#i've never written jonsasha but you cannot convince me that they wouldn't just bounce off each other

[bibliocratic]

jon and sasha

part of a series of archive polycule oneshots

“Blue,” Jon declares triumphantly.

He sets his incomplete circle of pie pieces down harder than necessary in his eagerness. The TV remote nearby gives a plasticky rattle.

Sasha leans forward from where she’s sitting cross-legged on the floor, the space cleared where the bandy-legged coffee table usually sits to accommodate the board. She wobbles like a bowling pin as her fingers strain and scrabble before her long arms reach, and she grasps another card from the box, recovering her balance to rock back to seated.

They don’t get to play this often. Neither Tim nor Martin will play with them; apparently, they’ve been accused of getting too competitive on occasion. But Tim’s out with some uni mates, probably winding down a pub crawl which has ended two bars in because they’re all skint and there’s no point in moving once you’ve snagged good seats somewhere growing crowded. Martin had joined the two of them for a bit earlier when they were channel-hopping between Gogglebox and a Marvel film on Film 4, but he’d gone to bed early, planning on taking an early train to Devon in the morning. Now, here the two of them were, both on five pieces out of six with one more to go, and Sasha refuses to be beaten.

She takes another sip from an overloaded gin and tonic and reads out the trivia question on the card.

“What is the capital of Switzerland?”

“Aha!” Jon’s face is flushed and smug. “Geneva.”

He goes to take a victory swig of the beer that’s surely gone room temperature in the time he’s been nursing it and reaches out to claim his final piece.

“Nope!” Sasha makes certain to pop the ‘p’, knocking his hand away and grinning as she sing-songs. “My go!”

“What, no! It’s Geneva. The capital city of Switzerland.”

“It’s not.”

“Course it is!”

“Better luck next time, Jonny boy!” Sasha crows, and casts the die in her hand. The number’s too high to land on the square she wants, and she curses, but she’s distracted by Jon, who is looking grumpy and argumentative and going for his phone. She grabs it away.

“Look, let me look it up,” he protests, and he’s moving closer, shuffling nearer to her. His jaw set in that way he gets when he’s sure he’s absolutely right.

He tries to take his phone back, but she holds it up high and out of his reach.

“That’s cheating, we said no phones.” Jon lunges again and he almost knocks her back. “You’re a complete cheat! Jon!”

Jon leans in as though to kiss her, but it’s an obvious distraction ploy, and she pushes his mouth away with a giggle, and shoves the phone into her pocket. Jon attempts to retrieve it, and she shrieks and flails back, intensely ticklish which he knows, the arse, and he relents when she kicks at him and says “Would you – stop it! We’ll wake Martin! Shhh, we’ll wake him!”

Jon huffs, but his petulance is short lived as he leans back next to her, angled up by his elbows, the fight drained out of him like water through a sieve. He takes another sour-faced sip.

“What was it then?”

“Huh?”

“Sasha.”

“Bern.”

“What?”

“The capital of Switzerland. It’s Bern, not Geneva.”

“Huh,” Jon says, sounding surprised, and she can almost hear the sound of him filing the fact away in his brain.

Sasha gestures with a lazy hand to the board and pieces she upended with her kicking.

“You want to keep playing?”

“I think we can safely say you won,” Jon replies, though he doesn’t sound like he minds so much any more. He moves himself again, because he’s even more fidgety with a drink in him, and reads out the first card he manages to find.

“What is the largest internal organ of the body?” he asks her.

“Thought we were finished?” she replies, but still, she makes a humming noise. “Liver?”

“Bingo.”

She takes a card from the box offered to her.

“How many noses does a slug have?”

It’s no longer competitive. They trade questions and answers idly, flicking through to find random cards, questions that pique their interest, that they think will stir the slow-moving waters of their late night conversation. Jon leaning at her side, partially against her like a tree gradually bending in the breeze, is a straight line of indolent heat. Sasha gets to the bottom of the glass of paint stripper she’s been suffering through – it was Martin’s, which he didn’t finish before he retired, and he always goes too heavy on the sprits for her taste whenever he makes them.

“Ok. Most dangerous animal in the UK?” she asks.

“Based on what?”

“Fatalities.”

“Hmm. Ok. Um… stags? We don’t have any wild boars anymore, do we, and there’s not exactly any wolves roaming the headlands…. Soooo, yes. Stags.”

“Cows.”

“No.”

Sasha’s grabbed her phone and is checking anyway.

“Apparently so. 2015 survey, seventy odd people over fifteen years.”

Jon raises an eyebrow.

“It’s not exactly the box jellyfish, is it?”

Sasha hums in agreement.

“I think there’s some cursed cow skin in Archive Storage.”

“Oh?”

“Can’t remember what it does exactly.”

“One would hope it doesn’t turn you into a cow.”

“Oh, one would, would one?” Sasha mimics Jon’s accent, giving it a regal snobbery, and he shoves at her shoulder with his.

“Here,” he says, passing over his can. “Help me finish this?”

“Not a fan?”

“It’s one of Tim’s IPAs from the fridge. I’m not convinced.”

Sasha dutifully takes a swig and finds it a marked improvement on what she’s been working her way through.

“You think there’s any drinking songs about IPAs?” she asks.

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, you’ve got… um Mistletoe and Wine, and Red, Red Wine, and they’re about, er….”

“Methylated spirits.”

“Wine, smartarse.”

Jon makes a thoughtful sound.

“Whiskey in the Jar,” he responds after a minute.

“Good one. I’m pretty sure… isn’t there a Kiss song about gin?”

“Cold Gin.”

“That’s the one. Oh! I know!” Sasha’s moving then, her limbs more sluggish than they were before, tugging her headphones out of her pocket and untangling them. “There’s that – er, Finnish band – ah, Christ, what are they called – and they’ve got, like, heaps of songs named after alcohol.”

That rabbit hole of questioning leads down into music for a while, and they sit with their heads touching so they can both use the headphones, listening to snippets of drinking songs.

“Give this one a listen,” Sasha says.

“What is it?”

“Just listen, would you?”

Jon, if anything, gets even more intense when he’s got drink in him, so he listens through the song with a furrowed brow.

“it’s… different.”

“It’s called math rock. Martin put me onto it. It’s all about like time signatures or something.”

Jon snorts and says, “That sounds exactly like something Martin would listen to” (and oh, she thinks with mild but not revelatory surprise at the way Jon has said that like an endearment, and looking at Jon’s face, she wonders if he’s realised it yet himself), before he’s heavy-handedly typing something into the search bar, backspacing repeated to correct the errors made by his imprecise fingers before he presses play.

She winces at the volume as the music starts aggressively loud.

“What is this?”

“Pirate metal.”

“No way.”

“Uh-huh.”

She watches him, his head nodding off-tempo to the raucous beat, and she mimics the motion, feeling him slide down further against her, his head cushioned against her shoulder.

“Neat.”