#What Happens In Vegas | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

alchemistc · 2 months ago

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There are tiny firefighters checking the integrity of the roof in a grid pattern directly on his brain.

The first thought comes as he's filtering towards wakefulness: Ow.

He needs maybe a gallon of water, and for the sun to stop being so fucking bright, and for -

His arm is pinned by something. That's - there's something wrong with that. Why is that wrong?

Tommy snaps his eyes open and immediately regrets it. The sun is too bright, and the bed he's in is too small, and the ceiling spins as he tries to get his bearings.

No clothes.

Sore muscles that don't have anything to do with the roiling of his gut or the nausea as he tries to focus or the way his brain feels too big for his skull.

He's a little afraid to turn his head, so he makes do with shifting his eyes to attempt to figure out why there's weight on his arm.

His stomach lurches dramatically, and Tommy squeezes his eyes shut. Not fucking again.

It's like he can't fucking help himself.

Tommy had known he'd regret agreeing to go to this damn bachelor party. Gregson is a good guy, but his best man is absolutely insane and apparently loaded - they'd all wandered in to the hotel to check in only to find they each had a room, a new suit somehow tailored to their measurements (that was a feat, considering), an itinerary laid out on each bathroom sink that included the places Tommy only ever went to when a buddy took him, and (if he's not mistaken, he'd immediately dropped his off at Gregson's brothers room) a little box neatly filled with party drugs.

It'd been fine, up until they'd split off. Gregson's best man had mentioned something about escorts, and about a third of the married men had turned to Tommy in a panic, like Tommy's sexuality was the only thing that could be a good enough excuse not to cheat on their wives, and Tommy hadn't had the heart to tell them there were definitely male sex workers and they were definitely the kind of thing Gregson's best man would be able to find in a heartbeat. He wasn't interested, anyway. If Tommy found someone to sleep with on this trip, he'd find them him-fucking-self.

So he'd made an excuse. Told Gregson they'd meet him in the bungalow the next afternoon. Six panicked men had followed after him like lost ducklings, across the lobby of the hotel and out into the cooling night.

He'd found a quiet looking bar off the strip, set them all up at the pool tables, and downed three shots in a row the moment he saw a flash of wide shoulders and curls.

It was a problem.

Tommy wasn't a fucking saint. He'd ripped his own heart out of his own damn chest, and sometimes the only medicine to try to heal that still bleeding wound was an ill-advised hookup with someone he'd never see again. Problem was, every guy that'd caught his eye in the last six months had a few of the same features. Tousled curls, blue eyes, a barrel chest, cheeks he could sink his teeth into. He did it because it felt like an apt punishment.

The guy on his arm groans. Shifts his weight. Rolls a shoulder and spins into the cradle of Tommy's armpit.

Tommy risks a peek and regrets it immediately.

"Morning," he says, and Tommy has spent months successfully avoiding this, how did he cross state lines and stumble right into it?

What the fuck happened last night?

Evan's thigh hitches up over Tommy's, criminally, perpetually cold foot tucking into the space between his legs. He slides a hand up the shifting muscles of Tommy's abdomen and there's a flash of memory there - Evan Buckley's eyes going dark and cloudy when he realized that Tommy had trimmed back up post breakup: no more gentle give to his tummy because there was no Evan cooking decadent meals three times a week that Tommy burned off in bed instead of the gym.

The hand glides up, fingers reaching to tweak a nipple, and Tommy turns his gaze to that instead. He can't look, can't see, can't -

"Is that -?"

Tommy ignores every muscle in his body protesting as he snatches at Evan's hand. His left hand.

His left hand that has a gold band settled on the third finger.

Tommy risks running his thumb over his own finger and - yeah. There's skin warm metal on his hand, too.

He waits for the panic. The terror. The absolute agony of knowing what kind of shit drunk Tommy dropped him in.

Only.

The gap in his memory is slowly filling in.

The two of them, buzzed but steady, eyeing each other across the little patio table tucked out back between the bar and a little nickel slot casino. The glittering lights above turning Evan golden as he acknowledged that the both of them had been idiots. Tommy, feeling that draw, the pull that no amount of curly hair or blue eyes on a stranger could replicate. The hand that reached for his when he'd admitted how fucking much he'd missed him.

Evan's expression when Tommy had dropped the stoicism and called him Evan again.

The longer Tommy stares at Evan's hand, the smaller the goofy smile on Evan's face becomes.

He moves like he's going to roll away, so Tommy brackets him in, tucks his face into the disaster of Evan's hair and breathes. "It's...slowly coming back, but uh... was this your idea or my idea?"

"What, running into each other in Vegas at a dive bar off the strip?"

Oh. He's - well, he sounds a little mad.

Doesn't stop him from sinking his teeth into the side of Tommy's pec, though.

"Or actually having the conversation you've been refusing to have with me for months?"

Another bite. Sharper, pointed this time.

"You made us go to three different chapels because you didn't like the look of the Elvis in the first two."

So. Tommy's idea, then.

He can see the edges of it. The of all the bars in all the world mentality that had given him the courage to say his piece, to listen to Evan's. The rightness of Evan's hand in his own, the absurd joy that sizzled under his skin when Evan raised their intertwined hand to press his lips to Tommy's knuckles.

Evan forces himself up, out-muscles Tommy and ignores the tractor beam of light that darts across his face so he can stare Tommy down. "Do you want me to go?"

Tommy wonders where the marriage certificate is. He thinks blindly of the joke about eating it - good luck returning me without the receipt.

"Did we actually sit down and write vows on our phones before we left the bar?"

Hours. Two more rounds of shots and maybe three beers each while they dissected every fucking misstep they'd taken those first six months. He hadn't been sober when he'd thrown it out there, but he hadn't been wasted either.

Tommy doesn't believe in fate. In curses, or the guiding hand of the universe, or soul mates.

But the coincidences seemed stacked, last night. Like this was all inevitable. Like eventually they'd be led back to each other no matter how many times Tommy found a poor substitute, no matter how many times Evan dipped his toes in and found he just wasn't as interested in someone new as he'd hoped he might be.

"I liked the bit about boils and all," Evan murmurs, and Tommy - well, he has to kiss him about that, doesn't he?

This doesn't solve anything. They've spent six months apart. They've got a share of issues that'd make a grown man weep. They - God, did they even say the words last night? He doesn't think they said the words.

Evan breaks the kiss to look him square in the eye, like he's read Tommy's mind. "I love you. I never stopped. Is that - is that enough, for now?"

Tommy feels light as a feather. Bright, and happy, and terrified out of his fucking mind. "Evan. I love you. We should get a divorce."

He narrows his eyes. Twists the ring with the pad of his thumb. "I think we could probably just do an annulment." Tommy laughs. Evan's vows are coming back in bits and pieces as his gaze in this moment mirrors the one he'd had on his face with a mildly better Elvis impersonator standing between them. Platitudes about not finding something but making it. Fancy words that only meant something because Evan wanted them to. Because Tommy did.

"I'm keeping the ring," Tommy says, and Evan's grin splits down the middle as he leans back in, somehow not bothered in the least by Tommy's morning breath.

#bucktommy #bucktommy fic #what happens in vegas #tevan fic #any excuse to get these two idiots to talk about things

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evita-shelby · 3 months ago

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The Wandering

summary: the Nelsons visit the Wandering Jew on Halloween and Rose makes the mistake of asking Eva to investigate the ghost as well as the strange vibe the hotel has.

cw: mentions of injuries and blood, fascism, drinking and unsafe witchcraft, cheating

rose and alfie(as well as their stories) belong to @justrainandcoffee

Their first trip after the pandemic was to London to visit Katie and her husband.

Its Halloween and because they don’t want to make things awkward with his sister and her husband ---because Eva has baby fever after seeing his baby niece---, they stay at the Wandering Jew.

They knew the owners, Rose and Alfie even if neither Jack nor Alfie could stand each other. They were more Eva and Katie’s friends than his and suddenly he and Alfie are sharing a rum bottle because Rose swears there’s a ghost in this place and Eva dabbles in witchcraft.

Jack wouldn’t lie and say he doesn’t believe her if their room and the hall it was didn’t give him a nauseating sense of déjà vu.

The painting with a red bearded knight and the lady that reminded him of Eva had been the first, then the dent on the simple candleholder felt like he’d been the one to drop it and the bed board ,to top it all off, had their initials in a heart with today’s date.

“Do you think it’s safe?” Alfie asks Jack who he assumes knows the answer as he takes another candy from the obnoxiously huge bag of Halloween candy they’d brought from the States at Rose’s request.

“Fuck if I know.” Jack takes a swig of the rum bottle having no fucking clue what this will bring.

And then they woke up alone in the waiting room with a hangover. The Hotel looked the same when he went upstairs to his room expecting to find a sleeping Eva who’s going to tease him for getting blackout drunk last night.

The door opens to reveal a medieval castle, Eva dressed exactly like the woman in the painting and talking like she’s in a Shakespearean play. And because he thought it was just a crazy sex dream, he let Princess Eva led him to the bedroom only to find himself alone and back in the hall of the Wandering Jew.

Not only that he is wearing the heavy steel armor, but the red beard he’d kill to grow out like that and even worse, completely sober.

Had to be a dream, must’ve been the rum, the candy and the takeout they had last night.

“Fucking hell, what sort of ritual did Evie do?” Alfie, dressed in simple medieval clothes, appears from a different room.

One moment they’re trying to communicate with the ghost haunting the place and the next Eva’s the princess in the painting.

She’d assumed it was a dream and didn’t stop the Knight from trying to fuck her and calling her his wife. After all, it was Jack in the armor and of course she’d be turned on by him in 17th century armor. Then she went out the door to see the rest of the castle only to find herself dressed in the same clothes the knight was supposed to be taking off her.

A little disappointing, to be honest, Knight!Jack had promised to go down on her and it’s been so long since Jack had his beard that long.

“Am I dreaming? I was just in the most beautiful cottage, and I was going to go outside to see Alfie and now I’m back here, wearing this!” Rose is still dazed from whatever she saw. “Where are we?”

“I have no fucking clue.” The witch answered wanting to know if she can go back to that fantasy she just left. Taking Rose’s hand to try something, she opens Rose’s door.

It is not the medieval cottage she’d described. This time they are in none other than the motherfucking Titanic. They don’t even have time to admire their beautiful clothes as they run behind Alfie hoping to get off the fucking boat.

But they can’t get on that boat, they came through a door and any door there would return them to dry land in the haunted hotel. In a moment of confusion, they leave Alfie Solomons and stumble out of the hotel room wearing the clothes of high society women in 1912.

If there was a way to keep them, Eva would do it in a heartbeat. Still, she throws the jewelry into the vase just in case.

“I hope the next one is in the modern world.” Jack complains as they walk back to the hall from the magical woodland they left.

They were dressed in fantasy-medieval-esque clothing, it was not the steel armor but the American’s breeches were a little too snug and he looked like fucking Fabio complete with long flowing locks while Alfie looked more comfortably dressed.

Alfie doesn’t change much; Jack just moments ago had a sick ass beard covered in his normal body hair and now he’s as smooth as a fucking dolphin.

“Next time Evie does her voodoo shit, I’m kicking the two of you out of my hotel.” Alfie stares at his hand in amazement considering he’d been bleeding sparkly red blood from the thrones because the door chucked him straight onto the thorns.

“That’s not my fault, your wife convinced her to do it.” The Bostonian points out missing his scruff and buzz cut. “Should’ve booked a normal hotel room when she wasn’t looking, could’ve been making Gina a cousin instead of trapped in fucking limbo.”

“When did Katie have a kid?” Alfie asks, thinking they’d somehow missed that thanks to the pandemic.

Jack had been wonderfully spared Laurie’s second wedding and only seen his and Caroline’s IVF journey whenever he was looking at their Instagram over Eva’s shoulder.

But of course, they had to meet the baby for the baptism ---Jack was the godfather because Laurie has no real friends--- and Eva had to bring up having one of their own. After all they were pestered by everyone about the topic and then Eva later brought it up knowing he’d agree to give it a try.

“Laurie, my half-brother in New York.” Jack clarified as they headed towards the next door.

The doors on the left were Jack’s, the doors on the right were Alfie’s, or so they figured after they walked into Alfie’s fantasy shit.

“The racist one?” the Jew asks having heard what a piece of shit Jack’s older brother is from Katie and Rose who met him once in New York.

“What other brother do I have?” Jack doesn’t bother hiding it anymore, Laurie always opened his trap and ruined every first impression anyways. “Hopefully baby Gina won’t take after him.”

They enter the door; Jack is dressed like Laurie and has more pomade in his hair than when grandpa dressed him for church on Sundays as a kid.

A tall blonde woman looking eerily like Carrie with Laurie’s bad vibes takes him by the arm and introduced him to an English couple and Ada Throne, Eva’s museum curator ex-girlfriend who happened to be Tommy Shelby’s sister. As if they hadn’t seen the fucker in Alfie’s past doors twice already.

Alfie’s swing at the man and shoves off the blonde woman beside him calling him slurs.

“Where did you even dig up this thing, uncle? I thought you wanted to fascists in your pocket?” Gina asks and Jack drags Alfie back out the door wondering where the fuck Eva was.

“Nazis! Your niece was introducing you to fucking Oswald Mosely and his bitch of a wife, Lady Hitler!” Alfie is breathing hard and reeling from what went on inside the room.

How do you even begin to explain that?

“Why do you have a crucifix?” the American points at the last thing he expected Alfred Solomons to have.

Alfie looks at the thing in confusion before tossing it as far away from him as he could.

“Cutest fucking baby I’ve seen. Makes me wanna have one.” Eva talks Rose’s ear off as they open the door to Eva’s side and reveal a horde of screaming kids at a birthday party and Jack nowhere to be found.

The witch shuts the door and opens it again several times hoping to change the scene. But it doesn’t and instead both women brace themselves because at least they can get cake out of this.

It’s loud, Eva’s being hugged by several children who look like her and Jack and the calendar says 1930.

She knows this place, it’s in Cape Cod and the home to the political family that shares her husband’s last name. And sure, Jack looks like the guy who bought it and sired seven influential people that included two presidents, but it shouldn’t mean they are the same fucking people.

For fuck's sake Eva’s family was related to them. Well, had a common ancestor, Eva is no blood relation to the Nelson family. Evita Nelson ---whom she’s named after--- was her great-grandfather, Francisco Riley’s, first cousin.

But there it is, a portrait of the family with Eva wearing the same locket she has on now. She hadn’t noticed that on every door they step through it never changes, like Rose’s ring.

“These are our past lives. The hotel isn’t haunted, it knows us.” The witch turns to her friend who looks at the ring on her hand coming to the same conclusion. “It’s trying to tell us.”

“We’re soulmates?” Rose asks her, not meaning them but meaning their two respective relationships. “Like born to find each other in every lifetime, like the movies?”

“Only one way to find out.” They leave the seaside manor and return to the hotel.

The rooms are in chronological order, starting with the Renaissance Era and now in the 1930s. Eventually they would reach the modern era, and this would fucking end on November 1st, All Soul’s Day.

“Have you noticed Rose wears the same ring and Eva the same locket?” Alfie asks having formed a new theory after they left a beach house in Margate where his ex-boyfriend shot him in the fucking face.

“Shelby appears half as much, I know the two of you fucked the prick, but that can’t mean he’s your soulmate.” Jack points out, as they take a break between doors.

Jack had gone to his and woken up in the same bed with Eva wearing nothing but the locket and teasing him for carving their names in the hotel’s bed.

It had been October 31, 1924.

Then he’d found himself appearing on a beach with Rose clutching to a barely breathing Alfie. Had Jack not hauled the injured man to his house, Alfie Solomons from the 21st century would’ve died in 1924.

“An eternal thorn in my side, then.” The Jewish man jokes and looks in the mirror to find his face whole. “How did you end up in Margate with me?”

“Opened the bathroom door at the Ritz-Carelton in 1924 to take a piss and ended up inside the house. Apparently in Halloween 1924, I came to London on business and carved our initials on the bed board drunk as hell.” The Boston native answered and looked at the clock, it was just a few minutes shy of midnight.

Before that door he’d been an Irish immigrant in New York coming home with the candleholder that fell from his hands and dented right where the one in the hotel had it. Alfie claimed there had been floating subtitles, but Jack used what little Gaelige he knew from his grandparents to get by.

But that made them figure out they’re moving towards the present from the past, and because it was getting closer to morning, they’d soon end up back in 2024.

“The distillery in 1919 became your hotel, in 1924 you sold it and moved to the wherever the fuck that beach was---” the American goes over what they’ve learned so far.

“Margate, where I got some of the things at a shop there.” Alfie supplied and added to the list, “Even Rose’s ring. Where did you buy the locket?”

“Antique shop in Boston, had our initials on the back. Jack Nelson, who I was named after, was from the South End too, had a wife named Eva, and now I’m thinking these may have been our past lives.” Now that he says it out loud it feels obvious. All of them had the same names ---except Martin Feeney--- come to think of it.

“If we weren’t stuck in this place, I would’ve told you, you’d lost it, Yankee.”

They tried to sleep and see if they woke up and yet the door tossed them in the 1980s where they look great as hell and are, apparently, anarchists.

Since the jewelry from the Titanic hadn’t disappeared ---even if Eva forgot about putting it there in the first place--- Eva tossed the lighter she took from biker!Jack to keep as a memento from this never-ending night. She had taken several things each time and ,with any luck, would get to take them all home.

“We should be getting to the end; our present selves would be born less than a decade after that.” Eva yawns and wonders how their guys are doing. She’d be surprised if they hadn’t killed each other yet.

“Have you noticed Tommy is in most of mine, and in that one from yours in the 20s?” Rose asks, worried that Tommy may be Alfie’s soulmate just as much as she is.

“Yep, I wish he weren’t, but I guess he is also part of this.” the witch didn’t feel like racking her brain about this, she was tired, she wanted Jack to make her feel small and safe and keep her from feeling cold in this fucking weather. You’d think she’d get used to the cold now that her permanent residence is in Boston, but Eva can’t live without her human space heater at night.

“Did you know he tried to bribe me to get me to leave him?” Rose admits and Eva shook her head even if it didn’t surprise her.

He had been married when they dated, his long-time friend and mother to his daughter. Eva liked him, liked his sadness and expressive eyes and when he told her he was divorced, she believed him. She’s not a homewrecker, she steers away from couples with open relationships because it never ends well for anyone, and her mother’s reputation has everyone believing Eva is exactly like her.

So, when she found out about Lizzie and all the men and women he fucked with no consideration for anyone’s feelings, Eva ended things with him and found Alfie stewing over a break up with the same fucking guy.

And now they were friends, so at least some good came out of that.

“I’m glad you didn’t take the money; Alfie deserved a happy ending.” The witch assures her Shelby’s presence doesn’t mean what the Englishwoman fears it does.

“And I’m happy you found your happy ending too.”

They wait for the antique clock to chime at midnight before trying the doors again. Hard to believe they’d only been gone one fucking hour.

And sure enough, the doors reveal their rooms exactly as they had left them earlier that night. They try them several times until both are satisfied, they won’t change before running downstairs to see if their drunk husbands are still sprawled on the floor.

Both men are awake and, surprisingly, not at each other’s throats.

“Evie, I will ban you from my fine establishment if you ever do this shit again.” Alfie swears, holding his head in his hands feeling the effects of the hangover he and Jack share.

The witch pays no mind to his threats, not when she has a vase full of trophies from their time traveling this past hour.

#eva smith #jack nelson fanfic #jack nelson x eva smith #what happens in vegas #the wandering jew #alfie x rose #alfie solomons x oc

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