Prompt-fill: What We Did On Our Holidays I
Aug. 7th, 2025 11:18 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tweagueSo I was having a particularly awful case of Blorbo Brain this morning, where I just wanted to write nonsense about My Fictional Guys; I'm already writing other stuff about them, but it's quite long and at present quite sad (stuck in the 'hurt' bit of the h/c dynamic for at least another 5000 words, I would guess) and I wanted something to satisfy the brain itch. So I went touting for prompts on the WEJverse Discord, and ysande was good enough to indulge me ^_^ She asked for 'basically every joyous coming of age summer story', and set off about three dozen different ficlet ideas; here's the first of them. It may eventually be the start of a longer story about this particular holiday, the first time Bertie goes to Lorrington, if other ideas spawn around the same time period; in my head it takes place the days before ysande's glorious prompt-fest fill where Gimlet gets sunburn because he's determined to do all the fun holiday things with Bertie, all at once, right now. Unbetaed and scruffy round the edges, but maybe it'll turn into something better later.
Bertie + Gimlet, school age, Gen, c.2k.
* * *
What We Did On Our Holidays I
“Bertie - Bertie, wake up.”
The words weren’t much more than a determined hiss, but the firm shake to his shoulder that accompanied them did the job as well as a shout. Bertie blinked his eyes open, a little groggily. There was a dim suspicion of grey half-light in the gap where the curtains weren’t quite drawn closed, but nothing more definite than that of dawn yet, so it must be frightfully early; and against that faintest hint of daylight, a vague shape that must be King.
“Whatever for?” he managed to croak.
“Come with me.”
“Not a chance,” he said, and attempted to burrow back down under the blankets; but King’s hand on his arm was entirely unyielding.
“Don’t be an ass Bertie. Get up, I want to show you something.”
And because it was King, and therefore a foregone conclusion; and because it was the first morning he had ever been there; and because of the faint note of excitement in King’s voice, and he had found that King’s excitement was something he somehow quite liked to share, he got up.
He had arrived late the previous evening, after a day of delayed trains and being constantly on the point of losing his luggage. It shouldn’t have been possible to take so long to get from Somerset to the borders of Dartmoor, yet there he was, Lorrington station in the midsummer twilight with the scent blowing thick off the tobacco flowers, and him almost the only one there to enjoy it. Then King had arrived, looking very pleased with himself high on an old pony trap, with the reins in his hands and an amused-looking groom taking his ease on the box seat at the back; and it had all started to feel a bit more like an adventure.
He was too old for adventures, of course. Seventeen-year-olds didn’t hold with such things. But driving through the gloom with the carriage lamp swinging beside him as King gave him chapter and verse on the stolid little pony’s virtues and foibles, and the first glow-worms emerged, and the nightjars shirred in the bushes - it felt a little like an adventure, all the same.
He’d been too late for dinner, King had informed him; he’d have a tray of supper sent up to his room. As soon as Bertie had been introduced to his father, of course.
It occurred to Bertie that he had somehow never given much thought to King’s parents; in some vague way he had assumed that he might have sprung into existence fully grown, and possibly armed, much in the manner of Athene. But at least he didn’t have time to work himself up about the encounter, because King led him straight from the hall into the study, and said, “Here’s Bertie Lissie, sir,” in a quiet, level voice, and there was a slim red-haired man looking up from a pile of papers, and freezing him where he stood with a pair of disconcertingly familiar blue eyes.
He was never quite sure, afterwards, what he had said; he only remembered the sensation of cold, like stepping into an ice-house.
“Mother’s already retired for the night,” said King, in a more normal voice, as afterwards he carried Bertie’s suitcase up the narrow, creaking stairs. The house, as they walked through it by lamp-light, seemed to be all in black and white, repeating patterns of black beams, black doors, black stairs, against the white of the walls; but every now and then the pattern would be broken by splashes of colour, walls painted with plants, animals, curlicues of vine and acanthus and stylised birds, old and stiff and strange. “You’ll meet her tomorrow, I expect. I’ll let you settle in this evening - since Father’s study is just at the bottom of the stairs he’s not fond of noise at this time of night. Bathroom’s here - “ as he indicated a door to the left, “and my room’s just across from yours.” He opened one of the many dark, nail-studded doors along the rambling length of the corridor, and went in, to put the lamp down on the bedside table and the case on an intricately-carved linen press at the foot of the four-poster bed.
“Aren’t I going to be in with you?” asked Bertie, a little taken aback.
King frowned. “There’s no need. We’ve got more rooms than we know what to do with.”
“Well, yes, I do quite see that, old thing - Chedcombe’s much the same,” Bertie conceded. “I just wasn’t quite expecting to be treated as a house guest - putting the housemaids to all the extra work, that sort of thing. I’m just as happy mucking in with you, really - “ And then, seeing the expression on King’s face, he hurried on, “though I do quite understand that an Englishman’s room is his castle, of course. Wouldn’t want to batter down the jolly old drawbridge for the world. And this room’s absolutely top-notch, don’t you know - I shall be half the night hunting for peas in the mattress, it looks like just the bed for it.”
King was still frowning. “If you won’t be comfortable in here - “
“It’s splendid, old boy,” said Bertie, putting all the conviction into the words that he could, because it was. “Fit for a king.”
“Was that a pun?” asked King, suspiciously.
Bertie sighed. “Not sure my brain’s working well enough for punning. It’s been an awfully long day.”
King nodded. “Of course. I’ll leave you to unpack. The girl will bring your supper soon.” He left the lamp where it was, and walked back to the open door, where he paused for a moment. “I hope you’ll be comfortable. I’m very pleased to have you here.”
Bertie smiled, and some part of himself that had felt unaccountably chilled since they had arrived in the great dark house seemed to warm a little. “I’m jolly pleased to be here too.”
Now, in the whisper of pre-dawn light, he pulled on yesterday’s shorts and shirt, slipped on his comfortable rubber-soled shoes, and crept out into the gloomy corridor outside his room. “Where on earth are we going at this hour?” Bertie whispered, his mind running on early-morning raids of the larder, of bird-nesting in the park, of taking out the horses King had spoken of so often for a gallop before the dew was off the grass -
“Don’t talk yet,” King replied, hardly more than a breath. “Here.”
Noiselessly, he opened the door opposite, and shut it noiselessly behind them again: a difficult operation with one of those great stiff iron latches, Bertie thought, and wondered how often he had practised. Then he crossed to the window, and pushed aside the heavy curtains just enough to give him access to the diamond-paned window. “How are you at climbing?” he asked, very softly, as he pushed it open.
Not as good as King, was the answer that rapidly became obvious. First a scramble up from an ancient oak chest through the narrow casement and out onto the leads, which here made a narrow flat pathway between the dormer windows and the low parapet that crowned the frontage, and through which a shallow gutter carried rainwater, in a way that Bertie vaguely thought must be desperately prone to leaks. That was easy enough, providing he didn’t look over the parapet too often, to see the yawning gulf from which he was separated only by a crenellation a foot or so high. The next stage - shinning up the leads themselves, up the reasonably gentle angle of the roof where it met a ridge of stones that offered a few finger-holds for support - was only a little more challenging; but the stage after that, where King slipped up and around a barley twist chimney-pot in a way that seemed little short of miraculous, began to test Bertie’s nerve. The air was cool and a little misty; the glazed surface of the chimney-pots very slightly slippery under his hands.
“I say, Lorry old thing, are you quite sure this is all right?” he called forward, a little plaintively. “I can hardly see a bally thing!”
“I’m sure,” King’s voice came floating back. “I’ve done it a hundred times. Just tread where I tread.”
“Not exactly the season for Good King Wenceslas,” Bertie muttered, more to himself than anyone else; but he fixed his eyes on King’s plimsolled feet up ahead, and followed.
Up and along the ridge, a foot on either side, slipping a little unnervingly; up a run of quoins, like a staircase, except a staircase where each tread was only a couple of inches deep; along a piece of moulded stone like a ledge, pressing himself to the wall, trying not to think of how easily stone this old could crumble, or the twenty foot drop to the roof below; and then -
“Nearly there now - just a few more yards. Right hand up and right a little more - there’s a gargoyle under the ivy, it’ll give you a better purchase - that’s it, you’ve got it. Then support your weight on it and bring your right foot across and up, there’s a decently thick branch there, just above your knee height - it’s enough to get your left hand up to the top here - “
- then King’s hand was clasping his wrist, for reassurance as much as steadiness, as he pulled himself up and over the edge and dropped down onto a flat roof, panting with exertion and adrenalin.
“Well done, I knew you could do it,” he heard King say, voice warm with approval. “We’re just in time too. Come and see.”
Slowly, he heaved himself up to his feet again, feeling very slightly shaky, and cautiously made his way across to where King was standing, hands resting against the the top course of masonry, leaning out over nothingness, with his face to the place where, far away to the east, the first ray of the sun had just shot skywards like a firework.
He came and stood next to him, and looked out.
Immediately below them, a tumble of rooftops, tile and lead and slate, different heights, different styles, dropping down around them like a Victorian lady’s skirts; beyond them, the formal gardens, the knots and geometric tangles of box hedges and gravel walks sharply visible; beyond that, the parkland, with great stands of trees, grass already browning in the summer heat, and a herd of deer at their morning forage; and beyond that, a great rolling sea of farmland, grassland, moor and heath, with the sun spilling over it and shreds of mist rising from the rivers. And everywhere the birds were singing.
“I try to come up here the morning after I get back from school,” said King, incongruously matter-of-fact. “Or town, or wherever else I’ve been. Providing the weather’s right for it, of course - not much point coming up if it’s tipping it down.”
“Not to mention that you’d probably break your neck trying,” Bertie murmured.
“I like how you can see everything from here,” King went on. “Look - that’s the river Taw, away there in the distance. It flows all the way up to the sea at Barnstaple. Though some of the other streams round here flow south into the Exe instead - we’re quite close to the watershed here.” And walking around each of the four sides of the tower in turn, he named to Bertie the rivers, the streams, the woods and copses and villages and meadows. “This is where you can see it best,” he finished, coming back to the point where they had begun, and turning to face Bertie for the first time. “Well - this is Lorrington, then,” he said.
There was an expression on his face that Bertie hadn’t seen there before: both complex and oddly open compared to his usually inscrutability. Something like shyness; something like belligerence; something like pride. As if he had wrapped the view up with a bow and handed it to him, and wasn’t sure if he’d regret the gesture.
Impulsively, as if he had been a much younger boy, as if they’d both still been in prep school and King had given him his finest marble, Bertie reached out, and took his hand, and squeezed it briefly before letting go. “Thanks,” he said, not knowing what else to say. “Thanks awfully for having me here, old thing.”
And King smiled: smiled quite brilliantly. “Thanks for coming. Should you like to look over the house today?”
ysande was good enough to indulge me ^_^ She asked for 'basically every joyous coming of age summer story', and set off about three dozen different ficlet ideas; here's the first of them. It may eventually be the start of a longer story about this particular holiday, the first time Bertie goes to Lorrington, if other ideas spawn around the same time period; in my head it takes place the days before ysande's glorious prompt-fest fill where Gimlet gets sunburn because he's determined to do all the fun holiday things with Bertie, all at once, right now. Unbetaed and scruffy round the edges, but maybe it'll turn into something better later.Bertie + Gimlet, school age, Gen, c.2k.
* * *
What We Did On Our Holidays I
“Bertie - Bertie, wake up.”
The words weren’t much more than a determined hiss, but the firm shake to his shoulder that accompanied them did the job as well as a shout. Bertie blinked his eyes open, a little groggily. There was a dim suspicion of grey half-light in the gap where the curtains weren’t quite drawn closed, but nothing more definite than that of dawn yet, so it must be frightfully early; and against that faintest hint of daylight, a vague shape that must be King.
“Whatever for?” he managed to croak.
“Come with me.”
“Not a chance,” he said, and attempted to burrow back down under the blankets; but King’s hand on his arm was entirely unyielding.
“Don’t be an ass Bertie. Get up, I want to show you something.”
And because it was King, and therefore a foregone conclusion; and because it was the first morning he had ever been there; and because of the faint note of excitement in King’s voice, and he had found that King’s excitement was something he somehow quite liked to share, he got up.
He had arrived late the previous evening, after a day of delayed trains and being constantly on the point of losing his luggage. It shouldn’t have been possible to take so long to get from Somerset to the borders of Dartmoor, yet there he was, Lorrington station in the midsummer twilight with the scent blowing thick off the tobacco flowers, and him almost the only one there to enjoy it. Then King had arrived, looking very pleased with himself high on an old pony trap, with the reins in his hands and an amused-looking groom taking his ease on the box seat at the back; and it had all started to feel a bit more like an adventure.
He was too old for adventures, of course. Seventeen-year-olds didn’t hold with such things. But driving through the gloom with the carriage lamp swinging beside him as King gave him chapter and verse on the stolid little pony’s virtues and foibles, and the first glow-worms emerged, and the nightjars shirred in the bushes - it felt a little like an adventure, all the same.
He’d been too late for dinner, King had informed him; he’d have a tray of supper sent up to his room. As soon as Bertie had been introduced to his father, of course.
It occurred to Bertie that he had somehow never given much thought to King’s parents; in some vague way he had assumed that he might have sprung into existence fully grown, and possibly armed, much in the manner of Athene. But at least he didn’t have time to work himself up about the encounter, because King led him straight from the hall into the study, and said, “Here’s Bertie Lissie, sir,” in a quiet, level voice, and there was a slim red-haired man looking up from a pile of papers, and freezing him where he stood with a pair of disconcertingly familiar blue eyes.
He was never quite sure, afterwards, what he had said; he only remembered the sensation of cold, like stepping into an ice-house.
“Mother’s already retired for the night,” said King, in a more normal voice, as afterwards he carried Bertie’s suitcase up the narrow, creaking stairs. The house, as they walked through it by lamp-light, seemed to be all in black and white, repeating patterns of black beams, black doors, black stairs, against the white of the walls; but every now and then the pattern would be broken by splashes of colour, walls painted with plants, animals, curlicues of vine and acanthus and stylised birds, old and stiff and strange. “You’ll meet her tomorrow, I expect. I’ll let you settle in this evening - since Father’s study is just at the bottom of the stairs he’s not fond of noise at this time of night. Bathroom’s here - “ as he indicated a door to the left, “and my room’s just across from yours.” He opened one of the many dark, nail-studded doors along the rambling length of the corridor, and went in, to put the lamp down on the bedside table and the case on an intricately-carved linen press at the foot of the four-poster bed.
“Aren’t I going to be in with you?” asked Bertie, a little taken aback.
King frowned. “There’s no need. We’ve got more rooms than we know what to do with.”
“Well, yes, I do quite see that, old thing - Chedcombe’s much the same,” Bertie conceded. “I just wasn’t quite expecting to be treated as a house guest - putting the housemaids to all the extra work, that sort of thing. I’m just as happy mucking in with you, really - “ And then, seeing the expression on King’s face, he hurried on, “though I do quite understand that an Englishman’s room is his castle, of course. Wouldn’t want to batter down the jolly old drawbridge for the world. And this room’s absolutely top-notch, don’t you know - I shall be half the night hunting for peas in the mattress, it looks like just the bed for it.”
King was still frowning. “If you won’t be comfortable in here - “
“It’s splendid, old boy,” said Bertie, putting all the conviction into the words that he could, because it was. “Fit for a king.”
“Was that a pun?” asked King, suspiciously.
Bertie sighed. “Not sure my brain’s working well enough for punning. It’s been an awfully long day.”
King nodded. “Of course. I’ll leave you to unpack. The girl will bring your supper soon.” He left the lamp where it was, and walked back to the open door, where he paused for a moment. “I hope you’ll be comfortable. I’m very pleased to have you here.”
Bertie smiled, and some part of himself that had felt unaccountably chilled since they had arrived in the great dark house seemed to warm a little. “I’m jolly pleased to be here too.”
Now, in the whisper of pre-dawn light, he pulled on yesterday’s shorts and shirt, slipped on his comfortable rubber-soled shoes, and crept out into the gloomy corridor outside his room. “Where on earth are we going at this hour?” Bertie whispered, his mind running on early-morning raids of the larder, of bird-nesting in the park, of taking out the horses King had spoken of so often for a gallop before the dew was off the grass -
“Don’t talk yet,” King replied, hardly more than a breath. “Here.”
Noiselessly, he opened the door opposite, and shut it noiselessly behind them again: a difficult operation with one of those great stiff iron latches, Bertie thought, and wondered how often he had practised. Then he crossed to the window, and pushed aside the heavy curtains just enough to give him access to the diamond-paned window. “How are you at climbing?” he asked, very softly, as he pushed it open.
Not as good as King, was the answer that rapidly became obvious. First a scramble up from an ancient oak chest through the narrow casement and out onto the leads, which here made a narrow flat pathway between the dormer windows and the low parapet that crowned the frontage, and through which a shallow gutter carried rainwater, in a way that Bertie vaguely thought must be desperately prone to leaks. That was easy enough, providing he didn’t look over the parapet too often, to see the yawning gulf from which he was separated only by a crenellation a foot or so high. The next stage - shinning up the leads themselves, up the reasonably gentle angle of the roof where it met a ridge of stones that offered a few finger-holds for support - was only a little more challenging; but the stage after that, where King slipped up and around a barley twist chimney-pot in a way that seemed little short of miraculous, began to test Bertie’s nerve. The air was cool and a little misty; the glazed surface of the chimney-pots very slightly slippery under his hands.
“I say, Lorry old thing, are you quite sure this is all right?” he called forward, a little plaintively. “I can hardly see a bally thing!”
“I’m sure,” King’s voice came floating back. “I’ve done it a hundred times. Just tread where I tread.”
“Not exactly the season for Good King Wenceslas,” Bertie muttered, more to himself than anyone else; but he fixed his eyes on King’s plimsolled feet up ahead, and followed.
Up and along the ridge, a foot on either side, slipping a little unnervingly; up a run of quoins, like a staircase, except a staircase where each tread was only a couple of inches deep; along a piece of moulded stone like a ledge, pressing himself to the wall, trying not to think of how easily stone this old could crumble, or the twenty foot drop to the roof below; and then -
“Nearly there now - just a few more yards. Right hand up and right a little more - there’s a gargoyle under the ivy, it’ll give you a better purchase - that’s it, you’ve got it. Then support your weight on it and bring your right foot across and up, there’s a decently thick branch there, just above your knee height - it’s enough to get your left hand up to the top here - “
- then King’s hand was clasping his wrist, for reassurance as much as steadiness, as he pulled himself up and over the edge and dropped down onto a flat roof, panting with exertion and adrenalin.
“Well done, I knew you could do it,” he heard King say, voice warm with approval. “We’re just in time too. Come and see.”
Slowly, he heaved himself up to his feet again, feeling very slightly shaky, and cautiously made his way across to where King was standing, hands resting against the the top course of masonry, leaning out over nothingness, with his face to the place where, far away to the east, the first ray of the sun had just shot skywards like a firework.
He came and stood next to him, and looked out.
Immediately below them, a tumble of rooftops, tile and lead and slate, different heights, different styles, dropping down around them like a Victorian lady’s skirts; beyond them, the formal gardens, the knots and geometric tangles of box hedges and gravel walks sharply visible; beyond that, the parkland, with great stands of trees, grass already browning in the summer heat, and a herd of deer at their morning forage; and beyond that, a great rolling sea of farmland, grassland, moor and heath, with the sun spilling over it and shreds of mist rising from the rivers. And everywhere the birds were singing.
“I try to come up here the morning after I get back from school,” said King, incongruously matter-of-fact. “Or town, or wherever else I’ve been. Providing the weather’s right for it, of course - not much point coming up if it’s tipping it down.”
“Not to mention that you’d probably break your neck trying,” Bertie murmured.
“I like how you can see everything from here,” King went on. “Look - that’s the river Taw, away there in the distance. It flows all the way up to the sea at Barnstaple. Though some of the other streams round here flow south into the Exe instead - we’re quite close to the watershed here.” And walking around each of the four sides of the tower in turn, he named to Bertie the rivers, the streams, the woods and copses and villages and meadows. “This is where you can see it best,” he finished, coming back to the point where they had begun, and turning to face Bertie for the first time. “Well - this is Lorrington, then,” he said.
There was an expression on his face that Bertie hadn’t seen there before: both complex and oddly open compared to his usually inscrutability. Something like shyness; something like belligerence; something like pride. As if he had wrapped the view up with a bow and handed it to him, and wasn’t sure if he’d regret the gesture.
Impulsively, as if he had been a much younger boy, as if they’d both still been in prep school and King had given him his finest marble, Bertie reached out, and took his hand, and squeezed it briefly before letting go. “Thanks,” he said, not knowing what else to say. “Thanks awfully for having me here, old thing.”
And King smiled: smiled quite brilliantly. “Thanks for coming. Should you like to look over the house today?”
no subject
Date: 2025-08-10 07:21 am (UTC)Bertie suggesting that he bunk in with Gimlet, and Gimlet being ‘Absolutely not.'
lolololol, yeah I don't think that was ever on the cards
this scene has been going around in my head for days because I just needed them to be sleeping together and your comment made me pin it down
It had started raining some time in the night, and Bertie had been dimly, pleasantly aware of it. Soft rain against the shining windows of Gimlet’s suite at the Ritz, a carafe of very good port between them, and the electric heater warm at their feet. But by the time the time Bertie stretched, luxuriously, and stood, and drained the last of the glass in his hand - he looked outside and was dismayed to see the gentle rain had turned into relentless sleet and gusting winds, lashing the empty streets below with grim and icy vigour.
'Dashed unsporting of the weather,’ Bertie complained. ‘After such jolly night, as well. How’s a chap meant to get home in this?’
'I’ll have them ring for a cab,’ Gimlet said, rising as well. He looked, unexpectedly, as ready for bed as Bertie was.
'In this rain, at nearly two in the morning? I’d be home sooner if I walked,’ said Bertie, gloomily.
'Not without a fairly convicing drowned cat impersonation,’ Gimlet pointed out, to whom a drenching was acceptable if it was a bath, a swim, or in the pursuit of some greater purpose - walking home in the rain in a city in which taxi cabs existed not falling into any one of those categories.
Bertie looked sadly out the window at the driving rain, and at the clock again. ‘I say, Lorry, let me bunk here for the night, won’t you? It’s nearly morning as it is. I’m sure it’d amount to much the same thing if I waited here for a cab to arrive.’
Gimlet frowned. ‘I thought you were happy to walk.’
'I said no such thing,’ protested Bertie. ‘I just pointed out the flaw in your taxi cab plan. Be a sport - how many times have we shared a tent or a cabin or a bothy?’
'That’s not the same at all,’ Gimlet said at once.
'Near enough as to make no difference,’ Bertie pleaded. ‘I promise not to kick or take all the blankets or complain about you snoring.’
Gimlet fixed him with an intensely displeased eye.
'Not that you ever would,’ Bertie amended, hastily. ‘Just going through the things I give my solemn word not to do. Besides,’ he added plaintively, ‘could you really sleep soundly if you knew I was trudging all the way back to Mount Street in that Boreatic tempest?’
'Yes,’ said Gimlet icily, and Bertie believed him. Then Gimlet sighed, and relented. ‘Very well. I expect you won’t make a habit of it.’
'Not the sort of thing I’d ask of you except in the direst of emergencies,’ Bertie assured him, to a resultant unamused look. ‘Jolly grateful for your forbearance, old boy; the next time it’s someone’s turn to change a flat in the rain, I’ll do it with uncomplaining will.’
'Hm,’ was all of Gimlet’s response, in very clear tones that showed he did not, in any way, consider that to be an equal trade at all. Still, they got ready for the night in a familiar and practised rhythm, although Bertie’s usual routine did not typically finish in borrowed silk pyjamas, wrists and ankles sticking comically out from the perfectly tailored lengths. He had slept in much worse conditions, though, and so had Gimlet, both before the war, and after, and that was saying nothing of the war itself. Bertie snuggled in on the far edge of the bed, accommodating Gimlet’s clear preferences and already generous compromise, and yawned.
'G’night, Lorry,’ he murmured, and closed his eyes, and listened to the measured, even breathing of his friend beside him, and slept.
He half-woke in the darkness, although he couldn’t pinpoint what had woken him. Perhaps the lack of the steady and relaxed sounds of sleep that his subconscious had been using as a sort of metronome for dreaming; perhaps a sudden and startled movement from either one of them. But Gimlet had never been a restless sleeper in all the time that Bertie had known him, and he was very still now. Too still - none of the loose-limbed repose of easy sleep. Bertie drowsily stretched an arm across the careful distance left between them, and met a tense shoulder, and lay a reassuring hand on it. Breathed out, and breathed in, and went willingly back to sleep.
The next time - the next time, he didn’t even surface enough from dreams to count as half-awake, as though even his dream-self knew that some things did not belong in the waking world. He lay curled on his side, and there was the weight of a sleeping arm atop him, and the press of a warm figure behind him, not familiar, but not foreign, somewhat like catching a glimpse of oneself in a mirror, after weeks and months without having one. There was a face, pressed close against his shoulder blade, breath warm and even against his back, and Bertie relaxed entirely, and slept through until morning.
He had felt the gentle dip and spring of the bed as Gimlet had gotten up, of course, but he let it pass over him like the sounds of the street stirring below, like the sliver of daylight that peeked from the boundary between the heavy curtains. Evidence of the world waking around him, but with no call on him to do the same.
He waited until Gimlet reappeared, bathed and dressed and faintly scented of bergamot and sandalwood, before he stretched and rose for the day.
'I’m not surprised the Ritz is the favoured destination for the rich and famous, now that I know what their beds are like,’ Bertie told him appreciatively. ‘Not sure when I’ve had a better sleep. Although maybe part of it was being appropriately grateful of the shelter you gave me from the rain. I can see it’s properly cleared up now, so I can be safely out of your hair, old thing.’
'I suppose,’ said Gimlet, smiling and more relaxed than Bertie had seen him for some time, ‘there’s no harm in feeding and watering you as well.’
And that, Bertie thought happily, was a most satisfactory result.
no subject
Date: 2025-08-10 02:04 pm (UTC)‘I promise not to kick or take all the blankets or complain about you snoring.’
Gimlet fixed him with an intensely displeased eye.
'Not that you ever would,’ Bertie amended, hastily.
and
'Besides,’ he added plaintively, ‘could you really sleep soundly if you knew I was trudging all the way back to Mount Street in that Boreatic tempest?’
'Yes,’ said Gimlet icily, and Bertie believed him.
- are both *so* beautiful, and YAY for Gimlet's snoring that he would absolutely flat refuse to believe in, even if anyone in his life plucked up the courage to tell him about it. I LOVE THEM SO MUCH.
BUT THEN OF COURSE GIMLET GIVES IN because it's Bertie and they've danced this dance so many times before, Bertie the only person who's really found the magic formula for getting Gimlet to acknowledge the importance of things (people) beyond himself and his own comfort and preferences and world-view, and it's just a matter of *being Bertie*.
And then omg the whole rest of the ficlet: I just died, repeatedly and happily. Bertie trying his best to accomodate himself to Gimlet's stated wishes and keep his distance, comfortably fitting himself to the sound of his friend's breathing and the rhythm of his sleep; and so attuned to them that their disruption is enough to wake him when there's something wrong, and reaching out *just enough* that it's more than Gimlet asked for and more than he probably thought he wanted, but somehow it's *precisely* what he needs. I love love love that you don't tell us what's the problem with Gimlet - is it nightmares? Insomnia? Intrusive thoughts? Discomfort with the situation, discomfort with how he feels about it? Dunno, and nor does Bertie, but he does the only thing that Gimlet could comfortably accept - reaches out, just enough to show he's there, and goes to sleep again, reassured and reassuring and not infringing Gimlet's rather rigid boundaries.
AND THEN when he half wakes again and finds Gimlet pressed up against him - oh I love that paragraph *so much*, it's so beautifully written and thoughtful and gorgeous, dream-like and a little distant, but warm and physically comforting and comfortable and straight-forwardly loving, all those things they have trouble negotiating in their waking lives <3 <3 <3 <3 'as though even his dream-self knew that some things did not belong in the waking world... not familiar, but not foreign, somewhat like catching a glimpse of oneself in a mirror, after weeks and months without having one.' SO ENTIRELY DEAD.
And then Bertie allowing Gimlet to get up and wash and re-arm himself into his daytime self before showing he's awake 😭 he's such a dear and I love him so. And Gimlet happy and relaxed and rested, and the idea that whatever was wrong it's been wrong for a while but Bertie's presence helps to soothe it 😭 😭 I am a wreck, I need this infinitely. Thank you so muuuuuch <3 <3
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Date: 2025-08-11 12:52 pm (UTC)And Bertie knows just how much he can push, and would know exactly when to back off and accept that he’s going to walk home in the rain, if that’s necessary - but he knows that it won’t be, because he knows Gimlet!
And Gimlet here really is offering up a slice of his vulnerability to Bertie - whatever’s been troubling him (and I’m not quite sure what it is, either, only that sleep has been unusually difficult these last few weeks, and he’s not distressed by it, exactly, he’s entirely capable of compartmentalising it and trusting that it will sort itself out, but in the mean time he is tired, and more importantly he doesn’t want to embarrass himself or reveal too much to Bertie, and it takes a little time for him to decide that he’s willing to do that, because it’s Bertie who’s asking <333 (and the irony being that he absolutely wouldn’t be able to sleep if Bertie had to walk home in the rain)
I am just so unreasonably obsessed with them both!! 😭😭😭