Randominity

Author: randominity
Pairing: Dan/Rupert, pre-slash
Rating: PG
Feedback: OMG, please?
Author's Notes: Part three of a sort of tenuously-related series of ficlets. Uhhhh.... I think I'm done. Thank you to misskittye for beta-ing!
Disclaimer: As not real as a not real thing.
[Part One Here]
[Part Two Here]



Rupert has had exactly three girlfriends and made out with two girls that he wasn't dating, and with one boy. Dan knows this. They haven't discussed it overmuch, though Dan asks sometimes, and Rupert won't lie; he enjoyed it in every case. What he hasn't admitted is that he's thought, before, about what it might have been like to hold Jacob Wilder's hand and curl up together in his bedroom and have his baby sister Charlotte ask if they were going to get married.

Experience, in Dan's eyes, makes Rupert the expert at determining who's gay and who's not. "Hey, do you suppose Matt...." Dan pauses in thought, sitting up and pulling one leg up underneath him. He's watching the television one moment, glancing down at Rupert the next. "D'you think he might be gay?" he asks, and they've had this conversation before. Before Matt, Dan had asked about Tom, and before that it was Hugh, who played Colin Creevey, though Rupert thinks the jury's still out on him.

Rupert can feel his face scrunch in frustration. "Dan, I dunno," he says. He rests his chin on his folded hands, stretched out on his stomach on his bed. He presses his hips into the mattress, experimentally. They've been talking about sex and things, sharing space, ever since they finished running lines and he's... not turned on, exactly, but. uncomfortable. Expectant, somehow. "Why?" he asks. "He come on to you or something?"

"No-- no," Dan says, and falls backwards to lay beside Rupert. "Nothing like that. Just sometimes... he can be, you know. You know how he is."

Rupert does know. Notoriously touchy-feely, is how Matt is. While Rupert doesn't mind at all the way Matt might nonchalantly reach for his hand while they have a conversation, or hook his chin over Dan's shoulder when he's studying, he can see where one might get the impression. "Flirty, yeah."

"I just wonder if there might be anything to it."

"Maybe he is," Rupert agrees, but he doesn't think it's that easy to tell. Things on-set, with the cast, seem to operate by different rules than elsewhere, and he's not about to say that Matt's behaviour is particularly out of place. "Maybe he's not," he adds. "Maybe he's just not sure yet."

"Yeah," Dan says, nodding. "I mean, well, I don't see how you could be, really." He shrugs, crossing an arm over himself and rolling onto his stomach, the other arm outstretched. "It's sort of such a definite thing, isn't it, saying, 'no, I know for a fact that I will never love a person of this type, ever'?"

"Right," Rupert nods.

"Um. Are you?" Dan says softly, gazing up at the television; his main method of avoidance. His glance flickers to Rupert, then down at his hands, and back to Rupert again. "Sure, I mean. Do you know?"

Rupert shrugs. "I don't think so," he admits. "I don't... I don't think I need to be, just yet. I don't think I need to decide, exactly. You know what I mean?"

"Yeah, I do-- I mean, I'm not sure, either," Dan says, not bothering to hide the relief in his voice. "I sometimes..." he adds, uncertain, "I don't know what it would be like, with a boy, but I-- I have dreams. sometimes."

Rupert nods, and shifts a little, no longer merely expectant. Dan's arm, stretched out on the comforter between them, is pale in such a different way from Rupert's, and the hairs have finally started coming in darker than Rupert's own. "That's okay," Rupert says. "I mean, I dream all sorts of crazy things--"

"I know. I know it doesn't - have to mean anything," Dan says. "I just think, sometimes. I wonder."

"I dreamed about my cousin, once," Rupert smiles. "A girl, though."

Dan laughs. "Well, cousins are okay."

"So are men, you know," Rupert tells him.

"I know," Dan says. He flips over to his back again and eyes the ceiling. "Just, when you're- not sure, as you said -"

"It's weird, yeah--"

"I keep wondering if I'm just curious or if I'm really interested," Dan says. He laughs to the ceiling. "Sad, right?"

Rupert shrugs again. "It's not a competition, you know," he says. He is surprised when Dan's hand finds the small of his back, and almost shies away from the touch. Dan is always wanting, and Rupert can't recall ever feeling like that. He can't remember wanting things so much, like he couldn't just have them.

Except, he realizes now, for when it comes to Dan. Dan is always wanting, and suddenly it occurs to Rupert that maybe he is what Dan wants. "You've been flirting with me," he mumbles in disbelief, heat flooding his face. He rolls to his side and Dan's hand falls to his waist. "You--what, you thought I'd--"

"I didn't think anything," Dan insists to the ceiling, before turning to Rupert, high spots of colour appearing on his cheeks. Every maneuver has inched him closer, and now when his hand curls over Rupert's hip, it seems surprisingly deliberate. He licks his lips and to Rupert it feels like an invitation. "I was just. hoping, really," he explains, his grin unsteady.

Rupert's experiences seem only to have taught him how to be agreeable about being seduced. "Okay," he nods, holding his breath when Dan's fingers press into the side seam of his jeans. "All right, then," he says, and smiles back.