ok but buck fawning over tommy’s chin, kissing it and complimenting him on it every chance he gets bc he just finds it so cute 😔
i know this is not technically what you asked for, but. well.
"you like... my chin."
there's absolutely no reason for tommy to look as skeptical as he does, if buck is being honest. tommy's face is gorgeous in an old hollywood way. not perfect by any stretch of the imagination, and subsequently perfect because of it.
"well." buck reaches for tommy's smoothie and takes a sip. raspberry vanilla. buck's favorite. god, he wants to marry this man so badly some day. "i mean. the rest of your face has a lot going for it too, but. yeah. it's interesting. it makes your face nice to look at."
he watches tommy's face go from amused to straight up joyful, watches the column of his throat as he tips his head back and he laughs out loud, cheeks flushing pink, and god if that isn't the most beautiful sound buck has ever heard? made even more beautiful because buck knows how hard he had to work for his joy, his ease as he moves through life. tommy kinard is a weightless being and it shows in the way he navigates the world, deliberate in his intention to experience everything about life to its absolute fullest.
it's unfair.
it's unfair for one man to be this handsome.
moments like these, he wants to look around, see if anyone else in the cafe is as aware of tommy's beauty as he is but he always decides against it. number one, he already knows from experience that no one is actually looking at him, at them, and, number two, even if they were, it wouldn't matter. he's all buck's anyway.
tommy shakes his head, laughter quieting. "you're ridiculous. of all the things to lust over."
"oh, okay, laugh it up."
but tommy's eyes are soft and fond, despite the teasing. or, okay, maybe partly because of it. buck's boyfriend is a bit of an asshole, after all, but that's okay. he'll happily be the butt of every single joke if only tommy would keep looking at him like that, keep smiling at him like he's the answer to every question he's ever had.
tommy leans across the table into his space, voice lowering like they're the only two people in the world. he hums, eyes searching buck's face, and leans in, pressing a gentle, brief kiss to his lips.
"god, i love you."
buck's voice goes breathy like it's the first time he's ever heard it. "yeah?"
"mmm," tommy hums again. "i love you, you beautiful..." kiss. "...ridiculous..." kiss... "...hilarious..." kiss. "...kind of odd..." kiss. "deeply intelligent..." kiss. "...overwhelmingly sweet man."
he finishes with one last kiss to buck's mouth, and buck has honest to god butterflies in his stomach when tommy pulls away and sits back in his seat. eight months in and being kissed by him still feels the same as it did the first time—still feels warm, and safe, and beautiful, and loving, and... how did this happen?
how did buck become the guy who gets butterflies in his stomach over a kiss?
"uh." he blinks a couple times to clear his head, to focus his thinking. not like it works, not when tommy is looking at him like he hung all the damn stars in the sky. buck clears his throat. "well. yeah." a beat. "but i'm your idiot."
and it's so cheesy. if given the opportunity, buck probably could have thought of a million different sweet and sexy things to say, but, at the end of the day, it's true. he's tommy's in the same way tommy is his.
tommy rolls his eyes, but he's smiling, his nose scrunching up even as he takes his drink back. he takes a sip from his straw without blinking, swallows the rest of the thing down like he didn't order it specifically because he knows buck likes to steal his drink, and. god. buck is so in love it fucking hurts.
tommy reaches across the table and takes his hand, the last traces of humor smoothed away and replaced with nothing but aching sincerity. "yeah," he says softly. "yeah. you're my idiot."
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Part 1 / tag list below the cut
“I’m quitting,” Eddie declares, “I’m out. Call me a tree, ‘cause I’m leaving. Call me a banana, ‘cause I’m splitting. T-t-t-t-that’s all, folks!” he adds, doing his best impression of Porky Pig’s signature stammering.
Chrissy’s laser focus doesn’t stray from her monitor, even when Eddie bodily throws himself into the chair across her desk with a long, strangled groan. Wordlessly, she raises her left index finger at him in a silencing gesture. With her brows furrowed in concentration, she drags her mouse around on its pad and double-clicks something on her screen before nodding decisively to herself. After another few clicks, she finally lowers her finger, raises her eyes, and meets Eddie’s gaze.
“Would you mind grabbing what I just printed? Please?” she asks, smiling at him imploringly.
Chrissy could ask Eddie to bleach his hair and shave off an eyebrow and he’d do it. She’s actually who he has to thank for landing such a cushy job with HHH—a referral from a trusted associate like her goes a long way in a place like this.
And despite Eddie’s many complaints about becoming a corporate sellout, he can’t deny that it certainly has its perks. The office is only a ten-minute commute from his apartment, the compensation agreement he signed amounted to more money than his last two jobs combined, his benefits package is frankly ridiculous, and he gets to work with one of his best friends in the world. Overall, not a bad gig.
Even so, he makes a show of sighing, loud and longsuffering, before doing as Chrissy asks, leaving her office to grab her job off the printer. Eddie knows she works in HR and some of her stuff can get pretty confidential, so he doesn’t even try to skim the contents of the page as he walks it back over to her.
“Here,” he says, thrusting the paper at Chrissy facedown.
“Thanks!” she says. She makes no moves to take it from him. “That’s for you, actually.”
Curious, Eddie takes the paper back and flips it over. In the center of the page is a graphic of safety sign one might find in a cartoon factory, though Chrissy had edited the original from “[___] Days Since Last Accident” to “[___] Days Since Eddie Last Threatened to Quit His Job”. There’s a big red zero in the counter box.
Eddie tries to glower down at Chrissy, but it’s sort of hard to maintain when she bursts into laughter. It’s been years, but the sound of Chrissy laughing like this, all bright and breathless and unrestrained, never fails to transport him back to his (third) senior year of high school, when they first became friends over a failed drug deal.
“Don’t be cute,” Eddie says with a laughable lack of authority, dropping heavily back down into the chair.
“Do you know who you’re talking to?” Chrissy counters, brow raised archly.
Eddie rolls his eyes, crumpling the page into a ball and lobbing it in between them.
Chrissy lets the ball land harmlessly on her desk before sweeping it into the trashcan by her feet. “Just so you know, I’ve had that saved on my desktop since Monday—and I haven’t had to edit the days count a single time.”
Eddie scoffs, but it’s hard to defend himself when this current visit marks the fifth day in a row he’s floundered into her office, vainly announcing his resignation. “Yeah, well,” he says weakly, “printing it seems like a gross misuse of company resources.”
“What are you going to do, report me?” Chrissy says with a mischievous sparkle in her eyes.
“Let me guess: you’re the one who receives those reports?” Eddie says dryly.
“Yep!” she says cheerfully. “Now, go on and tell me about your latest trainwreck of an interaction with Steve Harrington.”
“Christ, Chris!” Eddie hisses, leaping to his feet and immediately spinning around to check if anyone was around to hear her damning words. The coast is clear, luckily, but he still scrambles to shut her office door before falling back into his chair. “You can’t just go around saying his name all willy-nilly.”
“He’s not gonna suddenly appear if you say his name three times, Eddie. See, watch. Steve. Steve. St—”
“Don’t risk it!” Eddie squawks loudly, cutting her off.
“You’re an absolute mess,” she says through a laugh, shaking her head at him.
And well, Chrissy’s not wrong.
Eddie’s been a mess since Monday morning, when he unknowingly produced, directed, and starred in The Roast of Steve Harrington. He blames his shitty memory for forgetting what floor his new office was on—if he’d known he was sharing the elevator with someone he could have potentially worked with (let alone someone whose surname made up a third of the company name), he wouldn’t have opened his big, fat mouth in the first place.
When he finally gathered the courage to make it back down to the fifty-second floor and show his face at the HHH office, he kicked off his onboarding with Chrissy with a strangled, “I know it’s my first day and I technically just started ten minutes ago, but I quit. Thank you for the opportunity and good-bye forever.”
Chrissy, the traitor, spent a full five minutes laughing in his face over his shamefully recounted story before patting him twice on the head and informing him he wasn’t allowed to quit for at least six months. The overly saccharine tone of her voice alone told Eddie there was no room for argument there.
Still, that didn’t stop him from following her into her office after the all-hands meeting on Tuesday, all the while whining in her ear, “I can’t thrive in these conditions, Chrissy. Please, I beg of you—accept my sincere and humble resignation from this cursed hellscape.”
‘These conditions’ consisted of any rooms and/or conversations that contained Steve Harrington. Eddie hadn’t been expecting to see the guy doting over the catering when he walked into the conference room that afternoon, and he certainly wasn’t expecting his supervisor and trainer, Murray, to lead him over to Steve to introduce the two of them (though that was likely just an excuse to head straight for the sandwiches that were laid out for the meeting).
While Eddie choked on his own tongue trying to spit out some generic, inoffensive greeting, Steve merely watched him with an amused smirk before thrusting his hand out and offering a perfectly friendly “It’s nice to meet you, Eddie, I’m Steve”, as if Eddie didn’t have Steve’s name and face (and stupidly fit body—who the fuck looks that good in a pair of khakis?!) burnt into his memory from the day prior.
Afterward, Murray, who most assuredly did not have a filter of any kind, bluntly commented on Eddie’s awkwardness, then spent the next five minutes trying to determine if it was normal, strangers-meeting-for-the-first time awkwardness, or something more sensational. Eddie stubbornly kept his mouth shut until the meeting started.
Wednesday followed a similar pattern, with Eddie flouncing into Chrissy’s office with a dramatic “I choose to break my blood oath. At this point I’d welcome the sweet release of death if it meant I didn’t have to work here anymore.”
Chrissy just corrected him, patiently explaining that he was employed at-will, rather than by blood oath, and that if he left before his sixth month, she’d personally skin him alive. Eddie had to pause and weigh the pros and cons of being skinless. Surely it couldn’t be worse than his latest exchange with Steve—via email this time, mercifully.
He’d just learned how to field helpdesk tickets and received one from Steve Harrington himself. It was a simple enough software request ticket, so he assigned it to himself and replied with next steps, asking Steve for a code so he could remote into his computer and install the program.
Steve replied back, asking where he was supposed to find the code. It was an innocuous enough question, but then Eddie noticed something a little off about his email signature: his last name was bolded.
Eddie ignored it, assuming it was a stylistic choice—nothing to read into, surely—but then Steve sent another email shortly after to let him know to disregard his last email; he’d found the right app and was just waiting for it to generate a code. This time, Harrington was bolded and at least two sizes bigger than his first name.
Then, in Steve’s third email, sent not a minute later with the requested code, Harrington was bolded, two sizes bigger than his first name, and highlighted yellow—a tactic Chrissy found so hilarious that she had to shoo Eddie out of her office with tears in her eyes so that she could compose herself and actually get some work done.
Thursday was a blessed reprieve from Steve’s unique brand of psychological warfare, but Eddie still somehow managed to royally humiliate himself in front of him. After he slunk into her office and silently pushed a scribbled-on napkin across her desk—
Please accept this letter as my formal resignation from my position as Systems Analyst II at HHH, effective immediately. Effective yesterday. In fact, I’ll pay you back the entirety of my wages earned if we just forget I ever worked here.
—Chrissy tutted at him sympathetically before taking the napkin and reaching over to dab it at the large wet stain on his shirt.
He’d been walking back to his desk from the breakroom when he rounded a corner and bumped into Steve in the hallway. Literally bumped into, bodily contact and surprised yelps and everything. And it probably wouldn’t have been such a big deal, really, if not for the fact that he had a newly refilled mug of coffee in his hand.
“Eddie, oh my god, are you okay?”
No, Eddie wasn’t okay, because he just splashed himself with hot fucking coffee and now Steve Harrington was worriedly fussing over him and tentatively trying to mop up the liquid with his own fucking hands for some reason, and he was embarrassed (and a little turned on?) and he had to get the fuck out of there now.
“I’m okay, sorry, it’s fine—” he managed to squeak before whirling around and scurrying to the bathroom.
So yes, Eddie’s been an absolute mess the past few days, and today is no different.
…Actually, scratch that. Today is different. Today is worse.
“Okay, now spill,” Chrissy says. “What happened?”
With another drawn-out, pitiful groan, Eddie sinks down in his seat and lets his neck hang off the backrest, blinking up at the ceiling.
“Talk to me, Eds,” Chrissy says, concern starting to bleed into her voice. “If he’s actually bullying you, you can file a complaint. I have a form here somewhere.”
Eddie hears her open one of her desk drawers and reluctantly sits up. “He’s not bullying me, Mom,” he says with a huff. “We actually…we talked.”
“You talked?” Chrissy asks, eyebrows raised.
“Yeah, about the elevator. Buried the hatchet and everything. I said sorry, we laughed about it, it’s over and done with.” Eddie’s gaze darts around Chrissy’s desk, searching for something to distract him from the warm and fuzzy feeling growing in his stomach at the memory of their conversation.
“That’s great, I’m so proud of you!” Chrissy says cheerfully. “But wait, if you two are good now…”
Eddie doesn’t want her to ask what she’s about to ask, because the answer might be more embarrassing than all of his other Steve stories combined.
“Why are you still going on about quitting?”
Eddie drops his face into his hands, feeling totally and utterly pathetic. “Um, because I think I’m sort of, kind of, just a little bit…in love with him?”
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tbh I didn’t think I’d be writing a second part, but if strangers on the internet validate me enough, I guess I’ll do anything~
Y’ALL. I’m blown away by the response to part one of this silly lil au. I didn’t reply to any of the lovely comments or tags, but please know if you engaged in any way (or even if you just read the fic and snorted a little through your nose at a bit you found funny) I love you with my entire heart and you’ve made my entire life.
[Now for the tag list, which I’ve never done before. Sorry if you didn’t actually want to be on here! Or, sorry if you’re stumbling upon this post on your own after asking to be tagged and I missed you oops.]
@messrs-weasley @n0-1-important @bornonthesavage @thing-a-ling @eddiemunsonswife @changenamelater @ispyblu @thesuninyaface
@invisibleflame812 @4nemo1egend @ikolanatari @mavernanche @songbird-garden @trashpocket @original-cypher @over7joyed
@commonxsenss @justdyingontheinside @mojowitchcraft @maya-custodios-dionach @justmiiriam @imzadidragonfly @lillemilly @gay-stranger-things @child-of-cthulhu @bleedingoptimism @lemanzanabizarra @melaniehere91
@iswearitsjustme @silver-snaffles @csinnamon-fox @paint-music-with-me @epicsteddieficrecs @sweetcreaturetm @hxneyfarms @bossyknow-it-all @vecnuthy @stevethehairington @anything-thats-rock-and-roll @nburkhardt
@gayngerthings @patchworkgargoyle @violetsteve @henderdads @2btheanswertothequestion
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"A van Dyck," Dream drawled, dragging a light finger along the gilt frame of the painting propped on the top of one of Hob's shelves. Hob really should do something more formal with that. "Interesting thing to have in your living room, Hob."
"I tell people it's a print," Hob said, coming to stand beside him and handing him his tea.
"Oh, but it is not." There was a smirk dancing on Dream's lips, Hob knew without even looking at him directly.
"Makes sense that you'd be able to tell," he sighed.
"Of course. Just how did you come across such a thing?"
"Well, I was still mingling with the aristocracy in the early 17th century. Met some interesting people." He shrugged. "Really should have sold it when I was, well, destitute, but couldn't bear to. Managed to stash it away. One of the few things I have of that time, actually."
"I can only imagine you had more than one valuable thing in your possession over the centuries," Dream mused, sipping his tea. "Why this one?"
Oh, God. He knew, didn't he?
Hob rubbed at the back of his neck. "Reminded me of you."
Hob had never known much about art, particularly back then. He hardly would consider himself a collector and certainly not a connoisseur. But that particular portrait had caught his attention immediately for its similarity to Dream.
The likeness was, indeed, striking. His hair was longer than it had been when they'd met in 1589, sweeping over his shoulders, and his features were half-draped in shadow, but his eyes. Hob would know that haughty, intense gaze anywhere.
He'd never quite discounted the idea that it was a portrait of his stranger, except that he couldn't imagine him having the patience or cause to sit for it, or the desire to be immortalized in that way.
"It is me," said Dream.
"What? Seriously?" Hob turned to stare at him and found Dream already looking back, ethereal and lovely. There was only one lamp on in the living room, night falling around them, and it cast his face in a similar light to the portrait, soft gleaming skin and plunging darkness as backdrop, limitless shadow in his eyes. "You, allowing a portrait? You're not having me on?"
"I do not joke." Dream took a step closer to him, setting his tea aside on a table. "I suppose I must have been in good humor that day."
Hob raised both eyebrows. "Oh, uh-huh, you in good humor?"
Dream's lips ticked up in a half-smile. "It happens occasionally."
Hob leaned against the shelf, careful not to jostle the painting. "For someone who so disdains the waking world, you sure are very aware of the art scene."
Dream leaned beside him, tilting his head. "You might consider me a patron of the arts."
Hob chuckled. "A patron? Or an inspiration?" He reached out and dragged his thumb along Dream's lower lip. "Dream?"
"A lover of artists, perhaps."
"I'm sure." Hob swept a hand along his cheek, breaking up the light like he was dragging a wet brush through paint. "You look like you could have stepped right out of that painting right now. You could have stepped out of any painting."
Dream looked at him from under his lashes. "Are you calling me a work of art, Hob Gadling?"
"Always."
Then Hob kissed him, hands framing his beautiful face. Dream was like an artwork, constant in essence but changing interpretation in every new light. Hob could imagine how many people over the centuries had had a fleeting encounter with him and come away changed, just as he had.
Dream hovered near him when they parted. Hob looked over to the painting again. No mere depiction could capture Dream in all of his colors, but it really was a rather good try. Van Dyck had gotten the depth of his eyes just right.
"The Baroque period suits you," Hob told him.
"Now who knows something about art?"
"I've picked up a few things over the years. I'm in love with the world's greatest artist, after all."
Dream moved in as if to kiss him, but paused to speak against Hob's mouth. "There are other works of me out in the world, if you care to seek them out."
"Don't open that challenge because I will do it," Hob informed him, quite seriously.
"I hope so." There was a sharp gleam in Dream's eyes. Hob could only imagine what kinds of paintings might inspire that look. "I look forward to seeing what you find."
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