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angelsfalling16 · 4 years

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The Thin Line Between Pretending and Actually Loving You - Chapter 7

Chapter 1 || Chapter 2 || Chapter 3 || Chapter 4 || Chapter 5 || Chapter 6 || Read on ao3

Summary: Simon and Baz have dinner with Baz's family on Christmas Eve.

Word Count: 2372

A/N: Thank you @carryonsimoncarryonbaz for inspiring me to write a nicer, more accepting Malcolm. He didn’t appear for long in this fic, but it was definitely different for me to write a Christmas dinner where he didn’t end up arguing with Baz.

Also, I got the “very close talking” thing from Psych. I've always wanted to use that in a fic.

***

Baz

Simon and I arrive at my parents’ home around noon on Christmas Eve. The big family dinner is planned for tonight, and tomorrow morning is for just my immediate family.

I lead Simon through the first level of my house, introducing him to aunts, uncles, cousins, and their various partners.

Fiona immediately demands our attention from her place on the couch next to her boyfriend, Nico. She starts firing off questions, demanding to know everything about how Simon and I met, and she only stops when I promise to tell her all of the details later. (Hopefully, we will have “broken up” by the time she expects me to make good on that promise.)

After that, we move on to Nico’s sister, Ebb, and her partner, Annie. While Annie is quietly polite, Ebb is a bit more boisterous but kind all the same, pulling Simon into a bone-crushing hug.

After a few cousins who are more interested in whatever is on their phones than meeting my new boyfriend, we end up next to Dev and Niall, who glance between our faces and clasped hands with unreadable expressions before offering Simon genial hellos.

It seems like they may finally be accepting that our relationship is real.

Simon has begun to look a little overwhelmed by the time we make our way to the kitchen, but he still manages to offer up a polite smile when I introduce him to my stepmother, Daphne.

“It is so nice to meet you,” she says to Simon, wiping her hands on a towel before holding one out for him to shake.

He takes her hand for a brief moment before letting his hand fall awkwardly back to his side.

“Nice to meet you, too,” he says quietly.

“Do you need any help in here?” I ask, dropping Simon’s hand and moving farther into kitchen.

“Oh, no. I’ve already finished most of the preparation, so I’m good here. Besides, you should go entertain your guest.”

I try not to blush as my brain supplies me with a few different ways that I could do just that, none of which would be very appropriate at this moment, in a house filled with my relatives.

Careful not to look at Simon, I nod before turning and leaving the kitchen, heading back towards my extended family members, who I would prefer to avoid.

None of my siblings have appeared yet since we walked into the house, so they must be off playing somewhere or hiding. I wish I was still young enough to disappear until dinner was ready. Unfortunately, being a grown up apparently means being forced to make polite conversation with people I don’t usually spend more than a few hours with a couple of times a year.

“Everyone is so nicely dressed,” Simon whispers, stepping closer to me and taking my hand in his again as we head back towards the living room. I have to take a slow breath and remind myself that this is just for show, that he’s holding my hand because he has to, not because he wants to. “I look underdressed in what I’m wearing.”

“You look fine to me,” I say, keeping my tone neutral. “But if you are really worried, I may have something in my old bedroom that you could wear.”

“You’re a bit taller than me. I’m not sure any of you clothes would fit me.”

“We can make it work.”

“Okay,” he shrugs.

Five minutes later, Simon is wearing my clothes, and I can’t take my eyes off of him. It’s a suit that I only ever wore once, but it looks way better on him than it ever could have on me.

Simon

Baz has begun to act weird again. Ever since I stepped out of the bathroom wearing this suit, he hasn’t been able to take his eyes off of me for longer than a few seconds.

I keep waiting for him to tell me that’s something wrong with the way that I look, but he stays silent as we head back downstairs to join his family again.

I should have known when Baz picked me up wearing a stunning, dark green suit that I was underdressed, but I thought that maybe it was just a Baz thing. That was until I walked into mansion-sized home (of course, he grew up in a mansion; it makes so much sense) and everyone was wearing their nicest clothes. And while it’s not like I was wearing a t-shirt and jeans before, I still looked like I was just some guy he had picked up off the street on his way here. I looked completely out of place.

Baz’s suit is only a little long, and while I don’t usually care for wearing suits, it’s different when it’s Baz’s suit that I’m wearing. It obviously isn’t something that he wears anymore since it was still in the closet of his old bedroom, but something about it makes me feel special to be wearing it, like this is where I belong.

It's a ridiculous feeling. I’m only here to convince Baz’s friends that he’s not single. I don’t belong here, and I definitely don’t belong by Baz’s side. As soon as this whole charade is over, I’ll be cast to the side again, and I won’t matter to anyone in this house.

I knew that from the beginning, but it still hurts to think about, so I push that thought away and try to enjoy this afternoon with Baz’s family.

I spend the next hour sitting next to Baz on his couch while he makes pleasant conversation with some of his family members. The entire time, Baz holds my hand, his thumb rubbing idly over the back of hand, never letting go, not even when one of his sisters – Adelaide, I think – climbs into his lap, squealing about how someone (presumably one of their other siblings) is trying to catch her.

Then, it’s time for dinner in the formal dining room where two tables have been set up. The larger one has been set up for the “adults” while a smaller one is off to the side for the kids.

I wish that I could go join the kid’s tables. I’m sure that it would be a lot better than sitting awkwardly with all of these people that I don’t know and have no idea what to say to. Luckily, there is enough food to keep my mouth preoccupied with other things besides talking.

A few minutes into dinner, though, Baz’s father seems to suddenly notice my presence. I didn’t see him before when Baz was giving me a tour of the first floor, but there are plenty of places that he could have been hiding in this giant house.

“Baz,” he says, his voice loud and booming, but also kind-sounding. “I haven’t gotten the chance to meet your boyfriend yet.”

“Dad, this is Simon.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Simon,” his father says, smiling in my direction.

“You, too, sir,” I respond quietly.

“Call me Malcolm,” he says with a dismissive wave of his hand. “‘Sir’ is a little too formal for my taste.”[AH1]

When I imagined actually meeting Baz’s father, I always thought that he would be strict and someone who wouldn’t exactly be welcoming of his son’s new boyfriend. I had only seen him from afar while we were in college, and he looked just as dark and mysterious as Baz always has.

Now, as I sit just a few seats away from him, he pulls me into a pleasant conversation about how he met Baz’s stepmother, and I’m pretty sure that it’s his own way of saying that he’s okay with me and Baz being together. I even begin to relax after a while, feeling increasingly welcome in this place I’ll never be in again, by people I’ll never see again.

Even though I just met these people, I hate that I’ll have to part from them. I’ve never had a big family. (I never had a family at all.) And being welcomed so warmly by someone else’s family makes me realize just how much I’m missing.

Baz must sense the change in my mood because his hand finds my knee

“Are you alright?” He murmurs, just for me to hear.

I nod. “I’m fine.”

“Okay.” He smiles warmly at me before moving his hand back to his own lap, and I miss his touch.

It was stupid of me to offer to be his fake boyfriend when I had feelings for him. Now, I’m counting down the minutes until tonight is over so that we can go our separate ways, and I can go back to pretending like I don’t have feelings for him.

Baz

I expected most of my family members to leave right after dinner was over, but they seem to have chosen to sit around and talk for another hour or two. After a while, I excuse me and Simon from the table, and we go off in search of my siblings.

“Want to go upstairs?” He asks, stepping closer to me once we are away from anyone who would care whether or not we’re acting like a couple. I don’t move away, though. I like having him this close to me.

“And do what?” I ask curiously.

“Just get away for a moment. Maybe make people think that we’re kissing or something.”

“Okay,” I say warily.

His hand slips into mine, and he starts leading me away even though he has no idea where he’s going.

I follow him up the stairs, not saying anything even though I’m dying to ask him what he has in mind. He turns right at the stairs, in the direction of my room, so I assume that that is where he is headed, but after a few more steps he stops and turns to me, a strange look in his eyes.

Then, he steps towards me, backing me up until I hit the wall. My heart begins to race in my chest. I didn’t think he was being serious about the kissing thing, but he keeps moving closer to me.

I freeze for a moment before I shift my weight start to lean forward to meet him. I’m not going to say no to kissing him. Even if it doesn’t mean anything to him.

“You know we’re not actually going to kiss, right?” He asks, looking amused.

“Yeah, of course.” I let go of his hand and lean against the wall, but then he relaxes his stance, leaning towards me until our lips are just a breath apart.

“I thought you said we weren’t going to kiss.” I’m not sure why I’m whispering. No one else is around. I doubt anyone even noticed that we disappeared.

“We’re not.”

“Then, what do you call this?”

He bumps his nose against mine before saying, “I call it very close talking.”[AH2]

“Hmm. That is interesting. I’ve never done this before.”

“Really?” He lifts a brow, and I blush, glad for the darkness.

“Have you?”

“Nope. Just you. But if anyone walks by, it will look like we’re kissing.”

“Maybe we should make it look more convincing.”

“How?” He actually looks interested.

Without saying anything, I wrap my arms around him and pull his body closer, one hand settling on his lower back, the other drifting lower, stopping just before I reach his waistband.

He looks surprised at first, but then he smiles. He slots one of his legs between mine and lift a hand to cup my jaw, and when he touches me, I jerk slightly, and my lips brush his for the briefest of moments. I freeze and force myself not to react and not to push him away. Luckily, he doesn’t say anything about it. He must not care. But I’m not sure whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing.

We stand like that for a few minutes, not saying anything, just staring into each other’s eyes, our lips mere centimeters away. All I would have to do is tilt my head down a bit, and we would be kissing.

But I don’t do that. Because this isn’t real, and Simon doesn’t want to kiss me. I have to remind myself about that until he finally steps back, saying that we’re probably good now.

Nobody came by, and I’m actually relieved about that. That moment felt way more intimate than simply kissing would have, and I’m glad that no one bared witness to it.

This is starting to become too much. It’s getting harder and harder to fight the urge to pull him to me and pour out my feelings for him.

I need this all to be over. It’s easier to hide my feelings for him when I’m not being forced to be so close to him.

By the time most of my family has finally left, I have a plan in mind for how Simon and I can be broken up by New Year’s. It begins the moment that we live this house, and the plan is to tell Simon all about it on the drive to his house, but then Daphne invites us to stay the night.

She says that there is no point in us leaving, just to make the drive back up in the morning. There’s plenty of room in the house for us.

I can see Simon hesitate, but then she mentions the breakfast she has planned for tomorrow, and I have no hope of making it out of this house until late tomorrow afternoon.

It will be fine, I tell myself.

This could actually work to my advantage. Without Dev and Niall here, Simon and I can act less like a couple. And I can plant the idea that our relationship isn’t as strong as it appears in my parent’s heads so that it won’t be too big of a surprise when I announce our breakup in a couple of days.

This will all be fine. I just need to let Simon know that he will finally be free of me in a couple of days. I am sure that he will be delighted to hear this.

[AH1]Thank you @carryonsimoncarryonbaz for inspiring me to write a nicer, more accepting Malcolm. He didn’t appear for long in this fic, but it was definitely different for me to write a Christmas dinner where he didn’t end up arguing with Baz.

[AH2]I got the “very close talking” thing from Psych.

#snowbaz #snowbaz fanfiction #simon snow #baz pitch #tyrannus basilton grimm pitch #carry on #wayward son #rainbow rowell #christmas fake dating #my writing

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mushroommiracle · 6 years

Text

Words

Baz

Simon Snow’s bare feet patter into his bedroom where I’m typing up my lab report on the bed.

Technically, I live with Fiona, but I spend all of my time at Simon and Bunce’s flat. Most nights I end up staying over because Simon says he doesn’t like sleeping alone. It makes sense. Apparently he’s never had his own room before. He had at least one roommate in all of the foster homes he grew up in and when he was at school, he shared our room with me. That coupled with his frequent night terrors, it would be pretty cruel just to leave him alone.

Bunce said that she didn't mind sleeping with him, but Simon said that was weird (and I agreed). And I don’t imagine that Micha fellow would be too happy about his girlfriend sleeping in the same bed as the boy she spends all her time with while he’s stuck over in another country. She suggested a sleeping bag but Simon shut down that idea too. Said he felt bad about it. Typical. That leaves me. And I’m not complaining. Seven years of staring at his sleeping face like the creep I am and now I actually get to be in the same bed as him. There’s no way I’m giving that up. It’s a win-win situation. In more ways than one. I’ve liked the dark ever since I was a kid. Simon would call it “the vampire within me” but I liked it even before I was turned. It was in the dark that my mother’s fire burned brightest. But ever since I was kidnapped by fucking numpties and they kept in a coffin for a month, the darkness just seems suffocating. But I also just like being in his room. It’s so… him. Our room at Watford was too small to really do anything to. And Simon never had anything to decorate his side with. But now he’s got a part time job. (At bloody Starbucks. He probably only applied for the scones). He’s got a room that he can do whatever he wants to with. He’s got time to figure out what his interests are without worrying about the Humdrum or goblins trying to off him.

And his newly discovered interests are: space. Simon is completely infatuated with space. He majors in astrophysics and his walls are covered in posters of nebulas and blackholes. He doodles constellations on his arm whenever a pen is near and he won’t shut up about getting a tattoo of one someday. (“What’s stopping you?” Bunce asks. Simon says he’s afraid of needles and infection. I tell him that being afraid of a puny needle is idiotic when he’s battled literal monsters. Bunce points out that she can magic an infection healed. Simon asks if she can just magic him a tattoo. She tells him there’s not a spell for tattoos. “Well maybe you should work on that, Penny.”) Every few nights when his nightmares get too intense, I take him stargazing to calm him down. Sometimes, if his screams have wandered through the walls and woken her up, Bunce tags along. He lays between us and names the constellations that Bunce and I have known since we were toddlers but Simon had never bothered to learn until now. His eyes are usually red and raw, his face still streaked with tears. His voice and body still trembling from the combination of leftover fear and chilliness. But he loves the stars. He really does. So I do as well.

fantasy novels. Bunce and I have our suspicions that he only likes them because he misses magic so much, but neither of us would ever say so to his face. Somehow Simon had gotten through his entire childhood without reading Harry Potter once. When he mentioned this, of course I went out to buy the full set, but he wouldn’t read it. (“I just can’t do it. I open the book and there’s just so many words. And there’s seven books, Baz.”) Bunce, who was just as mind-blown about this as I was, set him up with an audible account and now he lounges around the house with earbuds dangling from his head. Every night I would ask him where he left off, and he would fanboy over how smart Hermoine was and how mad he was that Cedric Diggory died. I would lay with my hands in his hair, quietly agreeing until we both fell asleep. When he finished it, he was so distraught he barely talked for four days. It took another two days for us to marathon the movies. (We would’ve done it in one but I had class in the morning and I made him swear not to watch them without me.) And then he was done with books again for a solid month. But he kept griping about how he missed having something to do and that he wished he could listen to them all again for the first time. Bunce got fed up with it and downloaded the Percy Jackson books. At first he resisted, saying it felt like he was cheating on J.K. Rowling, but eventually he gave in. (He thinks I’m jealous of his crush on Nico but he is wrong.) Now he listens exclusively to fantasy novels, whether they’re well known or not. He’s got a heavy wooden bookshelf (which was as a bitch to get into the tiny flat) lined with all of the hardcopies. (Which doesn’t make sense because he listens to them all on audible. “It’s for the aesthetic.”) (The box set I got him of the HP books are on their own shelf. That’s so fucking cute. What the fuck.)

So, as I sit on his bed, enjoying the Simon-ness of the room, my boyfriend himself walks in. He’s wearing one of my sweaters. He keeps stealing them even though they’re a bit too big for him. (“It’s what boyfriends do, Baz.”) His lips are in a pout; his eyebrows are furrowed. He’s wearing a face that I know all too well. We have a routine by now. I set my laptop to the side so he can crawl into my lap. His arms and legs wrap tight around me and his face is pressing into the crook of my neck. He feels like he’s trying to crawl out of his skin. He’s not crying but I know that if this keeps up, it won’t be long until the tears come. I wordlessly bring my hands up and start drawing circles on his back. I know he loves that. I hum a bit. Occasionally rock side to side. I don’t bother asking him what’s wrong. I know he won’t talk. Can’t talk, rather. Simon has tried to explain it to me, but I still don’t quite understand it. I get that he’s always had trouble with words, but not talking like this is something else entirely. He says it’s like he’s trapped in his own mind. Likes he’s in a never-ending spiral of negativity that his voice doesn’t reach. Sometimes I can get him to respond by asking extremely basic questions. He takes deep breaths and answers in fragments. But usually it’s best just to hold him and let him come out of it on his own. Pushing him is never good. Early in our relationship, before I knew about his periods of silence, I would find him sitting on the couch, staring blankly at his lap, his hands clenched so hard his knuckles were white, and his mouth drawn into a tight frown. I would come over. Ask him what was wrong. Try to get him to talk. Effectively hold a one-sided conversation until it grew into frustration. It always ended with me yelling and Simon curled as small as he could make himself, shoulders bouncing with silent crying, every so often making small squeaking sounds in an attempt to speak.

So now I scratch his back, and hum, and rock. Until I stop scratching his back, and stop humming, and stop rocking. Until I’m just hugging him close and leaning us against the bed frame. After a while Bunce knocks softly on the door and comes in. We nod to each other and she sits next to me on the bed without a word. A few moments pass and I feel Simon turn his head to look at her. His grip around me is loosening but hot tears start to fall onto my shoulder. Bunce gives him a little wave. He shifts so he’s sat snuggled between us, just like when we’re stargazing. He takes a few deep, deep breaths and I can tell he’s coming out of it. Bunce takes his hand. He leans his head into my shoulder again. He brings his free hand to cover his eyes.

“I killed him.”

We’ve been through this before. We’ll go through it again.

#I figured it was only fitting for the first post on my writing blog be the first drabble i posted to tumblr #snowbaz #carry on #rainbow rowell #mushroom mumbles

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