#SUPERMARKET DATE!!!!!!!!! DOMESTIC ALAN!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[kusanagihaku]

help me hold on to you.

⭢ alan x mc, 2.2k

It is a dance of wants and haves, of budgets and portion sizes, of learning to think for two. It feels like you could do this forever. How easy it is, to be with Alan. How easy he is to love.  or: supermarket date! supermarket date! soft and fluffy domestic alan!!! i love him!!!!! ( º ᴖ º ) // also on ao3

You frown. How is it that whoever runs the campus store can bring in three different types of almond milk, but only one brand of oat milk? 

You weigh both cartons in your hands. Maybe you should just get the almond milk. It isn’t even the good type of oat milk too–

“Y/N?” 

You glance up, only to be met with sea green eyes and arms full of flour and sugar bags. “Kaito!” 

Kaito beams back, golden hair washed a pale yellow under the harsh cold of the store lights. He looks slightly different dressed down, almost like he could be a college student elsewhere in a ratty old hoodie and sweatpants. “I’ve tried that brand of almond milk, it freakin’ sucks. Get the blue carton.” 

You can’t help but laugh. With the strange stocking style of the campus store, you can only ever trust comments of the other students and hope not to step on any culinary landmines. You reach to put both cartons you were holding back when Kaito clears his throat. 

“Why are you wearing a Vagastrom hoodie?” 

Ah. 

You flush, biting your lip. It was colder than you expected this morning when Alan left the bed for his morning run, uncurling himself from around you gently in an effort not to wake you up. But you awoke anyway, body leaning towards his residual warmth like it has every day you’ve woken up in his bed, eyes blurring open to Alan’s fond smile. 

I’ll be back soon, he promised, voice low. Go back to sleep. The sleep-rough of his voice left butterflies at the bottom of your stomach, a small dance of adoration and contentment that lasted long after he shut the door. 

But the cold was sharp, and as Alan’s warmth faded from the blankets you found yourself sitting up and leaning off the edge of his bed until your fingers snagged the yellow hoodie draped across the back of his chair. It smelled vaguely of engine grease, as does everything in Vagastrom, but as you pulled it over your head you were surrounded by sandalwood and summer, by sunlight and sea salt, by Alan. 

The brush of comfort was enough to turn your eyelids heavy and your dreams sweet, until you were awakened again by Alan’s touch on the crown of your head. 

“Y/N?” Kaito peers at you, and you jolt a little. 

“Um,” you say, intelligently. “Ah.” 

It’s not as if you were hiding the fact that you were dating Alan per se, but it… had never really come up in conversation? After all, it is a fairly recent development, and Alan isn’t the type to broadcast news about himself to others. The interactions you’ve had with most of the other ghouls involve mostly you running small errands for them anyway, and less so idle chit-chat. Other than the Vagastrom ghouls (Leo had scoffed the first time he walked in on Alan’s thumb brushing your cheekbone and walked back out, while Sho just smirked and hollered something in Leo’s direction about a bet), you don’t think any of the other students know anything about your relationship with the Vagastrom captain. 

But this is Kaito, one of the first people to befriend you in Darkwick, and now that you’re faced with the opportunity and his guileless eyes, you feel kind of ashamed you’ve never told him about it…

“Did you find it?” A gentle weight rests on the top of your head. A warmth blooms at the base of your throat, sweet and golden, and you briefly forget about Kaito as you lean backwards to smile up at Alan. 

“They don’t have the brand I usually get. Should we get almond instead?” 

Alan nods at you to place the carton in his basket. “Sure.” 

“Sho said he wanted us to pick up some bell peppers too–“ 

“Sorry, what the fuck?!” Kaito’s yelp is startling, and you reflexively jerk backwards into the solid harbour of Alan’s arm. “Since WHEN?!” 

You flush. A sheepish apology balances on the tip of your tongue, but Alan beats you to it. The gruff in his voice is evident as he says, “Your business, Frostheim?” 

Kaito’s eyes grow round. A million little emotions (mostly some frantic type of fear, but tinged with betrayal, you note somewhat despondently) flash across his face before your apology tumbles out. “Sorry, Kaito, I meant to tell you and Luca, but I’ve been so busy-“ 

“It’s okay,” Kaito squeaks, and before you can say anything else he disappears up the aisle, bags of flour dropping in his wake. 

Alan frowns. He pulls you slightly closer, fingers resting lightly on the waist of his hoodie, and there is something so unexpectedly tender in the action it makes your heart feel three times too big. Always soft, always warm. Always gentle, with you. 

You half-expect him to say something about Kaito, but he just sighs. 

“Bell peppers are up front,” he says, instead, and you laugh. 

You end up picking more bell peppers than Sho asked for, if only so you can add the extras to the dinners you cook for the week. Alan picks out spring onions and a new box of white miso; you trade it for a box of red (he has an unopened box of white miso hidden behind his giant tub of protein powder; you unearthed it while searching for his black pepper last week) and toss in an extra yellow onion. 

You spend the most time in the meat section, of course – Alan’s meals consist mainly of grilled meat on rice whenever you’re not around. You watch as he frowns his way through cuts of meat, bending over to trade pork shoulder for jowl, and you resist the urge to smooth out the crease between his brows as he looks between both price tags. 

It is a dance of wants and haves, of budgets and portion sizes, of learning to think for two. It feels like you could do this forever. 

How easy it is, to be with him. How easy he is to love. 

He doesn’t believe it, you know. Where you see caution and care in wrinkles of his palms he sees nothing but bloodstains and bruises, like there is nothing in him that deserves to be held. But oh, the way you’re trying to show him–

It is a whole downpour by the time Alan walks you back from Vagastrom. You are both soaked to the bone, your bangs sticking to your forehead and his yellow vest a dark ochre. 

You invite him in to dry off, of course. He can’t possibly make his way back to Vagastrom like this. 

(You also don’t think he can find his way back in the pouring rain, but you don’t say that part out loud.) 

“I’ve got towels upstairs,” you say, instead, and lead him up the stairs to your room. You pray hard that all your laundry is in its basket and you haven’t left anything stupid out. 

You haven’t, much to your relief, and you invite Alan inside after a cursory glance. You shrug off the wet sop of your jacket and dump it on your desk, heading straight to your closet to where you remember sticking the towels after your last laundry run. 

“You can leave your vest on the desk, I’ll hang it above the radiator to dry,” you tell him, and immediately regret it. Stupid. Stupid of you to think your heart can handle the visual of Alan removing any piece of clothing in your vicinity. 

You are weighing how stupid it would sound to retract your statement, when Alan clears his throat. “Your, um. Your toy is on the floor.” 

You twist around to see your white stuffed rabbit lying on the floor next to your bed. Huh. He must have fallen out when you clambered out of bed this morning, rushing to make your 9am class. 

“Oh, you can just set him back on the bed,” you say, before turning to rummage through your closet for towels. You easily locate your spare one with a triumphant ha!, and turn back to hand it to Alan so he can dry off. 

…only to see him kneeling next to your rabbit, fingers outstretched as if to pick him up, but hesitant all the same. You blink. 

Alan senses your stare, and looks up at you, almost embarrassed. “My hands are dirty.” 

You know what he’s talking about – you’ve spent countless hours staring at his fingers as they fill out your forms, watching his hands twist spanners around bolts, dreaming of what his hands would feel like on the bare of your skin. They’re mostly clean (or as clean as he can get with wiping them on spare rags and rinsing them in the sink), but there is always a line of engine grease lingering under his fingernails he can’t quite get out. 

You understand what he’s talking about too – he looked up at you one afternoon, seated on the worn leather sofa in the Vagastrom garage as he tinkered with the hood of a car. You were balancing a calculator on one knee and a form on the other, trying to figure out why the budget request for Leo’s next mission was so high and trying to look like you weren’t staring too much at the muscles in Alan’s forearms. 

Honour student, he sighed. He set down the wrench. Don’t get involved with me.

You looked up, slightly flustered and alarmed at having been caught, but a protest on the tip of your tongue all the same. He caught the look on your face and shook his head. You don’t want to get mixed up in my life.

You didn’t say anything back then, choosing instead to duck your head to hide the burn in your cheeks, but oh, how you wish you did. 

You want him to know how you’ve noticed that his hands and eyes linger longer on you than most, that he takes extra care to clean up whenever you’re around. You want him to know you’ve seen the sidelong glances he’s thrown at you, too, across the garage, and that you’ve seen the red on the tips of his ears after he leans in a bit too close for a bit too long, the peeks he takes whenever he thinks you’re busy fixing something on his phone. 

You want to show him how his fierce has always been used for protecting, how his heart has always been built to lead. How his hands have always been meant to build and fix and hold and never to hurt. 

You want to tell him that you don’t know what pushed him to make the choices he did all those years ago, but you know that he is more than the product of those choices, more than what those circumstances have made him become. That he’s more than the strength behind his knuckles and the decisions that he’s made, how he’s someone an entire house will rally behind and defend to the death. That he deserves to give himself a chance to go for what he wants, for once. 

You shake your head. You hope he understands, this time. “I don’t mind.” 

When he still doesn’t move, you move to kneel next to him, towel wrung between your hands. The wet green of his hair hangs over his eyes, but you can see him watching you all the same, almost as if you are the hunter and he is the prey. 

“I don’t mind,” you say, again. It comes out as a whisper this time, bullets careening into a moment glass-thin. 

His eyes dart up to meet yours, narrowing and wary, but your hands move before he can speak. The brush of your thumb over the rough of his cheek is feather-light, and you will him to understand what you mean when you lean forward to murmur, “That way, I can fall asleep thinking of you.” 

You feel Alan’s breath catch as you brush your lips against the edge of his mouth, and you can almost hear the cogs in his head turning, slowly, as you pull away. Please understand.

And when he turns to you, when he gives in to himself, finally, when he presses his lips against yours in a controlled kind of recklessness and the thirst of a man who hasn’t felt the cool of water for days and doesn’t quite believe that he can, it feels like he does. 

“Do I have breadcrumbs?” Alan turns to you. You blink, pulled back by the anchor of his voice.

“Mm,” you manage, “I don’t think so, but I do. We can swing by the cathedral to pick it up before heading back to yours?” 

Alan hums in agreement, and bends over to retrieve a tray of pork chops from the freezer display. You can’t help it – you lean over to press a small kiss to his cheek as he straightens, and laugh when he turns to you, confused and slightly startled, smile tugging on his lips and blush climbing up his ears. 

“Thanks,” you say. For everything. 

Alan looks at you, eyes moss-soft, haloed in the artificial bright of supermarket aisle, then places the tray into his basket. He shifts the basket to his other side so he can grab your hand in his free one. “Let’s go home.” 

Yes, you think, tangling your fingers into his. Let’s. 

[221bcumberb]

“A female Sherlock? Why not. I don’t care. Sherlockina… it’s coming soon.” The question had arisen because I had been asking Benedict Cumberbatch about his views on the casting of Jodie Whittaker as the first lady Doctor Who – the Timelord saga until recently overseen by Sherlock’s showrunner Steven Moffat. And for the record, Cumberbatch is all for Whittaker in the role. “It’s an alien so why can’t it be a woman?” he says. “I don’t speak as a fan as I just speak as someone who wants to see Jodie Whittaker’s performance as the Doctor. I think she’s an extraordinary actress and we’re lucky culturally to have got her to agree to do it, let alone any debate about whether it’s right or wrong. Just go for it… Let’s see what happens.”

But back to Sherlock, and underlying Cumberbatch’s relaxed attitude to the gender of the person playing the detective with the pipe and deerstalker, I believe I detect an actor who is perhaps subconsciously letting go of the role that made his name. “Maybe…. maybe”, is his not unexpected reply to the eternal question of whether there will be more of the globally popular updating of Arthur Conan Doyle. And while there almost will be further episodes at some point, there is also little doubt that the 41-year-old actor’s energies are flowing in a new direction. In short, he’s become a producer.

SunnyMarch TV was launched by Cumberbatch and associates in 2013, France’s Studiocanal buying a 20 per cent stake last year, and its first major project is about to be seen on BBC1. The Child in Time is an adaptation of Ian McEwan’s 1987 novel centred on a grieving children’s author, Stephen Lewis, whose toddler daughter has been kidnapped from a supermarket two years earlier. However, it’s rather more lofty and metaphysical – as you’d expect from any Cumberbatch-McEwan axis – than the burgeoning canon of more visceral TV thrillers (The Missing and Thirteen on the BBC alone) about abducted youngsters. “Despite the depths it plumbs and the emotional trauma at the centre of it, it’s a story about salvation and hope and trying to build a future that accepts and encompasses the loss of that child”, says Cumberbatch with his characteristic flood of articulateness. “It’s almost an examination of childhood and time and what happens in trauma with time but also reflections and how the conscious and sub-conscious can slide… it got quite a lot going for it other than just that horrific, horrific central premise.”

McEwan is having something of a screen moment, what with the upcoming movie of his novella, On Chesil Beach, and now this – the first TV version of one of the author’s books. Cumberbatch appeared in Joe Wright’s 2007 film of McEwan’s Atonement, but this particular script landed on his producer’s desk. That he himself took the central role of Stephen Lewis was not simply because he wanted to play him but because starring in his own productions is helping get his company off the ground – “To bring attention to the material and get it funded”, as he puts it. Playing an ordinary person, albeit in extraordinary circumstances, the role is also something of a departure for Cumberbatch, a go-to actor for real-life geniuses (Alan Turing in The Imitation Game or Thomas Edison in the upcoming The Current War), arrogant fictional brainy types (Sherlock, Steven Strange), or troubled and/or ambivalent characters like Julian Assange or Hamlet. Cumberbatch would never claim to be an ‘everyman’. “It’s a part that is a million miles away from a lot of the stuff that I’ve done… especially the more famous one on telly”, he says, [referring to Sherlock]. “It was a challenge. I was bringing a lot more of myself as I sound and as I move through the world. It felt quite naked at times, and there were moments when I thought ‘am I doing enough?’. “I wanted Stephen to be close to myself, so I brought a lot of my own wardrobe in because I wanted to feel it was me rather than someone else I was putting on every day. It’s not often you get into a role by getting out of a role.” On the afternoon we meet, Cumberbatch’s wardrobe consists of navy chinos and trainers, white t-shirt and open grey linen shirt – the same outfit, I can’t help but notice, that’s he’s wearing later when he’s snapped by paparazzi as (according to Mailonline) “he enjoyed a date night with wife Sophie Hunter”.

Cumberbatch and theatre director Hunter were married in 2015 after having known each other for 17 years. The couple have two sons, two-year-old Christopher, and Hal, who was born in March. Did parenthood make the role of grieving father in The Child in Time more difficult for the actor? “I don’t think you have to be a parent to understand”, he says. “It wasn’t a case of ‘Oh, great, I can get my teeth into something whereby I’ll be emotionally wrought because I’m a new dad for a second time’. It just happened that way.” He didn’t take the part home with him then? “I try not to do that whatever I’m doing. Those are very separate spaces for me, and you have to take care of yourself. In a way, you’re literally kind of breaking down for a whole day but that’s what the drama demands; it makes you realise what the pain must be like for people who actually experience it. It’s unfathomable, so you don’t really want to bring that into your own domestic space.” Hunter is joining her husband as a producer on one of SunnyMarch’s new projects, a film adaptation of Megan Hunter’s eco-apocalyptic debut novel The End We Start From (“a stunning tale of motherhood”, according to Cumberbatch). Other movies on his production slate are an adaptation of Matt Haig’s How to Stop Time, Geoffrey Household’s 1939 adventure classic, Rogue Male, and Rio, which will co-star Cumberbatch and Jake Gyllenhaal, while TV dramas in pre-production include screen versions of Edward St Aubyn’s Melrose novels. For reasons given above, what connects the productions, apart from their origins in literature, is that they all star Cumberbatch. But what was it like for The Child in Time to also wear the producer’s hat? “It’s different because you’re there at the inception of the idea and just thinking who would be right to direct it… I’ve never been at that stage of things before”, he says. “I really, really enjoyed it. But it’s not without its challenges, especially watching the work sooner than you should as an actor, in a very raw state to then give feedback about what you feel as a producer. That was tricky.” And watching and then critiquing himself? “It’s horrible and very peculiar – the way you look, the way you do things, it’s just horrible. It’s full of hate but there’s nothing better than the self-critic in your head for brutality. “It’s a first time, we’ll see how it works”, he continues. “Everyone had a great experience making it which is a testament to us doing something right as a production team.” The cast of The Child in Time also includes Trainspotting-to-Boardwalk Empire actress Kelly Macdonald (playing Lewis’s estranged wife), Stephen Campbell Moore and Saskia Reeves. Stephen Butchard adapted it. “I’ve been a McEwan fan since I was old enough to kind of understand stuff… I would read the book almost the minute it came out”, says Cumberbatch. “Atonement was the first book [of his] I read and funnily ended up in a few years later. And The Cement Garden was first the first production I went to. There was a production of it being made when I studied it [at Manchester University] and I thought about auditioning for it and then I thought ‘I can’t do that… I’m not a good enough actor.” The Child in Time was one McEwan novel that evaded his omnivorous consumption, however. “I hadn’t read it”, says Cumberbatch. “And there will be expectations from those who know the novel even though it was released in the late 80s. We’ve re-contextualised it and set it in the present day [because] it’s partly a critique of the Thatcherite era.” In the meantime, in another departure for the actor (“Unlike any character I’ve played before”, he promises) it was announced last week that Cumberbatch will be playing the father of gay bare-knuckle-fighter Mikey Walsh in the film Gypsy Boy. And with so much going on you might think that he wouldn’t have time to make another film in the all-star Avengers superhero series, let alone three. However two more of the multiplex blockbusters in the role of Steven Strange have been filmed, with another in pre-production. “I’m very late to the party but it’s just amazing to be part of it. Anything’s possible especially as I can go like that”, he says, clicking his fingers, “and appear anywhere”. He might equally have been describing his future prospects.

[kusanagihaku]

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