aka brooklyn). pseudo-new girl!AU. eddie redmayne/felicity jones, w. eddie redmayne/felicity jones/luke treadaway + others. 21,375 words.
notes: I HAVE NO DEFENSE FOR THIS!
portrait of the artist as described by subject of this hot mess of fic, basically. i saw Les Mis the other week and left the theater with a renewed love for this dude and then idek, who doesn't want a New Girl-esque AU with hot people of their choosing? and uh, needless to say, these are all lies, but it also deviated HUGELY from the new girl premise (i originally had eddie as schmidt and felicity as nick and luke as winston lol) into this clusterfuck of lengthy rpf! THE END.
look in my eyes and ask me what i’m thinking
i’ll tell you it’s you and only you
we are denying our hearts and untouched lips
NEW ORLEANS, Former Ghosts
1.
SEPTEMBER 18
Laidback MALE or FEMALE roommate needed ASAP!!!!!!!!!
One room available IMMEDIATELY! for rent, Brooklyn, blocks from Bushwick-Aberdeen station
Three (awesome) roommates included (both genders!) in rent (not utilities OR cable sry) and we’ll all be the best of freinds!
NO PETS allergies are bad
If interested/want to see pics email Luke -- ltreads@gmail.com
“What if I don’t want to be their friend, let alone their best friend,” Felicity asks.
“And did you? -- you did, you spelled friends wrong,” Eddie says, reading over Luke’s shoulder.
“‘I before E,’” Felicity adds.
“This could not read more unprofessional if you tried.”
“If they are truly the great folks we want to live with us a minor oversight of the English language shouldn’t put them off,” Luke says, scrolling through the other posted listings.
“It’d put me off,” Eddie says, not missing a beat.
“We’re to be flatmates! Not, not . . . spelling bee competitors! Teammates! You know -- ” He pauses, clicks over to a different tab. “Look. Look . . . at . . . that. Got a nibble already!”
“Ew, he wants to know how young the girl roommates are,” Felicity says, reading from the other side of Luke. “He wants to see pictures . . . of the youngest roommate?”
“Pedophiles would be all in for spelling errors,” Eddie says. Felicity nods her agreement, and Luke ignores the both of them.
2.
It’s a four bedroom “loft” apartment that was, at one point, a warehouse. The space isn’t entirely renovated; the bathroom is more fitting for a gym locker room than a residential space.
The revised rendition of history tells that Luke brought the three of them together. Actually, it was Harry -- Harry Lloyd their fourth and now former roommate.
Harry had been their fourth, but then he left.
Despite their origins, their shared history is New York. They were like their own British enclave in Brooklyn. They had all relocated to New York and unintentionally sought each other out. They knew each other before they arrived for whatever ex-pat reason they fashioned for themselves -- Eddie was going for his doctorate in art history at Columbia (they tease that he’ll be a student until he dies), Luke had a band and connections waiting for him (he still has a band but less connections and now he also tends bar to make ends meet), Felicity and Harry were expanding on a gap year (and then she expanded it even further, staying for a man (boy) even though there is no longer a man (boy)) -- and it has now reached a point where imagining the city without considering each other is an impossibility. Luke puking on the subway on the way home at almost 2 AM, Felicity’s never-ending obsession with street falafel for lunch, Eddie romanticizing Central Park the same way the movies do, the jazz club they found Harry passed out on the curb of, Felicity conning Eddie into going to the ballet with her, the time they attempted Times Square on New Year’s and wound up at an Irish pub in Midtown -- all of that, all of their habits tying them not just to the city but to each other.
Felicity misses Harry and makes a note to say it often, plaintive and like a child, like she’s blaming the both of them for his current absence.
Eddie sort of understands it. Harry had balanced them. In his own way. He kept Luke’s crazy ideas restrained, he kept Felicity happy, but Eddie? If anything he nearly made Eddie’s presence superfluous. You didn’t need two stand-up men in an apartment full of weirdos. You don’t need two calming balms, two mediators.
What Eddie’s getting though is that this long-held belief doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny. Because without Harry around, Eddie’s just as ridiculous as the other two.
Luke’s always everywhere all at once, one bad idea dovetailing into a worse one, never really considering anything as mundane as potential consequences.
The only way he’s ever been able to describe Felicity is temperamental and mercurial (Eddie called her that once and her whole face lit up at the word mercurial; “That makes me sound like a mermaid,” she had said, and he had frowned the sort of frown one makes out of surprise and confusion. “It really doesn’t,” he said).
Felicity is really into the American legal system at the moment. Or, well, she’s into the fictionalized version of the American legal system. She watches a lot of old Law and Order reruns, waxes poetic about Benjamin Bratt at the dinner table, and starts dropping a whole lot of legalese into conversations -- warranted or otherwise: she allegedly drank the last of the milk, might they approach the bench to discuss the venue for their Thursday night plans, the defense rests as to whether it was her turn to clean the bathroom or in fact Luke’s.
Actually, it’s not just the American legal system. Her new bent is to talk about murder. She talks about murder all the goddamn time. He thinks during the days when he’s at the library and Luke’s at work she sits around watching those awful shows on the Discovery Channel about forensics instead of looking for a job, or worse, those shows about the ladies who go around the bend and murder their spouses or boyfriends. Lately, she’s begun posing the prospect of murder as a choice he and Luke have to make.
“Would you rather . . . ” and nine times out of ten, Felicity will drag the word rather out second-by-second, making the game up as she goes along, inventing the horrific scenarios of their demise off the cuff, “lay down on a bed of nails with the AIDS virus on them or,” and she’ll drag the word or out as well, her mouth twisting into a mischievous grin as she tries to play off the expressions on their faces (which is why, he thinks, he usually goes all theatrical with his disgust while Luke tries to play at a poker face), “or,” she’ll reiterate, “wade through a swimming pool filled with dirty needles and used syringes, unsure of their origin.”
“These situations would never happen. Organically. In the wild,” Eddie will protest. And she’ll roll her eyes.
“We’re not in the wild. Pick one.”
“AIDS. But my point still stands.” She’ll smirk and then point to Luke.
“I’d take my chances with the needles.”
And Eddie.
Eddie is good at a great many things. Humility often ranks among them, but he’s also good at using the random assortment of groceries they’ve assembled cheaply to make dinner, and he’s good at making sure their rent check is in by the 10th (the absolute last day their landlord is willing to go without charging them extra; they learned this the hard way) and that they pay their cable bill because a Felicity without cable is a bored Felicity and that never ends well (another lesson learned the hard way; the scorch marks that remain below the microwave over the stove serve as testimony). He’s good at playing the adult and mildly successful at convincing Luke and Felicity to follow suit.
What he’s just straight piss-poor about? -- the things those poets Felicity loves so much call Romance, but that, as they say, is another story. Maybe.
3.
SEPTEMBER 21
After Harry left, their new fourth was going to be Rooney.
She was the first response to their posting that seemed at least most of the way to legitimate, if not completely off-putting, over the phone.
“She uses no inflection. She’s the spoken approximation of a tersely written email. Impossible to read,” Eddie had said as they awaited her arrival.
“Actually, I find a tersely written email incredibly easy to read,” Felicity had said, missing the point. “Fewer words,” she said.
Rooney arrived, and she was very rich and very skinny and Luke was very into all of that.
She was also slumming it, and they all knew it.
“Her current life story is the chorus to Pulp’s ‘Common People,’” Eddie had said when they convened for a Roommate Meeting that night. Luke laughed; Felicity didn’t.
Felicity was against Rooney moving in from the start.
“Rooney isn’t a first name, it’s a last name. Like Mickey Rooney, and he was so racist and such a mean landlord to Audrey Hepburn. I say no. I don’t trust her.”
So they go with Kat.
(Though, it must be noted, not necessarily because of Felicity’s argument).
“Oh my god,” Kat says. “You’re talking The King’s Speech up in here, sans stutters all around. At least, I’m assuming. Elocution lessons can happen later, if we’re willing.”
Kat braces her weight against the kitchen counter, her gaze traveling over the three of them assembled on the other side. It’s as though she’s the one interviewing them and not the other way around and for a beat Eddie wonders if the result here will be the three of them on the street while Kat takes over their former humble abode.
Kat nods her head though, mostly in approval.
“It’s like I’m moving in with a ginger Mark Darcy, or a Mick Jagger in a time machine, or . . . I don’t know what you are,” she says, pointing at Felicity. “A less mandibular-dominant Keira Knightley? Pippa Middleton without the ass? Julie Andrews without the cheer? A muskrat? The British-equivalent to a muskrat? I’m just saying, that face? Giving me mad muskrat vibes.”
“Meeting!” Felicity calls.
She grabs both Eddie and Luke by their respective sleeves and walks them toward the bathroom. It’s still steamy from Luke’s shower (he takes the longest showers Eddie has ever witnessed another man take; he’s convinced Luke wanks exclusively in there and that’s the hold-up; thank Christ they don’t have to pay for water).
“No,” Felicity says, crossing her arms over her chest.
“No?” Eddie repeats.
“Yes,” Luke says.
“You two only like her because . . . ” She pantomimes a huge pair of tits in front of her own, sort of juggling invisible breasts up and down.
Luke and Eddie both cock their heads a little and stare at first Felicity’s imaginary and then her own chest.
“She makes up for yours, love,” Luke says. Felicity punches him in the shoulder. When she looks at Eddie he holds his hands up in surrender and/or innocence while Luke yells a delayed, “Ouch.”
“So that’s it then? You’ve gone off me? Bored of my bits and need some new ones to ogle?”
“Yes,” Luke says, “Exactly. Got it in one.”
“She does have a large vocabulary,” Eddie says, a peace offering.
“We can certainly add that to her nice big pro list,” Luke says and Felicity rolls her eyes.
“Where are the hot boy candidates?” Felicity asks. “Where are they?” Luke braces Felicity by the shoulders.
“We go with Betsy Ross Captain American out there? That means we are not opening our home to maybe possible rapers and villains.”
“And it balances,” Eddie says, “Boy girl, girl boy.”
“And it balances!” Luke repeats. Felicity scowls.
“We can put it to a vote, but I think you know where the odds rest, Miz Jones. But just think,” Luke says. “You’ll finally have someone to sync your cycle and share tampons with, or whatever it is you girls do.”
“Murder you,” she says and walks away.
Kat’s . . . a force of nature. She’s not particularly neat (and that had been Eddie’s biggest hope and New Roommate Criteria -- that they be neat, that they clean up after themselves for once and not leave him a sink full of used mugs and bowls with caked on soup or cereal or cheap ramen noodles), but she’s nowhere near as bad as Luke, nor as lazy as Felicity, so it is a slight step up.
And like his other roommates (and, well, himself, if he’s being honest), she also doesn’t shut up.
“When do we have tea and crumpets, eh?” she asks during her first week, breaking out a truly terrible Cockney accent for what he thinks is the fifth time that day.
“Never,” Felicity says, glaring before turning back to the sink.
It might be the new female presence in the apartment or one of those Animal Planet-like principles (a new lioness enters the den, threatening the status enjoyed by the former! claws out!), but Felicity has been a lot more amenable to household chores. He wonders how much of it is her wanting to be in their good graces (alright, his good graces, Luke doesn’t notice a blessed thing that happens in their apartment unless it’s balanced on his cock) or how much is her wanting to one-up Kat preemptively. He supposes the latter, but after dinner that night Eddie had succeeded in browbeating her into washing the dishes (though this time she drove a bargain, finally agreeing so long as he would make dinner -- a real dinner, not oatmeal or one of those frozen pizzas Felicity lives off of or leftovers from takeaway the night before -- she’d scrub up).
Kat seems to be playing at an opposite game, one of friendship rather than enmity. Kat tries, admirably, to make Felicity her best friend those first couple weeks, either purposefully misreading Felicity’s disgruntled social cues or electively ignoring them.
It’s like watching a golden retriever try to befriend a sloth.
“I am not a sloth,” Felicity says when Eddie tells her this. “There is nothing sloth-like about me in the slightest.” He looks at her doubtfully. “I like to sleep, sure. But. But, sloths are ugly.”
“Then you can be the prettiest, laziest sloth in all the jungle.”
“And I’ll befriend a tiger and a jaguar and they’ll eat your smug red face right off.”
He waves her off. “You’re too lazy for new friends.”
Felicity doesn’t say anything at first, namely because it’s true.
“That’s not true,” she finally says. “I just don’t have the room for more. You and Luke take up far too much of me.”
Kat’s first night there Luke had tried, patiently, to explain Felicity to Kat.
“She’s rude, strange, and unemployed. But we keep her.”
Felicity had frowned. “I’m not your bloody pet.”
Eddie smirked. “It’s cute that you think that.” To Kat he said, “She’s like a surly house cat we took in off the street.”
“Though thankfully not incontinent,” Luke added.
Felicity glared at the both of them, her head swiveling back and forth. “You don’t find house cats on the street. You find strays,” she said to Eddie like she found him to be the dumbest human alive.
He shrugged. “You ran away from your last home.”
“So we abducted you,” Luke said.
Felicity’s face had scrunched up and Eddie thought in that moment she looked more rodent-like than feline.
But they always did this with her -- about her would probably be the better phrasing. They explained her presence away like she was an unwanted hassle they selflessly took on.
Felicity thinks that’s what you call a defense mechanism, and has told them as much once.
She said it was because they liked her.
He gets that. They do like her.
And sometimes, they really like her.
They really, really like her.
4.
AN INTERLUDE, Felicity:
First, she thinks, a confession: she does not dislike Kat all that much. Does she resent her presence? Sure. Her presence means a whole lot of bad things that Felicity works hard not to consider.
Bad things like: Harry is gone, and she misses him.
Bad things like: she is no longer their only girl.
That’s the silliest one. She’s public about missing Harry, they all are. It’s a bit like sending a beloved brother off to war or college or somewhere terrible where you know he is being changed without your presence or consent and that, she thinks, is terrible. Truly the worst. Not only has he gone, but should he return, he would not be the same.
(Felicity does not know this of herself -- of course not, if she did her own inner narration would follow a decidedly different path -- but she forgets to consider herself in these same terms. That maybe Harry is not the only one who will change, but that she might and will and has as well).
But the other bad thing, that’s just plain embarrassing. She fights hard not to admit, aloud or to herself, that she needs Luke and Eddie to need her. No, not just need her. Need only her.
Kat unsettles all that. That’s what Felicity thinks.
She also upends their habits, the small rituals they have built up over the last couple years of shared living have established. She doesn’t care for Indian and rearranges their takeaway schedule to accommodate her appetite. She takes too long in the shower, rivaling Luke for who can use the most hot water, and by the time Felicity gets to use it all that’s left is a tepid, low-pressure stream. Before Kat, that never would have happened. Luke doesn’t shower in the morning, his schedule requiring him to be at the bar by 3 at the earliest, and Eddie is conscientious. He’s conscientious without expecting them to be, and that, she thinks, means he’s a good person. He’s a good person because he used to leave her enough hot water.
Kat’s the worst.
On a Thursday night Kat takes over the coffee table in front of the television with a whole assortment of nail varnish. Luke’s at the bar and Eddie’s still on campus, the fall term still early and he’s still disciplined. So Felicity joins her. She turns on Millionaire Matchmaker and she joins her.
“This show’s just ridic,” Kat says, drawling her words out, holding up two different bottles of similar looking glitter flakes.
“This show is amazing,” Felicity protests, unsure if Kat was insulting it or not. Eddie would never insult this show. In fact, he’s the reason she’s hooked on the show in the first place.
“So,” Kat says after a long awkward pause. Felicity looks at her blankly. “Are you . . . with anyone? What’s the sitch, Desperate Housewife Felicity Huffman?”
“I,” Felicity says slowly, “am not with anyone. At present.”
“‘At present,’” Kat repeats in a British accent and then snorts. Felicity trains her gaze on the television and Patty trying to help a deep-fried personal injury lawyer from Tampa find the former stripper of his dreams. “And Luke and Eddie?”
There’s the bad thing right there. There it is.
“Luke and Eddie are . . . Luke and Eddie.” Kat’s looking at Felicity confused. “They’re nobody.”
“Girl. Friend.” Kat leans back against the couch, waving her wet nails in front of her face, willing them to dry. “They are the opposite of nobody. Like, get me a pass to that rodeo, am I right? I mean, I guess with Eddie you’d have to be down with the ginger thing, and a lot of people aren’t, but that’s prejudice, right?” Kat picks at the side of her thumbnail and scowls.
Felicity doesn’t say anything. She just sits there, her posture ramrod straight, her hands still flat on the coffee table, nails unpainted.
“If I made it my personal mission, I could totally bag Luke, right? Right. He’s just . . . how do you live with that, man? It’s that whole Downton Abbey stiff upper lip thing, that it? I mean, that is a thing?” Kat shakes her hand again in the air, trying to make her nails dry faster. “I guess I’d settle for Eddie though, push came to shove.”
“Settle?” Felicity hears herself say, like it’s a word she just now learned.
She finds herself offended, and only partly on his behalf.
So that’d be another bad thing to add to the list.
5.
After Harry left, Luke had taken to taking over the oversized leather couch, all sprawled out, all legs and hair, while he’d pretend to pick at his guitar while really just watching old episodes of Gallery Girls with Eddie and Felicity.
(When questioned about the oversized leather couch, Luke claims squatter’s rights, which none of them really think is a thing, but Luke had been the one to get the couch, haggle down the price, and ensure its delivery, so that makes his possession a hard thing to argue against).
That left the smaller couch for Felicity and Eddie (or the big chair in the corner, but that’s The Reading Chair and you can’t see the TV from it, and the lightbulb in the lamp next to the chair blew out around three weeks ago, so it now just looks like a shady timeout corner for the misbehaved) (or the floor, which Felicity sometimes spreads herself out on in weird yoga poses Eddie tries not to think about). And the small couch is fine. It has a better view of the TV and it’s closer to the fridge and closer to the front door in case there’s a fire and they need to escape (but being close to the fridge means you’re constantly The Fetcher of the Drinks and if there was ever a front door-entering intruder they’d be the first in the line of attack, so the cons more or less balance the pros).
But it works.
Even though most of the time he and Felicity duel it out for the bulk of the territory (she puts up a good fight despite the fact she’s almost a foot shorter than he is) and even though most of the time she winds up curled against his side, her legs flopped over the end of the couch and his own stretched out long in front of them onto the coffee table, avoiding the minefield of empty and filled glasses and mugs alike. She’s like a mischievous lapdog in that sense, silently demanding his attention, her body wriggling in beside his, her hair fanning out over his shoulder and brushing his chin, claiming that territory as hers. Sometimes she’ll tilt her head up to him and ask him dumb questions -- the rate of her questioning seemingly directly correlated with whether he likes a show and she does not (he had to quit watching Breaking Bad with her after they got into an explosive fight about the ethics of dealing meth and, well, murder and he missed most of the season finale), or if it’s the news. Her choice of understanding of world events both baffles and mystifies him.
(For example, she knew every bloody detail there was to know about the Greek economic crisis and Whitney Houston’s death and the conflict in Syria but nothing of Prince William’s marriage to Kate Middleton or the American presidential election or even who Paul Ryan was).
He never touches her though. Not when she’s curled up with him like that and not with his hands. She doesn’t touch him either, but he always silently makes that space for her, under his arm and against his chest, and that keeps things normal somehow.
Kat changes all of that. There’s not enough room for four anymore. There’s not that understanding that some things in Apartment 4D go without comment.
(He knows that Felicity does the same sort of thing with Luke. Which always served as a justification in his mind.
She gets up in his space, but Luke gives as good as he gets.
He’s not like Eddie.
He doesn’t go still at first and he doesn’t question any of it -- he just throws his body right in the path of hers).
6.
SEPTEMBER 30
Most free nights are spent at the bar where Luke works. The place doesn’t even have a name -- it’s just called The Bar, like the owners had either been that lazy, that drunk, or that full of themselves that people would know you meant their bar when you said you were going to The Bar.
He tests out a lot of new (free) drinks with Eddie and Felicity as his tasters.
“What is this?” Felicity asks, eyeing the tumbler, swirling the ice a little.
“Blood orange Manhattans, my friends.” Luke leans against the bar, a towel draped over his shoulder and his shirtsleeves rolled. It’s a slow night, but since the summer ended most nights have been pretty dead at The Bar. “Fresh-squeezed blood orange juice -- don’t scowl, Fee --, some bourbon, er, sweet vermouth, and bitters.”
Eddie takes a larger than advised gulp and Felicity watches him closely. He sucks in a harsh breath as he swallows.
“That’s . . . wow.”
“A good wow or a bad wow -- which is it then?”
“It’s a, it’s a wow.”
Felicity, without prelude, slams back the better part of her glass.
“Jesus,” she says, clutching her chest. “Christ, that burns.”
Luke looks between the two of them, disgusted and disappointed. “Well fucking enjoy, that’s all you’re getting out of me tonight.”
Eddie rolls his eyes and ten minutes later there are two pints on the bar in front of him and Felicity.
They wait for Luke to close up before heading home. It’s a balmy night, warm for September, and Eddie’s sweaty already. Sweaty and drunk.
The second Luke turns the key he starts walking. Walking and talking -- another thing that happens most nights. The brief walk from The Bar to their apartment has been host of some of the greater conversations shared among the three of them.
(The one thing they are never allowed to talk about is how they’re getting kinda old for this shit. By “this shit,” he means the constant fuck-ups, the hangovers four out of seven mornings per week. The unemployment. The revolving door of part-time employment.
The one part they definitely don’t mention is the apartment -- living like this, collegiate, sloppy, no ownership and no responsibility).
Felicity keeps grabbing at Eddie's wrist to make him slow down and walk with her. And he does.
Luke doesn’t get too far ahead of them, needing an audience for whatever he’s rambling about (the new bartender at The Bar, Aubrey, who Luke says frightens him) and Felicity doesn’t let go of his wrist, his skin damp with sweat under her fingers but she doesn’t seem to mind. She knocks into him at random, her gait unsteady in her heels, and it smells like rain, the streetlights hazy in the humidity.
When they reach their building, Luke freezes suddenly. His posture slumps that much more, his shoulders dropped. Eddie looks at Luke expectantly.
“So the band’s kaput. Lost our goddamn lead singer. Isn’t life fucking grand,” and then he pushes the front door open.
“Eddie can sing,” Felicity says lazy, dropping down into a chair at the kitchen table, kicking her heels off. “He can be in your band.”
“How do you know?” Eddie leans against the kitchen counter and twists a bottle of water open.
“That you could be in a band? Frankly, I don’t. I don’t know if you possess the requisite . . . showmanship. The peacockery to befit the stage.”
“Not a word. And not what I meant.”
She shrugs small, practically imperceptible. “You sing in the shower.”
“You listen to me in the shower?”
“You really belt those show tunes, my friend. And to be fair, my bedroom is loo-adjacent real estate. I have a front row seat for your performance.”
He cocks his head to the side. “And who would you be then?”
“Who would I be where.”
“In Luke’s little band of misfits.”
She parts her thighs, just barely but enough for him to notice.
“A dedicated groupie.” He doesn’t mean to, but he stares at her. Her and her legs. Her and her slightly spread legs.
“Do I finally get to weigh in? About my own band, I might add?” Luke asks.
Felicity gestures magnanimously towards Luke. “The floor is yours.”
7.
OCTOBER 4
Romola is to come to dinner.
Eddie has known Romola for as long as he can remember. He met her back in London, when he was still at university, and she was all blonde and smarts and he loved her for all of three days before her realized he wasn’t the sort she would ever love. Not like that. Now, Romola is a journalist working for the BBC syndicate in New York. And now, she is to come to dinner.
(Felicity is prickly when Eddie tells her Romola is expected, which Eddie finds odd, because Romola is lovely, and sometimes Felicity can be lovely as well.
She’s lovely in strange, unexpected ways. How she knows and stores information and how that makes her at times seem considerate and how she tries to hide that part of herself; that she knows he likes conversation in the morning so she’ll get up and sit with him over breakfast even though there is no godly reason she should be out of bed before nine. That she won’t watch certain episodes of television or films without him. She’ll text him strange odd messages, overheard tidbits of conversation that become hilarious nonsense out of context. She’ll buy him that eggnog-flavored frozen yogurt she finds absolutely repellent, and sometimes she’ll do his laundry if he leaves it out, his clothes and sheets smelling a bit like her).
“Romola is an adult,” Felicity says. “Like, a real person.”
“We’re all real people. We’re all adults,” Eddie says, distracted, while he fills the ice trays he found empty in the freezer. Surprise, surprise.
“Yeah, like number-age-wise, but not, you know, ambition-career-bank-account-credit-score-wise.”
“Speak for yourself,” he grumbles. “And since you mentioned it -- it is time: get a goddamned job, Fee.”
She snorts inelegantly and drops back onto the couch. All he can see are the soles of her bare feet braced on the arm of their couch.
“I’m living off the kindness of strangers. I am Blanche DuBois.”
He points a wooden spoon in her direction even though she can’t see him. “I am no longer a stranger.”
“Nor particularly kind,” she says. “But you are strange.” She pauses and then clears her throat. “Would you rather,” she starts and Eddie groans, “die Macaulay Culkin-style in My Girl with all the bees and no EPI pen, orrrrrrr -- ”
“Whatever the or is. No bees.”
“You don’t know what the or is. The or could be worse.”
“What’s the or?”
“Ummmmmm. You drown. Slowly. In the New York sewage system, choking on the city’s piss and shit and little tiny rat bones.”
“Fuck off. The bees.”
“Told you there were worse things than the bees.”
“Which would you pick?” he asks over the running faucet while he rinses some arugula. Felicity had made fun of him at the little market a block over when he picked it out. “Oh, she gets the fancy lettuce, does she?” That was what she had said and he had told her to piss off but she just laughed that high-pitched giggle of hers, like she knew something she shouldn’t know when really she knew nothing at all.
“I don’t pick. I’m the scheming murderess and I never die.”
She pauses again and he stirs the sauce he has simmering on the stove. He can see her head pop up out of the corner of his vision. She’s wearing one his sweaters, one of the ones with the patches on the elbows, but the arms are too long for hers and the patches are down almost near her wrists.
“You think you could kill someone through sex?” she asks, Non Sequiturs by Felicity Jones.
He turns to look at her, the spoon no longer moving in the sauce, his face a crumpled expression of exasperated confusion. “What? Like you fuck him to death?”
“Yeah. Though I feel that’d require a lot, a lot of -- exertion.”
“Not if he had a bad heart. Or you ice-picked him in the throat, like in that movie.”
“That’s cheating.”
“You’d leave behind a lot of DNA at the scene.”
“That’s why it’d have to look accidental. Like he just couldn’t handle it.”
He bursts out laughing.
“I am so serious right now!” she says but she’s smiling and it comes out sounding more like a squeal.
“Serious as a sex-induced heart attack?”
She starts laughing too, her knees drawn into her chest and she’s all but drowning in that sweater she must have found draped over the couch or something. She’s not the greatest with boundaries, but he can’t imagine her snagging his clothes from his room without asking.
“I need to do some research,” she says, and she reaches for the closed laptop on the coffee table -- his laptop, in fact.
“Thank god,” he says, teasing, turning back to the stove, “I thought you’d want a live experiment.”
She looks at him over his laptop screen as it comes< back to life, and without any trace of irony she says, “You’re too young and spry. I’d most likely die first.”
He can feel his jaw go a little slack as he looks over at her, but before he can respond -- “My God, Redmayne, your internet viewing habits . . . ”
“Don’t look at my browser history! That’s private!”
“I’m not!” She gestures at the screen. “You left all the tabs open!”
“Don’t use my laptop then!”
She ignores him. “A recipe for coq au vin,” she catalogs, “Ambitious. A pilates website . . . ab routine? I had no idea the depth of your vanity. A Pandora station set to . . . Katy Perry’s ‘Teenage Dream.’ Oh my god -- ”
“You shut that laptop right now. You shut it now.”
“This is, like, a peek into the private psyche of one Mr. Edward Redmayne,” she laughs. “The Met schedule, meh, boring. A wiki page on Mark Rothko? Really? I thought you were smarter than that! You know everything. Jesus, you ever close a tab -- oh my fucking god, what.”
“Close the laptop. Just -- close it.”
“‘Jam It All The Way Up My Azz’-- spelled with two zeds -- ‘Part 3,’ oh my god, seriously.” She can’t stop laughing. She hits play and after a beat over-the-top moans fill the apartment. Suddenly there’s the sound of slapping ( . . . or spanking?). He stands frozen in the kitchen.
“Jesus Christ, Eddie, this is filthy,” she says with equal parts admonishment and respect.
He still has the wooden spoon in his hand when he comes around to her on the couch. The cuffs of his sweater have rolled over her knuckles and she has both hands clutched over her mouth, the sweater pressed against her face, in glee -- and something else, her cheeks all hot and pink.
“Turn it off,” he says over her, and she looks up at him with those big eyes and on the screen some porn star keeps saying, "ohhhhhh, yeahhhhhh, fuck my ass, fuck my ass so good,” accompanied by a whole lot of flesh slapping against flesh -- and a hand spanking said fucked ass. Felicity’s eyes drift to the spoon and widen a little more, her amusement at all this all the more evident, but still colored by that something extra. Like she’s excited, which . . . no.
“Are you going to spank me with that?” she asks in a dramatically husky voice, her idea of what porn stars sound like apparently.
He’s supposed to play that off. He’s pretty sure he’s supposed to just play off that comment and parry it into some half-hearted defense of his own porny predilections, but looking at her his mouth feels dry and anything he might want to say would be wrong. A weird, tense moment of silence stretches between them, the both of them watching each other rather than his laptop, like they’re playing at some high stakes game of chicken, a real life rendering of her incessant Would You Rathers.
“Use your own computer,” he finally says. He tries to sound menacing but he fails, and the spoon in his hand just makes him look like an angry contestant on Top Chef. The woman on his laptop is wailing, “it’s so big!” The guy spanks her again. Felicity looks on the verge of giggling.
“Don’t be so cross. I will gladly share my internet history with you!” she says, her arms stretched out like she’s an open book. “You show me yours, I’ll show you mine. That’s how it works. No . . . anal domination happening on mine though, hate to disappoint.”
“Too mundane?” he asks as he stalks back to the kitchen.
“Nah, just. Bum stuff -- not my thing.”
His back turned to her and it hits him how ridiculous this conversation is. “I am done with this conversation with -- ”
“Are you offended I’m not into anal?” She worries the bottom of her lip faux-innocently and from the sounds of it, their third party with the cock jammed up her azz (why, of all the videos, did he pick that title?) is coming.
“I’m not into -- ”
“This video begs to differ.”
He whirls around to face her. His mouth is still dry and her face is still pink and that fucking video is still playing. “I need to get dinner ready.”
“Fine,” she sighs. She slowly shuts the laptop with the video still playing, the woman on-screen cut off as she yells please!.
He dumps the arugula into a bowl and starts shaving a block of parmesan cheese, Felicity eerily quiet and still on the couch.
And then --
“Do you watch that out here?” She asks the question innocuously enough, which puts him on edge, but when he looks at her she’s not even looking at him. She’s got this weird faraway glazed look to her.
“What? No. What? Why?”
She doesn’t answer him but she suddenly leaps up, his sweater falling over her thighs, skinny in a pair of yoga pants (even though she definitely didn’t do any yoga today; she has the schedule of a slug).
“I need to get ready, bye.”
So, in truth --
There’s always been a weird sexualized bent to his relationship with Felicity.
Okay, that’s not entirely true. But the second day of living with her he was treated to the operatic solo that resulted from her getting fucked by her artist boyfriend.
It wasn’t even that she was that loud with him; the walls were just that thin.
And he was paying that much attention.
Romola comes alone, comes late, and she doesn’t stay for long.
Once Kat gets wind of the fact Romola works in television at the BBC, she spends the entire night trying to pick her brain, insistent that Romola does in fact know Matt Lauer and is withholding the truth about him for personal reasons. Felicity and Luke behave, for the most part -- Luke texts throughout dinner while Felicity just sits there and chews quietly, pushing her dinner around her plate with her fork.
He’s not sure if it’s him or if it’s her that keeps sneaking glances at the other, but every time he does, she either smirks right back at him or looks away quickly. He doesn’t know what that’s all about. What he does know is that a quiet Felicity is generally a Felicity that spills trouble in her wake, so he waits. The entire dinner he spends on edge, just waiting for her to drop whatever bomb she has up her sleeve (it’ll be the anal porn, it’ll definitely be the anal porn, and he’ll have to explain himself, and what a dumb thing to feel embarrassed about -- pornography! he’s a man! a grown man! -- but he gets it: it’s not the porn itself, it’s not the fact he watches the porn -- it’s the fact Felicity knows all the intimate details about it. About him, and the idea of explaining, of explaining her as she relates to him, as he relates to her, that’s what he finds he dreads more than anything).
But nothing happens. Felicity passes the dinner quietly, draining a bottle of red on her own, and when Romola begs off, claiming work (and maybe it is work, but he knows about Dominic and he knows Dominic is a thing that can fall under the heading of work), Felicity rises to clear the table.
Eddie finds her at the sink after he walks Romola to the door. She’s rinsing their plates and Eddie arches an eyebrow. He can count on one hand -- fuck, one finger -- the number of times Felicity has done the dishes of her own volition. And that had been the time she had down the wash and ruined half a dozen of his button-ups.
“What a wonderful dinner party, darling, just the very most,” she says, like not only the dinner was fabulous but managed to transport them back to the 1920s.
Eddie snatches up the collection of empty wine bottles and drops them into the bin with a clatter.
“So where’s the body then?” he asks her. She looks at him confused over her shoulder. She’s standing flat-footed in her stockings, the sleeves of her dress rolled up, and Eddie kicks her boots out of the way, already envisioning one or the both of them tripping and destroying what few dishes still remain to their name.
“The body,” she says.
“I can only assume there is a brutally murdered, just, absolutely mutilated body hidden somewhere in this apartment. My bedroom, I’d guess?”
“Why am I stashing bodies in your bedroom?”
“I can’t think of a single other reason why you’d be doing that,” he says, nodding towards her and the dishwater and the suds that have clung to her elbow.
“I’m being nice!” she shouts at him. “This is what nice people do!”
He can’t fight a smile while he looks down at the assembled leftovers on the counter. She washes in silence while he handles the rest of the kitchen, humming that Bruno Mars song she hates under his breath as he works.
“Come dry,” she says to him, and he does. He starts singing that one Taylor Swift song quietly, almost under his breath, and he can feel her glaring at him. It makes his smile deepen, even more when she says, “In silence.”
He complies: they work side-by-side in silence. She finishes before he does, drains the sink, a grin starting as she looks at him and all that’s left to dry. She doesn’t move. She just stands there, watching him, watching him scrub the already damp towel over a plate, into a glass, a fistful of cutlery, before dropping them on the counter. Their dishwasher has been on the fritz for the better part of the last month; “on the fritz” translates to “flooding of the sink and countertop around the sink when in use,” so rather than repairing, they have learned to live without it and/or never use their own dishes or flatware, save for when company appears.
“Quitting time? Or can I talk you into putting these away.”
She doesn’t say anything, but she pushes off from the sink -- and then she swats him, hard, on the ass.
He freezes, making a sound sort of like he has a cough stuck in his throat. Or a sound like Felicity-just-smacked-his-ass-(sidenote:-unprovoked). He looks at her with what he has to assume is surprise and she looks at him innocently.
“What?” she shrugs, picking up a glass. “I thought you were into that.”
She turns her back to him, opening a cupboard to put their glasses away. He doesn’t even really think about it -- he just does it. He whips the damp dishtowel in his hand at her, striking her ass with a loud (satisfying?) smack.
She whirls around, a glass in either hand, looking flushed and on the verge of laughter.
He shrugs this time, his shoulders trembling with repressed laughter.
“I prefer it the other way around,” he says.
She finally laughs.
continued ;
2. | 3.
rpf. my days are long & my nights i don’t remember. a new roommate, some illegal drugs, hypothetical murder(s), a whole lot of innuendo, and a threesome: in sum, much like rihanna they found love in a hopeless place (aka brooklyn). pseudo-new girl!AU. eddie redmayne/felicity jones, w. eddie redmayne/felicity jones/luke treadaway + others. 21,375 words.
notes: I HAVE NO DEFENSE FOR THIS!
portrait of the artist as described by subject of this hot mess of fic, basically. i saw Les Mis the other week and left the theater with a renewed love for this dude and then idek, who doesn't want a New Girl-esque AU with hot people of their choosing? and uh, needless to say, these are all lies, but it also deviated HUGELY from the new girl premise (i originally had eddie as schmidt and felicity as nick and luke as winston lol) into this clusterfuck of lengthy rpf! THE END.
look in my eyes and ask me what i’m thinking
i’ll tell you it’s you and only you
we are denying our hearts and untouched lips
NEW ORLEANS, Former Ghosts
1.
SEPTEMBER 18
Laidback MALE or FEMALE roommate needed ASAP!!!!!!!!!
One room available IMMEDIATELY! for rent, Brooklyn, blocks from Bushwick-Aberdeen station
Three (awesome) roommates included (both genders!) in rent (not utilities OR cable sry) and we’ll all be the best of freinds!
NO PETS allergies are bad
If interested/want to see pics email Luke -- ltreads@gmail.com
“What if I don’t want to be their friend, let alone their best friend,” Felicity asks.
“And did you? -- you did, you spelled friends wrong,” Eddie says, reading over Luke’s shoulder.
“‘I before E,’” Felicity adds.
“This could not read more unprofessional if you tried.”
“If they are truly the great folks we want to live with us a minor oversight of the English language shouldn’t put them off,” Luke says, scrolling through the other posted listings.
“It’d put me off,” Eddie says, not missing a beat.
“We’re to be flatmates! Not, not . . . spelling bee competitors! Teammates! You know -- ” He pauses, clicks over to a different tab. “Look. Look . . . at . . . that. Got a nibble already!”
“Ew, he wants to know how young the girl roommates are,” Felicity says, reading from the other side of Luke. “He wants to see pictures . . . of the youngest roommate?”
“Pedophiles would be all in for spelling errors,” Eddie says. Felicity nods her agreement, and Luke ignores the both of them.
2.
It’s a four bedroom “loft” apartment that was, at one point, a warehouse. The space isn’t entirely renovated; the bathroom is more fitting for a gym locker room than a residential space.
The revised rendition of history tells that Luke brought the three of them together. Actually, it was Harry -- Harry Lloyd their fourth and now former roommate.
Harry had been their fourth, but then he left.
Despite their origins, their shared history is New York. They were like their own British enclave in Brooklyn. They had all relocated to New York and unintentionally sought each other out. They knew each other before they arrived for whatever ex-pat reason they fashioned for themselves -- Eddie was going for his doctorate in art history at Columbia (they tease that he’ll be a student until he dies), Luke had a band and connections waiting for him (he still has a band but less connections and now he also tends bar to make ends meet), Felicity and Harry were expanding on a gap year (and then she expanded it even further, staying for a man (boy) even though there is no longer a man (boy)) -- and it has now reached a point where imagining the city without considering each other is an impossibility. Luke puking on the subway on the way home at almost 2 AM, Felicity’s never-ending obsession with street falafel for lunch, Eddie romanticizing Central Park the same way the movies do, the jazz club they found Harry passed out on the curb of, Felicity conning Eddie into going to the ballet with her, the time they attempted Times Square on New Year’s and wound up at an Irish pub in Midtown -- all of that, all of their habits tying them not just to the city but to each other.
Felicity misses Harry and makes a note to say it often, plaintive and like a child, like she’s blaming the both of them for his current absence.
Eddie sort of understands it. Harry had balanced them. In his own way. He kept Luke’s crazy ideas restrained, he kept Felicity happy, but Eddie? If anything he nearly made Eddie’s presence superfluous. You didn’t need two stand-up men in an apartment full of weirdos. You don’t need two calming balms, two mediators.
What Eddie’s getting though is that this long-held belief doesn’t really hold up to scrutiny. Because without Harry around, Eddie’s just as ridiculous as the other two.
Luke’s always everywhere all at once, one bad idea dovetailing into a worse one, never really considering anything as mundane as potential consequences.
The only way he’s ever been able to describe Felicity is temperamental and mercurial (Eddie called her that once and her whole face lit up at the word mercurial; “That makes me sound like a mermaid,” she had said, and he had frowned the sort of frown one makes out of surprise and confusion. “It really doesn’t,” he said).
Felicity is really into the American legal system at the moment. Or, well, she’s into the fictionalized version of the American legal system. She watches a lot of old Law and Order reruns, waxes poetic about Benjamin Bratt at the dinner table, and starts dropping a whole lot of legalese into conversations -- warranted or otherwise: she allegedly drank the last of the milk, might they approach the bench to discuss the venue for their Thursday night plans, the defense rests as to whether it was her turn to clean the bathroom or in fact Luke’s.
Actually, it’s not just the American legal system. Her new bent is to talk about murder. She talks about murder all the goddamn time. He thinks during the days when he’s at the library and Luke’s at work she sits around watching those awful shows on the Discovery Channel about forensics instead of looking for a job, or worse, those shows about the ladies who go around the bend and murder their spouses or boyfriends. Lately, she’s begun posing the prospect of murder as a choice he and Luke have to make.
“Would you rather . . . ” and nine times out of ten, Felicity will drag the word rather out second-by-second, making the game up as she goes along, inventing the horrific scenarios of their demise off the cuff, “lay down on a bed of nails with the AIDS virus on them or,” and she’ll drag the word or out as well, her mouth twisting into a mischievous grin as she tries to play off the expressions on their faces (which is why, he thinks, he usually goes all theatrical with his disgust while Luke tries to play at a poker face), “or,” she’ll reiterate, “wade through a swimming pool filled with dirty needles and used syringes, unsure of their origin.”
“These situations would never happen. Organically. In the wild,” Eddie will protest. And she’ll roll her eyes.
“We’re not in the wild. Pick one.”
“AIDS. But my point still stands.” She’ll smirk and then point to Luke.
“I’d take my chances with the needles.”
And Eddie.
Eddie is good at a great many things. Humility often ranks among them, but he’s also good at using the random assortment of groceries they’ve assembled cheaply to make dinner, and he’s good at making sure their rent check is in by the 10th (the absolute last day their landlord is willing to go without charging them extra; they learned this the hard way) and that they pay their cable bill because a Felicity without cable is a bored Felicity and that never ends well (another lesson learned the hard way; the scorch marks that remain below the microwave over the stove serve as testimony). He’s good at playing the adult and mildly successful at convincing Luke and Felicity to follow suit.
What he’s just straight piss-poor about? -- the things those poets Felicity loves so much call Romance, but that, as they say, is another story. Maybe.
3.
SEPTEMBER 21
After Harry left, their new fourth was going to be Rooney.
She was the first response to their posting that seemed at least most of the way to legitimate, if not completely off-putting, over the phone.
“She uses no inflection. She’s the spoken approximation of a tersely written email. Impossible to read,” Eddie had said as they awaited her arrival.
“Actually, I find a tersely written email incredibly easy to read,” Felicity had said, missing the point. “Fewer words,” she said.
Rooney arrived, and she was very rich and very skinny and Luke was very into all of that.
She was also slumming it, and they all knew it.
“Her current life story is the chorus to Pulp’s ‘Common People,’” Eddie had said when they convened for a Roommate Meeting that night. Luke laughed; Felicity didn’t.
Felicity was against Rooney moving in from the start.
“Rooney isn’t a first name, it’s a last name. Like Mickey Rooney, and he was so racist and such a mean landlord to Audrey Hepburn. I say no. I don’t trust her.”
So they go with Kat.
(Though, it must be noted, not necessarily because of Felicity’s argument).
“Oh my god,” Kat says. “You’re talking The King’s Speech up in here, sans stutters all around. At least, I’m assuming. Elocution lessons can happen later, if we’re willing.”
Kat braces her weight against the kitchen counter, her gaze traveling over the three of them assembled on the other side. It’s as though she’s the one interviewing them and not the other way around and for a beat Eddie wonders if the result here will be the three of them on the street while Kat takes over their former humble abode.
Kat nods her head though, mostly in approval.
“It’s like I’m moving in with a ginger Mark Darcy, or a Mick Jagger in a time machine, or . . . I don’t know what you are,” she says, pointing at Felicity. “A less mandibular-dominant Keira Knightley? Pippa Middleton without the ass? Julie Andrews without the cheer? A muskrat? The British-equivalent to a muskrat? I’m just saying, that face? Giving me mad muskrat vibes.”
“Meeting!” Felicity calls.
She grabs both Eddie and Luke by their respective sleeves and walks them toward the bathroom. It’s still steamy from Luke’s shower (he takes the longest showers Eddie has ever witnessed another man take; he’s convinced Luke wanks exclusively in there and that’s the hold-up; thank Christ they don’t have to pay for water).
“No,” Felicity says, crossing her arms over her chest.
“No?” Eddie repeats.
“Yes,” Luke says.
“You two only like her because . . . ” She pantomimes a huge pair of tits in front of her own, sort of juggling invisible breasts up and down.
Luke and Eddie both cock their heads a little and stare at first Felicity’s imaginary and then her own chest.
“She makes up for yours, love,” Luke says. Felicity punches him in the shoulder. When she looks at Eddie he holds his hands up in surrender and/or innocence while Luke yells a delayed, “Ouch.”
“So that’s it then? You’ve gone off me? Bored of my bits and need some new ones to ogle?”
“Yes,” Luke says, “Exactly. Got it in one.”
“She does have a large vocabulary,” Eddie says, a peace offering.
“We can certainly add that to her nice big pro list,” Luke says and Felicity rolls her eyes.
“Where are the hot boy candidates?” Felicity asks. “Where are they?” Luke braces Felicity by the shoulders.
“We go with Betsy Ross Captain American out there? That means we are not opening our home to maybe possible rapers and villains.”
“And it balances,” Eddie says, “Boy girl, girl boy.”
“And it balances!” Luke repeats. Felicity scowls.
“We can put it to a vote, but I think you know where the odds rest, Miz Jones. But just think,” Luke says. “You’ll finally have someone to sync your cycle and share tampons with, or whatever it is you girls do.”
“Murder you,” she says and walks away.
Kat’s . . . a force of nature. She’s not particularly neat (and that had been Eddie’s biggest hope and New Roommate Criteria -- that they be neat, that they clean up after themselves for once and not leave him a sink full of used mugs and bowls with caked on soup or cereal or cheap ramen noodles), but she’s nowhere near as bad as Luke, nor as lazy as Felicity, so it is a slight step up.
And like his other roommates (and, well, himself, if he’s being honest), she also doesn’t shut up.
“When do we have tea and crumpets, eh?” she asks during her first week, breaking out a truly terrible Cockney accent for what he thinks is the fifth time that day.
“Never,” Felicity says, glaring before turning back to the sink.
It might be the new female presence in the apartment or one of those Animal Planet-like principles (a new lioness enters the den, threatening the status enjoyed by the former! claws out!), but Felicity has been a lot more amenable to household chores. He wonders how much of it is her wanting to be in their good graces (alright, his good graces, Luke doesn’t notice a blessed thing that happens in their apartment unless it’s balanced on his cock) or how much is her wanting to one-up Kat preemptively. He supposes the latter, but after dinner that night Eddie had succeeded in browbeating her into washing the dishes (though this time she drove a bargain, finally agreeing so long as he would make dinner -- a real dinner, not oatmeal or one of those frozen pizzas Felicity lives off of or leftovers from takeaway the night before -- she’d scrub up).
Kat seems to be playing at an opposite game, one of friendship rather than enmity. Kat tries, admirably, to make Felicity her best friend those first couple weeks, either purposefully misreading Felicity’s disgruntled social cues or electively ignoring them.
It’s like watching a golden retriever try to befriend a sloth.
“I am not a sloth,” Felicity says when Eddie tells her this. “There is nothing sloth-like about me in the slightest.” He looks at her doubtfully. “I like to sleep, sure. But. But, sloths are ugly.”
“Then you can be the prettiest, laziest sloth in all the jungle.”
“And I’ll befriend a tiger and a jaguar and they’ll eat your smug red face right off.”
He waves her off. “You’re too lazy for new friends.”
Felicity doesn’t say anything at first, namely because it’s true.
“That’s not true,” she finally says. “I just don’t have the room for more. You and Luke take up far too much of me.”
Kat’s first night there Luke had tried, patiently, to explain Felicity to Kat.
“She’s rude, strange, and unemployed. But we keep her.”
Felicity had frowned. “I’m not your bloody pet.”
Eddie smirked. “It’s cute that you think that.” To Kat he said, “She’s like a surly house cat we took in off the street.”
“Though thankfully not incontinent,” Luke added.
Felicity glared at the both of them, her head swiveling back and forth. “You don’t find house cats on the street. You find strays,” she said to Eddie like she found him to be the dumbest human alive.
He shrugged. “You ran away from your last home.”
“So we abducted you,” Luke said.
Felicity’s face had scrunched up and Eddie thought in that moment she looked more rodent-like than feline.
But they always did this with her -- about her would probably be the better phrasing. They explained her presence away like she was an unwanted hassle they selflessly took on.
Felicity thinks that’s what you call a defense mechanism, and has told them as much once.
She said it was because they liked her.
He gets that. They do like her.
And sometimes, they really like her.
They really, really like her.
4.
AN INTERLUDE, Felicity:
First, she thinks, a confession: she does not dislike Kat all that much. Does she resent her presence? Sure. Her presence means a whole lot of bad things that Felicity works hard not to consider.
Bad things like: Harry is gone, and she misses him.
Bad things like: she is no longer their only girl.
That’s the silliest one. She’s public about missing Harry, they all are. It’s a bit like sending a beloved brother off to war or college or somewhere terrible where you know he is being changed without your presence or consent and that, she thinks, is terrible. Truly the worst. Not only has he gone, but should he return, he would not be the same.
(Felicity does not know this of herself -- of course not, if she did her own inner narration would follow a decidedly different path -- but she forgets to consider herself in these same terms. That maybe Harry is not the only one who will change, but that she might and will and has as well).
But the other bad thing, that’s just plain embarrassing. She fights hard not to admit, aloud or to herself, that she needs Luke and Eddie to need her. No, not just need her. Need only her.
Kat unsettles all that. That’s what Felicity thinks.
She also upends their habits, the small rituals they have built up over the last couple years of shared living have established. She doesn’t care for Indian and rearranges their takeaway schedule to accommodate her appetite. She takes too long in the shower, rivaling Luke for who can use the most hot water, and by the time Felicity gets to use it all that’s left is a tepid, low-pressure stream. Before Kat, that never would have happened. Luke doesn’t shower in the morning, his schedule requiring him to be at the bar by 3 at the earliest, and Eddie is conscientious. He’s conscientious without expecting them to be, and that, she thinks, means he’s a good person. He’s a good person because he used to leave her enough hot water.
Kat’s the worst.
On a Thursday night Kat takes over the coffee table in front of the television with a whole assortment of nail varnish. Luke’s at the bar and Eddie’s still on campus, the fall term still early and he’s still disciplined. So Felicity joins her. She turns on Millionaire Matchmaker and she joins her.
“This show’s just ridic,” Kat says, drawling her words out, holding up two different bottles of similar looking glitter flakes.
“This show is amazing,” Felicity protests, unsure if Kat was insulting it or not. Eddie would never insult this show. In fact, he’s the reason she’s hooked on the show in the first place.
“So,” Kat says after a long awkward pause. Felicity looks at her blankly. “Are you . . . with anyone? What’s the sitch, Desperate Housewife Felicity Huffman?”
“I,” Felicity says slowly, “am not with anyone. At present.”
“‘At present,’” Kat repeats in a British accent and then snorts. Felicity trains her gaze on the television and Patty trying to help a deep-fried personal injury lawyer from Tampa find the former stripper of his dreams. “And Luke and Eddie?”
There’s the bad thing right there. There it is.
“Luke and Eddie are . . . Luke and Eddie.” Kat’s looking at Felicity confused. “They’re nobody.”
“Girl. Friend.” Kat leans back against the couch, waving her wet nails in front of her face, willing them to dry. “They are the opposite of nobody. Like, get me a pass to that rodeo, am I right? I mean, I guess with Eddie you’d have to be down with the ginger thing, and a lot of people aren’t, but that’s prejudice, right?” Kat picks at the side of her thumbnail and scowls.
Felicity doesn’t say anything. She just sits there, her posture ramrod straight, her hands still flat on the coffee table, nails unpainted.
“If I made it my personal mission, I could totally bag Luke, right? Right. He’s just . . . how do you live with that, man? It’s that whole Downton Abbey stiff upper lip thing, that it? I mean, that is a thing?” Kat shakes her hand again in the air, trying to make her nails dry faster. “I guess I’d settle for Eddie though, push came to shove.”
“Settle?” Felicity hears herself say, like it’s a word she just now learned.
She finds herself offended, and only partly on his behalf.
So that’d be another bad thing to add to the list.
5.
After Harry left, Luke had taken to taking over the oversized leather couch, all sprawled out, all legs and hair, while he’d pretend to pick at his guitar while really just watching old episodes of Gallery Girls with Eddie and Felicity.
(When questioned about the oversized leather couch, Luke claims squatter’s rights, which none of them really think is a thing, but Luke had been the one to get the couch, haggle down the price, and ensure its delivery, so that makes his possession a hard thing to argue against).
That left the smaller couch for Felicity and Eddie (or the big chair in the corner, but that’s The Reading Chair and you can’t see the TV from it, and the lightbulb in the lamp next to the chair blew out around three weeks ago, so it now just looks like a shady timeout corner for the misbehaved) (or the floor, which Felicity sometimes spreads herself out on in weird yoga poses Eddie tries not to think about). And the small couch is fine. It has a better view of the TV and it’s closer to the fridge and closer to the front door in case there’s a fire and they need to escape (but being close to the fridge means you’re constantly The Fetcher of the Drinks and if there was ever a front door-entering intruder they’d be the first in the line of attack, so the cons more or less balance the pros).
But it works.
Even though most of the time he and Felicity duel it out for the bulk of the territory (she puts up a good fight despite the fact she’s almost a foot shorter than he is) and even though most of the time she winds up curled against his side, her legs flopped over the end of the couch and his own stretched out long in front of them onto the coffee table, avoiding the minefield of empty and filled glasses and mugs alike. She’s like a mischievous lapdog in that sense, silently demanding his attention, her body wriggling in beside his, her hair fanning out over his shoulder and brushing his chin, claiming that territory as hers. Sometimes she’ll tilt her head up to him and ask him dumb questions -- the rate of her questioning seemingly directly correlated with whether he likes a show and she does not (he had to quit watching Breaking Bad with her after they got into an explosive fight about the ethics of dealing meth and, well, murder and he missed most of the season finale), or if it’s the news. Her choice of understanding of world events both baffles and mystifies him.
(For example, she knew every bloody detail there was to know about the Greek economic crisis and Whitney Houston’s death and the conflict in Syria but nothing of Prince William’s marriage to Kate Middleton or the American presidential election or even who Paul Ryan was).
He never touches her though. Not when she’s curled up with him like that and not with his hands. She doesn’t touch him either, but he always silently makes that space for her, under his arm and against his chest, and that keeps things normal somehow.
Kat changes all of that. There’s not enough room for four anymore. There’s not that understanding that some things in Apartment 4D go without comment.
(He knows that Felicity does the same sort of thing with Luke. Which always served as a justification in his mind.
She gets up in his space, but Luke gives as good as he gets.
He’s not like Eddie.
He doesn’t go still at first and he doesn’t question any of it -- he just throws his body right in the path of hers).
6.
SEPTEMBER 30
Most free nights are spent at the bar where Luke works. The place doesn’t even have a name -- it’s just called The Bar, like the owners had either been that lazy, that drunk, or that full of themselves that people would know you meant their bar when you said you were going to The Bar.
He tests out a lot of new (free) drinks with Eddie and Felicity as his tasters.
“What is this?” Felicity asks, eyeing the tumbler, swirling the ice a little.
“Blood orange Manhattans, my friends.” Luke leans against the bar, a towel draped over his shoulder and his shirtsleeves rolled. It’s a slow night, but since the summer ended most nights have been pretty dead at The Bar. “Fresh-squeezed blood orange juice -- don’t scowl, Fee --, some bourbon, er, sweet vermouth, and bitters.”
Eddie takes a larger than advised gulp and Felicity watches him closely. He sucks in a harsh breath as he swallows.
“That’s . . . wow.”
“A good wow or a bad wow -- which is it then?”
“It’s a, it’s a wow.”
Felicity, without prelude, slams back the better part of her glass.
“Jesus,” she says, clutching her chest. “Christ, that burns.”
Luke looks between the two of them, disgusted and disappointed. “Well fucking enjoy, that’s all you’re getting out of me tonight.”
Eddie rolls his eyes and ten minutes later there are two pints on the bar in front of him and Felicity.
They wait for Luke to close up before heading home. It’s a balmy night, warm for September, and Eddie’s sweaty already. Sweaty and drunk.
The second Luke turns the key he starts walking. Walking and talking -- another thing that happens most nights. The brief walk from The Bar to their apartment has been host of some of the greater conversations shared among the three of them.
(The one thing they are never allowed to talk about is how they’re getting kinda old for this shit. By “this shit,” he means the constant fuck-ups, the hangovers four out of seven mornings per week. The unemployment. The revolving door of part-time employment.
The one part they definitely don’t mention is the apartment -- living like this, collegiate, sloppy, no ownership and no responsibility).
Felicity keeps grabbing at Eddie's wrist to make him slow down and walk with her. And he does.
Luke doesn’t get too far ahead of them, needing an audience for whatever he’s rambling about (the new bartender at The Bar, Aubrey, who Luke says frightens him) and Felicity doesn’t let go of his wrist, his skin damp with sweat under her fingers but she doesn’t seem to mind. She knocks into him at random, her gait unsteady in her heels, and it smells like rain, the streetlights hazy in the humidity.
When they reach their building, Luke freezes suddenly. His posture slumps that much more, his shoulders dropped. Eddie looks at Luke expectantly.
“So the band’s kaput. Lost our goddamn lead singer. Isn’t life fucking grand,” and then he pushes the front door open.
“Eddie can sing,” Felicity says lazy, dropping down into a chair at the kitchen table, kicking her heels off. “He can be in your band.”
“How do you know?” Eddie leans against the kitchen counter and twists a bottle of water open.
“That you could be in a band? Frankly, I don’t. I don’t know if you possess the requisite . . . showmanship. The peacockery to befit the stage.”
“Not a word. And not what I meant.”
She shrugs small, practically imperceptible. “You sing in the shower.”
“You listen to me in the shower?”
“You really belt those show tunes, my friend. And to be fair, my bedroom is loo-adjacent real estate. I have a front row seat for your performance.”
He cocks his head to the side. “And who would you be then?”
“Who would I be where.”
“In Luke’s little band of misfits.”
She parts her thighs, just barely but enough for him to notice.
“A dedicated groupie.” He doesn’t mean to, but he stares at her. Her and her legs. Her and her slightly spread legs.
“Do I finally get to weigh in? About my own band, I might add?” Luke asks.
Felicity gestures magnanimously towards Luke. “The floor is yours.”
7.
OCTOBER 4
Romola is to come to dinner.
Eddie has known Romola for as long as he can remember. He met her back in London, when he was still at university, and she was all blonde and smarts and he loved her for all of three days before her realized he wasn’t the sort she would ever love. Not like that. Now, Romola is a journalist working for the BBC syndicate in New York. And now, she is to come to dinner.
(Felicity is prickly when Eddie tells her Romola is expected, which Eddie finds odd, because Romola is lovely, and sometimes Felicity can be lovely as well.
She’s lovely in strange, unexpected ways. How she knows and stores information and how that makes her at times seem considerate and how she tries to hide that part of herself; that she knows he likes conversation in the morning so she’ll get up and sit with him over breakfast even though there is no godly reason she should be out of bed before nine. That she won’t watch certain episodes of television or films without him. She’ll text him strange odd messages, overheard tidbits of conversation that become hilarious nonsense out of context. She’ll buy him that eggnog-flavored frozen yogurt she finds absolutely repellent, and sometimes she’ll do his laundry if he leaves it out, his clothes and sheets smelling a bit like her).
“Romola is an adult,” Felicity says. “Like, a real person.”
“We’re all real people. We’re all adults,” Eddie says, distracted, while he fills the ice trays he found empty in the freezer. Surprise, surprise.
“Yeah, like number-age-wise, but not, you know, ambition-career-bank-account-credit-score-wise.”
“Speak for yourself,” he grumbles. “And since you mentioned it -- it is time: get a goddamned job, Fee.”
She snorts inelegantly and drops back onto the couch. All he can see are the soles of her bare feet braced on the arm of their couch.
“I’m living off the kindness of strangers. I am Blanche DuBois.”
He points a wooden spoon in her direction even though she can’t see him. “I am no longer a stranger.”
“Nor particularly kind,” she says. “But you are strange.” She pauses and then clears her throat. “Would you rather,” she starts and Eddie groans, “die Macaulay Culkin-style in My Girl with all the bees and no EPI pen, orrrrrrr -- ”
“Whatever the or is. No bees.”
“You don’t know what the or is. The or could be worse.”
“What’s the or?”
“Ummmmmm. You drown. Slowly. In the New York sewage system, choking on the city’s piss and shit and little tiny rat bones.”
“Fuck off. The bees.”
“Told you there were worse things than the bees.”
“Which would you pick?” he asks over the running faucet while he rinses some arugula. Felicity had made fun of him at the little market a block over when he picked it out. “Oh, she gets the fancy lettuce, does she?” That was what she had said and he had told her to piss off but she just laughed that high-pitched giggle of hers, like she knew something she shouldn’t know when really she knew nothing at all.
“I don’t pick. I’m the scheming murderess and I never die.”
She pauses again and he stirs the sauce he has simmering on the stove. He can see her head pop up out of the corner of his vision. She’s wearing one his sweaters, one of the ones with the patches on the elbows, but the arms are too long for hers and the patches are down almost near her wrists.
“You think you could kill someone through sex?” she asks, Non Sequiturs by Felicity Jones.
He turns to look at her, the spoon no longer moving in the sauce, his face a crumpled expression of exasperated confusion. “What? Like you fuck him to death?”
“Yeah. Though I feel that’d require a lot, a lot of -- exertion.”
“Not if he had a bad heart. Or you ice-picked him in the throat, like in that movie.”
“That’s cheating.”
“You’d leave behind a lot of DNA at the scene.”
“That’s why it’d have to look accidental. Like he just couldn’t handle it.”
He bursts out laughing.
“I am so serious right now!” she says but she’s smiling and it comes out sounding more like a squeal.
“Serious as a sex-induced heart attack?”
She starts laughing too, her knees drawn into her chest and she’s all but drowning in that sweater she must have found draped over the couch or something. She’s not the greatest with boundaries, but he can’t imagine her snagging his clothes from his room without asking.
“I need to do some research,” she says, and she reaches for the closed laptop on the coffee table -- his laptop, in fact.
“Thank god,” he says, teasing, turning back to the stove, “I thought you’d want a live experiment.”
She looks at him over his laptop screen as it comes< back to life, and without any trace of irony she says, “You’re too young and spry. I’d most likely die first.”
He can feel his jaw go a little slack as he looks over at her, but before he can respond -- “My God, Redmayne, your internet viewing habits . . . ”
“Don’t look at my browser history! That’s private!”
“I’m not!” She gestures at the screen. “You left all the tabs open!”
“Don’t use my laptop then!”
She ignores him. “A recipe for coq au vin,” she catalogs, “Ambitious. A pilates website . . . ab routine? I had no idea the depth of your vanity. A Pandora station set to . . . Katy Perry’s ‘Teenage Dream.’ Oh my god -- ”
“You shut that laptop right now. You shut it now.”
“This is, like, a peek into the private psyche of one Mr. Edward Redmayne,” she laughs. “The Met schedule, meh, boring. A wiki page on Mark Rothko? Really? I thought you were smarter than that! You know everything. Jesus, you ever close a tab -- oh my fucking god, what.”
“Close the laptop. Just -- close it.”
“‘Jam It All The Way Up My Azz’-- spelled with two zeds -- ‘Part 3,’ oh my god, seriously.” She can’t stop laughing. She hits play and after a beat over-the-top moans fill the apartment. Suddenly there’s the sound of slapping ( . . . or spanking?). He stands frozen in the kitchen.
“Jesus Christ, Eddie, this is filthy,” she says with equal parts admonishment and respect.
He still has the wooden spoon in his hand when he comes around to her on the couch. The cuffs of his sweater have rolled over her knuckles and she has both hands clutched over her mouth, the sweater pressed against her face, in glee -- and something else, her cheeks all hot and pink.
“Turn it off,” he says over her, and she looks up at him with those big eyes and on the screen some porn star keeps saying, "ohhhhhh, yeahhhhhh, fuck my ass, fuck my ass so good,” accompanied by a whole lot of flesh slapping against flesh -- and a hand spanking said fucked ass. Felicity’s eyes drift to the spoon and widen a little more, her amusement at all this all the more evident, but still colored by that something extra. Like she’s excited, which . . . no.
“Are you going to spank me with that?” she asks in a dramatically husky voice, her idea of what porn stars sound like apparently.
He’s supposed to play that off. He’s pretty sure he’s supposed to just play off that comment and parry it into some half-hearted defense of his own porny predilections, but looking at her his mouth feels dry and anything he might want to say would be wrong. A weird, tense moment of silence stretches between them, the both of them watching each other rather than his laptop, like they’re playing at some high stakes game of chicken, a real life rendering of her incessant Would You Rathers.
“Use your own computer,” he finally says. He tries to sound menacing but he fails, and the spoon in his hand just makes him look like an angry contestant on Top Chef. The woman on his laptop is wailing, “it’s so big!” The guy spanks her again. Felicity looks on the verge of giggling.
“Don’t be so cross. I will gladly share my internet history with you!” she says, her arms stretched out like she’s an open book. “You show me yours, I’ll show you mine. That’s how it works. No . . . anal domination happening on mine though, hate to disappoint.”
“Too mundane?” he asks as he stalks back to the kitchen.
“Nah, just. Bum stuff -- not my thing.”
His back turned to her and it hits him how ridiculous this conversation is. “I am done with this conversation with -- ”
“Are you offended I’m not into anal?” She worries the bottom of her lip faux-innocently and from the sounds of it, their third party with the cock jammed up her azz (why, of all the videos, did he pick that title?) is coming.
“I’m not into -- ”
“This video begs to differ.”
He whirls around to face her. His mouth is still dry and her face is still pink and that fucking video is still playing. “I need to get dinner ready.”
“Fine,” she sighs. She slowly shuts the laptop with the video still playing, the woman on-screen cut off as she yells please!.
He dumps the arugula into a bowl and starts shaving a block of parmesan cheese, Felicity eerily quiet and still on the couch.
And then --
“Do you watch that out here?” She asks the question innocuously enough, which puts him on edge, but when he looks at her she’s not even looking at him. She’s got this weird faraway glazed look to her.
“What? No. What? Why?”
She doesn’t answer him but she suddenly leaps up, his sweater falling over her thighs, skinny in a pair of yoga pants (even though she definitely didn’t do any yoga today; she has the schedule of a slug).
“I need to get ready, bye.”
So, in truth --
There’s always been a weird sexualized bent to his relationship with Felicity.
Okay, that’s not entirely true. But the second day of living with her he was treated to the operatic solo that resulted from her getting fucked by her artist boyfriend.
It wasn’t even that she was that loud with him; the walls were just that thin.
And he was paying that much attention.
Romola comes alone, comes late, and she doesn’t stay for long.
Once Kat gets wind of the fact Romola works in television at the BBC, she spends the entire night trying to pick her brain, insistent that Romola does in fact know Matt Lauer and is withholding the truth about him for personal reasons. Felicity and Luke behave, for the most part -- Luke texts throughout dinner while Felicity just sits there and chews quietly, pushing her dinner around her plate with her fork.
He’s not sure if it’s him or if it’s her that keeps sneaking glances at the other, but every time he does, she either smirks right back at him or looks away quickly. He doesn’t know what that’s all about. What he does know is that a quiet Felicity is generally a Felicity that spills trouble in her wake, so he waits. The entire dinner he spends on edge, just waiting for her to drop whatever bomb she has up her sleeve (it’ll be the anal porn, it’ll definitely be the anal porn, and he’ll have to explain himself, and what a dumb thing to feel embarrassed about -- pornography! he’s a man! a grown man! -- but he gets it: it’s not the porn itself, it’s not the fact he watches the porn -- it’s the fact Felicity knows all the intimate details about it. About him, and the idea of explaining, of explaining her as she relates to him, as he relates to her, that’s what he finds he dreads more than anything).
But nothing happens. Felicity passes the dinner quietly, draining a bottle of red on her own, and when Romola begs off, claiming work (and maybe it is work, but he knows about Dominic and he knows Dominic is a thing that can fall under the heading of work), Felicity rises to clear the table.
Eddie finds her at the sink after he walks Romola to the door. She’s rinsing their plates and Eddie arches an eyebrow. He can count on one hand -- fuck, one finger -- the number of times Felicity has done the dishes of her own volition. And that had been the time she had down the wash and ruined half a dozen of his button-ups.
“What a wonderful dinner party, darling, just the very most,” she says, like not only the dinner was fabulous but managed to transport them back to the 1920s.
Eddie snatches up the collection of empty wine bottles and drops them into the bin with a clatter.
“So where’s the body then?” he asks her. She looks at him confused over her shoulder. She’s standing flat-footed in her stockings, the sleeves of her dress rolled up, and Eddie kicks her boots out of the way, already envisioning one or the both of them tripping and destroying what few dishes still remain to their name.
“The body,” she says.
“I can only assume there is a brutally murdered, just, absolutely mutilated body hidden somewhere in this apartment. My bedroom, I’d guess?”
“Why am I stashing bodies in your bedroom?”
“I can’t think of a single other reason why you’d be doing that,” he says, nodding towards her and the dishwater and the suds that have clung to her elbow.
“I’m being nice!” she shouts at him. “This is what nice people do!”
He can’t fight a smile while he looks down at the assembled leftovers on the counter. She washes in silence while he handles the rest of the kitchen, humming that Bruno Mars song she hates under his breath as he works.
“Come dry,” she says to him, and he does. He starts singing that one Taylor Swift song quietly, almost under his breath, and he can feel her glaring at him. It makes his smile deepen, even more when she says, “In silence.”
He complies: they work side-by-side in silence. She finishes before he does, drains the sink, a grin starting as she looks at him and all that’s left to dry. She doesn’t move. She just stands there, watching him, watching him scrub the already damp towel over a plate, into a glass, a fistful of cutlery, before dropping them on the counter. Their dishwasher has been on the fritz for the better part of the last month; “on the fritz” translates to “flooding of the sink and countertop around the sink when in use,” so rather than repairing, they have learned to live without it and/or never use their own dishes or flatware, save for when company appears.
“Quitting time? Or can I talk you into putting these away.”
She doesn’t say anything, but she pushes off from the sink -- and then she swats him, hard, on the ass.
He freezes, making a sound sort of like he has a cough stuck in his throat. Or a sound like Felicity-just-smacked-his-ass-(sidenote:-unprovoked). He looks at her with what he has to assume is surprise and she looks at him innocently.
“What?” she shrugs, picking up a glass. “I thought you were into that.”
She turns her back to him, opening a cupboard to put their glasses away. He doesn’t even really think about it -- he just does it. He whips the damp dishtowel in his hand at her, striking her ass with a loud (satisfying?) smack.
She whirls around, a glass in either hand, looking flushed and on the verge of laughter.
He shrugs this time, his shoulders trembling with repressed laughter.
“I prefer it the other way around,” he says.
She finally laughs.
continued ;
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