[fic] sign a new agreement with itunes - v [france/england]
Excerpt from Francis Bonnefoy’s master thesis on You and I and I and You: Britain and France, a shared cultural history (re-re-re-revised title, and not very likely to stick):
Consequently, Franco-British history reveals a relationship that is as much about revulsion as it is about attraction; their historical and cultural influence upon one another has been greater than that of any other country in the world. Britain has shaped France into itself as much as France has shaped Britain, for better or for worse; they are mirror reflections, all at once the same and utterly different in too many ways to count. If anything at all happens between them it is always at once, passionately, without restrictions for thought or understanding, and usually with rather drastic results for one or the other or both - or the rest of the world: they are all about recognition, presence and absence; about consumption. In the end they create themselves incessantly: on either side of the Channel, always looking, always being each other’s worst and best reality. Just there.
Just breathing.
- from the Conclusion
He arrives at Antonio’s drenched quite through and so thoroughly undone that Gilbert arrives through the downpour within fifteen minutes, and he and Antonio force him into a bath. He lies in it with his head pillowed on Antonio’s thigh, on the side of the bathtub, with Antonio’s fingers drifting casually through his soaked, dripping hair. Gilbert enters into a scuffle with the fluffy towels, swearing at each and every one of them until he’s entangled in the mass.
“I know you don’t like him,” he says, and reaches out for the soap, thin wisps of hair pressed slickly to the back of his neck; he feels detached, not quite home. They’ve reached a problem with the bubbles, which are apparently keen on melting in a matter of seconds, so that the bath water is murky, but quite bubble-less. The lack of bubbles is, in fact, a little saddening. (Which promptly spirals into fantasies of sharing a bath with Arthur, bubbles every which way, knees bumping with elbows and jaws until they find an acceptable position, arms slipping together, legs tangling, like the brush of parentheses - which has to Stop Right Now, physicality be damned.)
“I don’t dislike him,” Antonio says, soft and surprising and dark-haired in the middle of the bright-lit bathroom. His palm curves around Francis’ nape, slow and certain, comforting. “Something about him irritates me very very much, but I don’t know what that is.”
“Bollocks,” Gilbert snorts, from the towels.
“By this time,” Antonio says, blustering into the situation the way he does everything else, “you’re kind of screwed if you think you can live without him.”
“Or just not screwed enough,” Gilbert mutters, sounding strangely far away as Francis slips, submerges, lungs and heart full of water.
Francis calls the next morning, in the middle of breakfast, winter sunlight trickling in the kitchen through the blinds, striping everything in black and white. “I’m staying at Antonio’s with Gilbert for a few days,” he says, as Arthur leans against the counter, cradling the phone between his neck and jaw, the heel of his palm pressed to his collarbone. “I. I need to think.”
“Yeah,” Arthur murmurs, looking down at the mess of butter and marmalade he’s made on his toast when the phone startled him. “Yeah, I get that.”
“Arthur,” Francis says, and Arthur breathes, in and out, carefully, as though everything could rapidly crumble if he didn’t take it slow, take it good.
It isn’t a very good week. He sleeps in late twice, cleans too much and misses every inch of the sticky notes in the morning, the stupid little messages of Francis’ everyday world; he takes long scalding baths because there isn’t anyone to tell him off for hogging up the hot water, and eats takeaway almost every night (except the one when he tries to make himself some chicken, and nearly blows up the oven. It isn’t a very good evening, either.) He curls up in too-big jeans, toes barely poking out the end, hot and sullen like a child, and listens to old records, wondering how long it will be until all the scratched, beautiful sound bleeds into him, turns him inside out. He drinks precisely five cuppas a day. Six, when he can’t sleep.
He works his six hour-shift in the store and then goes down to rehearsal, and plays.
(Alfred takes one look at him and then takes him out for hamburgers. He’s a good kid, Alfred, even though most of his conversational skills revolve around fast food and his German boyfriend. Arthur often feels irritated beyond the point of reason around him, but that, he is starting to understand, is his mechanic response to those he cares for the most - a protective automatism, hackles raised, barriers up, whenever someone comes a little too close for comfort, cuts him a little to much to the quick.
He buys him a McChicken and they spend an hour discussing a chord in Bohemian Rhapsody, and the food is greasy and the air chilly outside, but Arthur feels warm.)
Francis is waiting for him outside rehearsal, on Friday. He’s wearing jeans Arthur has never seen on him before, but he’s engulfed in the same warm brown jacket he left home in, and he looks so distinctly sheepish, eyes slipping down the curve of Arthur’s headphones and lingering one second over the crease of his scarf, that Arthur barely hears Toris’ quiet goodbye.
“Fish and chips?” Francis asks, carefully, with a small smitten smile; and Francis hates fish and chips with a burning passion so Arthur figures it’s as close to an apology as he’s ever going to get.
They go for Chinese takeaway in the end, if only because compromise isn’t a very bad thing to have. They eat roasted noodles and shrimp-and-lemon buns with mitten’ed fingers, sitting on a green park bench, London lights hazy and purplish-gold around them, like stained glass streaked across their eyelids and cheeks. It’s funny how everything can seem so cold and so hot at the same time: it’s admittedly the middle of November, but their mouths are burning with the food. All of it’s very dramatic lighting.
Coward, Arthur thinks, fingertips sticky with sauce, because they’re sitting face to face, one leg pulled up onto the seat to allow space for the takeaway bags, and Francis’ knee touches his everytime he reaches out for another bite. Right. Fuck, he thinks, detailing Francis’ face in the desiccated London streetlight: he clearly hasn’t shaved for a few days, stubble darkening his cheeks, and Arthur isn’t used to the new haircut, the way the shorter locks graze his chin, give him almost a younger look.
“So,” Francis says. “Boys?”
“Yeah,” Arthur mutters. He coughs, looks up, watches Francis watch him, carefully. “Always.”
“You never told.”
“Nah.” He takes a breath. He sets down his chopsticks, very precisely, and says, “So. How long d’you think we’ve been dating and never noticed?”
“I,” Francis says, and stops, head tilted, mouth quirked in the little furrow that usually means he’s trying very hard not to say what he was about to say. Then that melts fully into a smile, and he pushes the bags off the bench, tucks them between his knees. “I don’t know. Years?”
It’s funny. Arthur is fairly sure this is still the same kind planet he’s got his feet on, still the same mad world all around them in bursts and shades of neon lights, but suddenly it’s like the earth is spinning the other way - hurling through space until all the air and all the light are squeezed out of them, until they’ve got nothing left but colliding to do. Everything’s different, and yet somehow everything’s still the same, and he can taste his own quirk of a smile on his mouth as he says,
“Well, we’ve been sharing flat all this time.”
“Sharing rent,” Francis snorts, dismissive and fond and oh, lord, he never saw that before.
“Making laundry,” he murmurs.
“Going on dates.”
“Seeing terrible French existentialist movies.”
“Eating in extremely delicious French restaurants. You're welcome.”
“Cleaning the bathroom. Which you never do.”
“Sharing a shower, that one time.”
“Watching telly in the evening.”
“Watching rugby.”
“Making food.”
“Burning food, in your case.”
“Piss off,” Arthur laughs. And then, maybe in retaliation, maybe because by that point his brain’s likely gone off to see the stars and left him fending for himself, “so. Everything except the sex.”
He doubletakes a second later, but Francis is smiling, lashes lowered over his eyes just so, and maybe he doesn’t even know he’s doing it, maybe he doesn’t even know what it does to Arthur, maybe he doesn’t even know. “Shame, really,” he murmurs.
Arthur pauses (and the world pauses with him. And then. And there’s the miracle:
It starts again.)
He nudges the bags aside, leans forward, fits neatly between Francis’ parted knees, and buries his hands in his hair. He kisses him like they’re both buggering fools who will do it again, and again, and again, and closes every space between them that he can; he feels Francis’ cool fingers crawl between the creases of his scarf, draw alongside his neck to cradle his jaw and tilt his face up - it’s a curiously open-mouthed kiss, tongues cool with cheap beer and Francis’ smile. Arthur tightens his arms all around it.
He slips his fingertips under Francis’ collar, down to touch the softer skin of his nape, and Francis chuckles a little, a funny sound that slides down Arthur’s throat - and then they’re kissing in earnest, slick and warm and scarves and coats getting in the way and oh, Arthur thinks, I’m never going to forget you. You bastard, I’m never going to forget you.
“Oh god,” Francis murmurs, fingers curling in possessively, as though he’s just come to his own kind of epiphany. Arthur wants to laugh, in the tight little space where cold breath pours from their mouth like white fog, but Francis kisses him again, and his mind goes blank for a little while.
“Oh, god,” Francis says again, later, and Arthur comes to fuzzily, realizes he’s thrown one leg across Francis’: they’re pretty much sitting in each other’s lap, entangled into one another so tightly it’s going to be awkward figuring out whose everything is whose. “We’ll shock London’s upstanding citizens if they wander this way,” he says, mouth red and swollen and amused and gorgeous.
“Who cares,” Arthur murmurs, catching the lower lip between his teeth.
“Closet pervert,” Francis says.
“Exhibitionist,” Arthur says back, and realizes that they’re laughing, ludicrously, ridiculously, breathing in each other’s air, sitting on a green park bench in the middle of the night in the middle of London - a little crazy, a little drunk, a little mad with love, with beer, with everything, Arthur thinks, that make the world this good.
“You know what I like,” Francis asks, on the way home, in a side alley to a crowded, well-lit street; the lights pour down into them at intervals, intermittent like orange, streetlight fireflies.
“No,” Arthur says, looking as though he’s focusing mostly on all the places where their shoulders touch, infused with warmth. And then, “Me?”
“That too,” Francis purrs. “I meant. Just. Holding hands.” Arthur looks down at them, their fingers carefully tousled together, palm against warm palm, wrists brushing: Francis runs his thumb on the back of his hand, squeezes a little. It makes his heart skip, to see Arthur’s cheeks flood with a flush, the tilt of his head and of his smile. He wants to swallow that smile.
“Okay,” Arthur says, very carefully not grinning, and making an utter mess of it. “Why?”
“’s warm. Comfortable.”
“Sap,” Arthur says, but he’s very much smiling now, so Francis pushes him back, twined hands caught between their chests, and kisses it off his mouth in the brittle streetlight.
Francis cartwheels in on the situation exactly thirty-two minutes later. He’s sitting on the edge of his bed, unbuttoning his shirt; Arthur standing not two feet away, carelessly undoing his belt, and it smashes into him like a characteristic situation, independent of natural clauses, like a bright-lit bus or a red phone box in the middle of the night. He watches Arthur’s fingers tug around the leather, loop it out of the metallic buckle. His hands are breathtaking in all the best ways, sharp and bony and made for music, and so Francis curls his own fingers in the belt hoops of Arthur’s waistband and pulls him close, close enough to bury his face against his smooth, flat belly, just for a moment.
“You nervous?” Arthur asks, lacing one of his beautiful, beautiful hands in Francis’ hair.
“Not at all,” Francis snorts, blowing a kiss under Arthur’s bellybutton, his skin murmuring with pleasure at the answering shiver. “It’s funny.”
“Good.” Arthur pulls him up from his snuggle, furls one hand around his neck, presses his mouth to Francis’ - just this: the press of open mouths, without teeth or tongue. Gravity gives out on them before Francis realizes it, and he feels the soft thwump of his own blue comforter against his back, the thin fabric of his shirt against his spine spreading out like wings from under him. And Arthur reaches the same conclusion, apparently, running his palms down Francis’ sides: he kisses him harder for a fraction of second, then pulls away, whispering faint little praises of beauty he’s probably not even aware he’s saying.
Francis almost laughs. Arthur’s got it all wrong. He’s the gorgeous one here, bare-chested and clad only in loose jeans, bare feet - leaning over him with eyes that really shouldn’t be this green and a dark, fanciful expression staining his face, like Francis is somehow someone to be treasured, like he’s somehow worth it all.
Francis is a scholar, and so he catalogues this, too: the way Arthur kisses him, all lazy tongue and teasing teeth (and if he’d known, even months ago, that Arthur was this adept at snogging he’d probably have thrown him down onto the nearest surface available and shagged him stupid), too-dry hands skimming down his chest, grazing underneath the tails of his opened shirt, the familiar warmth of their bodies touching. He pigeonholes every bump of Arthur’s spine with every shiver of his thighs under his splayed palm, categorizes all the subtle reactions of his own body under Arthur’s touch. The way Arthur mouths at his neck, jaw slanting alongside his collarbone, disorganizes everything and then makes it all so very much clearer, chaos reorganizing in a brief glorious moment of simplicity. He chalks up the sound of Arthur’s knees hitting the carpet as best to remember; red folder, and then blinks and completely loses thread, because he’s too busy trying to remember how to breathe to go ahead and think on top of it.
It’s warm and wet and with just the slightest touch of teeth and isn’t that weird, he thinks hazily, having someone touch your most intimate part? and that’s weird, too, because he’s had this done to him many times before, but somehow it’s Arthur - somehow Arthur’s head between his legs, Arthur’s hands firm on his thighs, Arthur’s mouth on his cock - and somehow it matters more, matters different.
Hi, he thinks, staring up at the ceiling, I’m a little in love with you. I think. And then everything goes French. And blue.
He’s breathless, even after barely a minute of this - Arthur is taking him apart and then putting him back together, taking him as a human being and then making him into another one altogether, completely different and yet absolutely the same, newer planets born in his wake, and it’s not even the sex, it’s just them, just Arthur, foolish man. He’s teetering on the edge of something so big it dizzies him; and when Arthur pulls away, red-mouthed and breathing hard, it’s just another revelation that shimmies past, disappearing under his skin.
“C’mere,” he whispers, and Arthur does, hoisting himself up with his elbows on either side of Francis’ head, positioning himself just so that their hips rub and push against each other and their lips brush, surprisingly chaste. Francis presses a thigh between Arthur’s knees, gasping, and hooks one arm around his neck, breathing out shivering laughter when Arthur buries his face in his throat.
The bed is rocking, all at sea, and they’re rocking with it, tangled up and grasping onto one another, all the heat between them burning out their rough angles, until Francis feels it all over, everywhere and well beyond, until Arthur pulls himself up, a fraction, so he can touch Francis’ forehead with his, and say,
“Hey.”
“Hey,” Francis says back, and watches Arthur come with wonder etched on his face, eyebrows drawn tight together and mouth only half-open, a muffled groan in Francis’ own.
(And the world. It explodes.)
Afterwards, they decide to be pragmatic and clean up, because they’ve made a mess, mostly of themselves and a little of the comforter (they swap it for Arthur’s, which is white instead of blue and feels strangely fitting.) They settle in the creases of it still half-naked - that is to say, Arthur has insisted on putting at least a shirt and boxers on, and Francis is quite comfortable in the altogether, so really they are half-naked, between the two of them.
“Oh, great,” Arthur says, after a while, eyeing the long dip of Francis’ collarbone, “you’re going to be naked all the time now, aren’t you?”
“Probably,” Francis says. He looks easy and at home, knees brought up to his chin under the comforter, hair in a disarray over his face; Arthur is sitting crosslegged on the blankets, both of them with their backs to the wall, shoulders touching in sync. “Do you mind?”
He does not. He says, “Well.”
Francis moves a centimetre closer and nudges their noses together, and Arthur. Stops thinking. (Or not, because it’s silly and breathtaking, and somehow more intimate than rutting together earlier: their noses are brushing, mouths inches apart but still separate for some intricate, delicate reason, and he can see Francis’ every eyelashes, the creases at the corners. Francis puts his hand on his face, fingers splayed all over his cheek.)
“I think,” Francis begins.
“Don’t,” Arthur replies. “You might cause some unknown damage. To your brain.”
Francis plummets him backwards and they end up half under the comforter and half out, much in the way they’re half-naked and half-not, all the bare skin between them pressed flush and hot together. Francis laughs into his neck and Arthur just holds on: they’re hugging upside down on the bed, a little delirious, warm everywhere. It’s good. It’s just good, in the end.
(Two weeks after they start sleeping together Arthur happens upon Francis’ green shirts in the middle of laundry and throws them all away, except one.
“You’re only wearing that one where I can see you,” he says. “And at home,” he adds, as an afterthought, and Francis laughs, kisses his nose, and asks whose room they’re turning into a study.)
This is how the morning goes.
They sleep back to back out of habit, but their feet and legs are tangled up, under the blankets. Francis wakes first, slapping his alarm silent so Arthur only murmurs, rolls over, and snuggles himself back into rest. (On weekends, he’ll spare half an hour making breakfast, and return to the bedroom to find Arthur sitting up hair-tousledly, yawning his jaw off and frowning up at him until Francis positions a strategic mugful of tea between his palms.
This is how they spend most Sunday mornings, painting each other’s face orange with marmalade and then licking it off, with coffee and toast and the occasional cereal, having sex in the bright of the morning, taking baths that last well into the afternoon with Billie Holliday singing on the old track player - reclining into one another, Arthur’s head on his shoulder, hands jumbled up in the soap bubbles.)
On weekdays, Francis takes breakfast alone, in the kitchen, skimming over the Guardian headlines and wincing at his coffee because Arthur forgot to buy sugar, last Thursday. He spends half an hour in the bathroom and always forgets to pick up his clothes in the bedroom before he first leaves it; he tiptoes back in, ducks from the book Arthur throws blearily at him for waking him up, and dresses in front of the mirror they’ve had to install in the living-room after a few drastic incidents (Arthur, it turns out, is a dragon in the morning.)
He takes five minutes and writes Alfred called; there’ll be no rehearsal tonight and class cancelled this afternoon, I’ll be back with lunch and YOU FORGOT THE BREAD AGAIN. BUY IT. on a hundred sticky notes - but now there are also variations on the I like having you in my bed theme, such as your feet are cold or you were very good last night, my arse isn’t sore at all (and won’t Arthur blush and crumple that one in the trash, Francis muses.)
He has grown exceptionally fond of the sticky notes. They fight all the time, and they are not quite sure why they stand each other’s company; but the notes help them, sometimes, to remember. It’s silly things, and maybe they’re not worth reminiscing at all - they go no long way of explaining why coming home to Arthur is a warm thought, why Christmas vacation is something to make plans for; why bread and milk and toast and tea have taken on the shine of beautiful things.
(Except the notes sometimes read love me? and Arthur - Arthur will blush, yes, and take it down from the window, but he’ll scribble love you. and something that looks like a duck but is probably a heart, and he’ll leave it on the coffee machine, where Francis can find it right away, when he comes home.)
fin.
un. | deux. | trois. | quatre. | cinq.