#and i might've been rerereading ch 3 or something skjfngkfjg ANYWAY

[andthebubbles]

i have a (very important 😏🐱🐶) compilation to make (excerpts from baby, you're a haunted house by spit-kitten (simon/anthony)):

ch 1:

After all, not everybody had the benefit of Simon's distinguished glare. Anthony smarted at the memory of standing before Nigel Berbrooke this summer and singularly failing to intimidate him. Nigel Berbrooke. He had as good as given up on reprimanding Eloise for anything ever since the day that he had stormed into her room with newly-bruised knees and demanded that she refrain from leaving piles of books lying around in hallways, and she had simply laughed and told him to stop looking like a scalded cat and start looking where he was going. And there was that night in Oxford - he could not remember the beginning of the quarrel, or who it had been with - just recalled looking up at somebody, stung, and a voice full of derision saying, 'God, Bridgerton, spare me the big eyes: you look like a kicked bitch. Can you fetch? Beg? Roll over?'

ch 2:

Not that the strikes themselves were anything like wholehearted: Simon was mostly feinting at his head, giving him the lightest of taps to the shoulder, to the flank – spending more of his energy on laughing at Anthony than earnestly attempting to blacken his eye. Anthony himself was more interested in trying to step on his opponent’s feet than avoiding his strikes. Eventually recklessness earned its just desert, and his efforts brought him close enough to let Simon catch him by the shoulder. And then to squeeze, firmly enough that it had Anthony gasping out a laugh of surprise and trying to squirm away from the pressure of a thumb against his collar bone. Simon, damn him, just grinned and held on; gave him a shake, like he was shaking a boisterous puppy by its scruff.

ch 5:

The difficulty came in keeping his affection, his pathetic lap-dog affection, in check.

He had let it flourish unexamined for so many years now that he found he could no longer remember where the line should be drawn between permissible familiarity and what lay beyond; between teasing camaraderie and – well, there was no way round it – and coquetry.

The delight he took in Simon's company made it all too easy to forget. He was too eager to please, to amuse, to rouse his friend from the fits of guarded melancholy to which he was still prey, and he was too swept along by the pleasure he gained from any success in that arena to heed his own words or to look ahead to where they might be leading him, and then without any warning he would find himself stranded. Breaking off in the middle of the story he was telling, hoping to make Simon laugh. Suddenly remembering that the last time he had recounted it, he had been lying boneless and aglow in Siena's bed, his head pillowed on her thigh, hoping to make her laugh. Hoping to make her love him.

The only real, sustained privacy he was afforded was when George was changing his bandages, and he would spend the entire time with his face heated, sunk in confusion, poring over his conduct so far that day and probing it for slips. On more than one occasion, Simon had remarked on his flush on his return, his 'What do you two do in there?' not sounding entirely like a joke. Well, better that he should believe Anthony was letting every one of his footmen fuck him senseless than that he should suspect the truth.

And that was really, truly the only privacy. Anthony no longer had to worry about retiring to his dark and chilly bedroom: he simply was not doing so. When the first evening since that long, strange night of the shooting had begun to draw to a strained close, he had been so obviously unwilling to part – had sat up so long in front of the fire, talking of nothing – that Simon had finally tired of his slow blinks and stifled yawns, and said, more gentle than Anthony was used to hearing him, 'You need to lie down, Bridgerton, before you fall down. Come, can you bear to spend another night curled up on a sofa like the world's heaviest kitten?'

Anthony had said, less indignant than he was used to hearing himself, that he could bear anything Simon could, and bear it better, or words to a similar effect.

'How fortunate,' his host had replied in tones of grim amusement, guiding him to his less-than-luxurious bed for the night, 'that I am a man with more than one couch. I will take this one, and we shall see whose back gives out first.' And Anthony had concentrated all the parts of his mind that had not already fallen asleep on feeling entirely normal as he watched Simon walk away to the other side of the room – not devastated at all.

He had been so exhausted that first evening that it had been easy, completely natural, to fall asleep there with the soft sound of Simon's breathing in the air. It had become – more difficult over the past couple of days. His mind had been less obligingly empty, the nights less obligingly dreamless and every morning when he woke, sleep-dazed, to see Simon sitting across from him, it had been harder and harder to remember why he was all the way over there, already dressed and attending to his post, and why it was imperative that Anthony should not reach out for him and kiss him good morning.

And it was beginning to do terrible things to his back, but he rather felt he deserved them.

--

His host cut an impressive figure in his boots and long coat, with shining raindrops caught in his hair. Far more suited to a backdrop suddenly grown wild and romantic than Anthony himself, who must already be well on his way to looking as bedraggled as the cat from the poem, after she had slipped into the fish-pond and drowned.

--

Don't, he thought, numbly, don't. But Simon continued, his voice heavy, soaked in scorn.

'I have cheering news for you: unmarried, no heir, beginning to be notorious – in his eyes, you have already failed. Every day that you linger here, tempting fate, you are failing him further. How would he react if he saw you so unmanned by such a hopeless attachment?’ – Anthony stopped breathing – ‘Lapdog to an opera singer, for God's sake. The cast-off plaything of somebody who spurns, who does not even see you. Do you think it would make him proud?'

The pounding of Anthony's pulse was almost too much to let him hear this last. Simon did not even know what he had hit on, could not know the true resonance of his words – He was caught between wanting to lunge at him, and being rooted to the spot, pale and speechless. Here it was, the kind of scene he had been running from all week – must have been fearing for years, without ever truly understanding why. Here was a glimpse of the ridicule, the disgust that awaited him if his mask of indifferent friendship were ever to slip and reveal the detestable truth.

If at any point this past week he had been unsure for a moment that he loved Simon, then he knew it now. He knew it with more certainty than he had known anything in his life, because if he had not loved him then this would not feel quite so much like some vital thread had been pulled out of him, and he was going to shake apart at the seams.

He grasped for the instinctive fury that would have flared up so easily only a week ago; he tried to let it rise and carry him forward, tried to form a fist. But he could not approach. He could not get closer; he could not make himself touch Simon. People will talk, he thought, with a kind of dull horror. Oh, God.

All of his famous temper, all of his precious disdain; it had all abandoned him completely, draining out and leaving him pathetically sick and shaky. He felt only an abject self-loathing, so thick his throat hurt with it.

And he was going to feel like this, he realised, feel a portion of this utter worthlessness, every time he looked at Simon – for the rest of his life.

'You bastard,' he said, voice horribly soft, and did the only thing he could think of. He turned and left.

ch 8:

'How are your ribs?' he asked, fixing the patient with a stern look. He really would leave Anthony alone if there was the slightest hint of pain, no matter how difficult that might be.

Anthony seemed entirely unintimidated; he simply laughed and gave a pleased stretch, pressing into the hand in his hair in the manner of a cat. A self-satisfied but particularly winsome cat. 'Now, what could that question possibly signify?' he said, with a side-long glance and a spirited grin. 'Desperate to fuck me again, by any chance? Do you have a surgeon waiting in the wings to come and clear me for duty – or shall we throw caution to the wind and simply get on with it?’

As Anthony's ideas went, that one did not sound so bad. Simon couldn't very well not grind the wretch's face gently into the pillows for his impertinence, not when he already had a convenient hand in his hair, but he did not make much of a job of it; he was too eager to kiss away his captive’s laughing protestations and turn to other, even more satisfying methods of making him writhe against the sheets.

He was starting to have a notion – appearing before him like a vision, a miracle – of what might come after you had everything you wanted. Perhaps you had it again, and again, and again.

--

The thought of being able to reach over and take Anthony's hand while he was trying to eat his breakfast, of capturing his wrist, leaning down to steal the food from his fork and getting kicked at for his trouble - of doing, in fact, what he always had done, and yet having it be so entirely different; it was absurdly pleasing. Of being able to regard him openly when he was all early morning energy, as he washed and dressed and sat obediently for his shave; of watching as the weight of Simon's gaze made his cheeks hot under George's brisk fingers, the air in the room going tight.