Call It What You Like
A/N: Lol, how long have I been out? Sorry. x3 Anyway, I've been working on this for a long time and I know it sounds unprofessional and ramble-like, but that's the way it's written. Like, Tancred is thinking it all, 'cause he kind of is, but it's not first person. Yeah. Okay.
Warning: Eh, excessive use of the s-h-i-t word, I guess. And metaphors. LOLOLOL I'M A POET.
He knows about her long-standing infatuation with him, and it does make Tancred feel a little guilty when he shamelessly flirts with everyone (including her), but he can't help doing so since that was pretty much in his nature. Besides, it's not his fault that she chose him to like, so he leaves it alone. It's not like he can make her stop liking him, because he knows from experience that Emma won't stop, no matter what he attempts to make her forget about it and move the hell on; she'll know something was up no matter how atrocious, insensitive, and/or rude he could be to her and so she'd simply ignore it until he gives up and is just he's himself again, in which case she would still like him.
Basically, he doesn't do anything to encourage it or deny it.
He simply leaves it alone.
Plus, if he's being honest, it's rather flattering.
But then his friends start pushing him to be with her and asking him what he could lose by trying it out just once, and it is really starting to annoy him. He's made it rather obvious that he doesn't even truly like her that way, remotely, and honestly he thinks it is totally unfair for them to push this chore onto him- to have to try this experiment which is bound to fail massively even though it is and will always be pointless. Alas, solely for the fact that it would make everyone (except him) happy, he figures, what the hell, it wouldn't hurt anyone (but him).
It doesn't help that Charlie offers to pay for a date- one to Tancred's all time favorite restaurant. That wanker.
So he does it.
He walks up to her one day while she's chatting about who-knows-what with Olivia, Lysander (who is the only one who knows that his attraction to her is purely platonic) muttering quietly how much of a terrible idea this whole thing is beside him, and bluntly states: "Hello Emma. Would you like to go out with me?"
It amused him that she stares at him speechlessly, eyes and mouth open wider than he'd ever seen them be before, struggling to suppress the shock and stammer something out at the same time. He knows he shouldn't think it, but he thinks she looks positively ridiculous.
And yet some part of him insists that it's the most goddamn adorable thing he's ever seen.
He ignores that part; it's probably just his "flirt" emerging.
She settles for nodding with a squeaky "yes."
Tancred smiles and sets a date for Saturday.
At first it's fine. Everything is absolutely normal and it all works out perfectly and he finds that, okay, this is alright, I can do this. It's not that different from before, except maybe that he has to hold her hand and sit and walk with her just about any time they happen to be together, which is almost all the time, but that's not that big of a deal considering how she and he did that- stand beside one another- already, some of the time, and his other relationships had been far more demanding before. It is bearable. He doesn't even not like it.
And then she kisses him one day.
That, in itself, isn't so bad. He could take that. Kissing's fun and cute and stuff. And she wasn't a terrible kisser or anything. Actually, it was one of the best kisses he'd had in a while.
So he's fine with it.
But she must seriously like his face a lot, because then she kisses him again. And again. And again. And then finally he realizes that no, wait, something about this is wrong. This isn't right. He isn't supposed to feel anything. Nothing, except the urge to kiss back because kissing does feel good, or maybe the simplistic, animalistic urge to make this go a just little further. That wasn't really feeling, but for whatever shit reason, now he is- he feels the need to make it last; to make her enjoy it like he does; to kiss her sweetly, not just deeply and a little lustfully; to get so into it he forgets where he is, what he's doing, and relish in all that is Emma, and hopefully make her feel the same.
To do this forever.
Those feelings are dangerous feelings, things he'd much rather prefer keep buried in a deep hole that would only open, oh, once in never. But, dammit, he is feeling something, and deep down he's starting to realize this, and now he's scared.
That scares him.
He isn't supposed to feel because he doesn't care.
But he is feeling.
That scares Tancred a lot. Like, he's shitting bricks over how terrified this makes him.
So after she kisses him- after she makes him feel that nonsensical sensation of whatever it is again- he tells her that he isn't quite comfortable with this yet.
She nods, understanding and noticeably disappointed.
He doesn't think he should tell her why, or that he doesn't think he'll ever be comfortable with it, so he doesn't.
He smiles and takes her hand instead, offering to go to their local bowling rink with her, his treat.
She agrees.
It had been six months to date when it happened.
He snaps.
They're at the park when it happens: one minute they're running around like kids again, the next second she's on top of him, kissing him, and making him feel. He can't move for a minute, doesn't know what to do but kiss back because he's quite good at that bit.
They stop.
He won't admit he misses that kiss.
It's maddening how frightening that moment was for him.
She made him feel whatever the hell that feeling was again and he just freaks out. It isn't supposed to be like this; it never was. He'd never felt anything with anyone else before, and he had been slightly attracted to them, so why was this girl, who he only dates because they all told him to, who he didn't actually feel anything for, making him feel something?
He says that out loud. Some of it.
Mostly how he doesn't feel anything for this girl. And how they all made him do it. It's pretty bad.
She almost cries.
"No; Emma wait. I'm sorry. I just-"
She cuts him off. "Look, I get it."
"You do?" He asks incredulously. How can she possibly understand? He doesn't understand, and it's about him.
"Yeah." She sniffles, and he instantly feels bad. "You don't like me, and I get it."
"I..." He wants to lie to her, to say that he does like her, but then he also wants to tell her the legitimate truth that no, she doesn't get the reason is that damn feeling, but she looks at him with this face like she's just about to sink into the floor in a pile of tears, and instead of doing any of that, he just sighs and nods. "You get it," he concedes.
"Ex...exactly. So, since you don't like me, it's not right for us to be like..." She doesn't know what to say, but he gets it. "Like this." She finishes lamely.
"I'm sorry."
She smiles weakly and manages this dying-raccoon-sounding, bitter, completely fake laugh, and he finds himself hating it so much that it only succeeds in confusing him even more. "I know Tancred."
"I really am," he says with extra emphasis. And he means it.
"I know," she repeats, and gives him a peck on the cheek. It's an everyday friendly peck, but even then he feels those dangerous feelings emerge again. "Thanks for trying. But I can't do this anymore."
He stares dumbly at her. "What?"
"I can't. This relationship isn't real. That's hurting me and it's suffocating you, so really, we can't." She has tears in her eyes now. He feels utterly lost. "Bye Tancred. We'll just go back to normal, yeah? I'll try not to like you, and you can go back to how you were before. Okay?"
He doesn't know what to say.
He doesn't know what he's feeling about it.
He doesn't want to know, because it actually kind of hurts.
This scares him too.
"Oh." He says. He really wants to slap himself by this point.
She smiles, but to him it looks like she's dying inside.
He knows she is, actually.
"I'll see you at Bloors."
She walks out of the park, and he feels more lost than ever.
Because one day he snapped, and that's the start of when his life begins to spiral into a typhoon of disarray and craziness and everything is shit, emotional confusion, and just basically has all the greatness of dead puppies for a long, long time.
Only two days later he's at the grand Sage doorstep, feeling lost even though he's certain he knows exactly where he is. That scares him also.
Everything is scaring him nowadays.
Lysander only gives him this look with this exaggerated sigh and lets him in, and within five minutes they're sitting in the empty house's living room, mashing buttons repeatedly and killing each other's computer animated foes.
"We split up," he blurts suddenly.
Lysander sighs. "I figured."
"What? How?" Tancred asks. He shakes his head immediately after. "Never mind." He will never understand the way his friend, best friend, could always read him perfectly.
"Yeah."
The two continue playing, the gunshots of Call of Duty: Black Ops blasting from the TV speakers.
Put mildly, Lysander's team beats the shit out of Tancred's.
Tancred can't bring himself to care. For some reason.
He knows something is wrong.
Lysander knows too, because he turns the game off, throws a box of tissues at the blond, and tells him to spill.
And then Tancred let's it out. He lets it all out.
How he freaks out when she touches him; how she makes him want to sit back and enjoy things; and the annoying way he suddenly developed some weird sweating disorder when they started going out judging by the strange fact that he sweats like a damn pig and loses his cool with simply a single smile from her. He groans out his frustration over all the kisses and the hugs and how everything is just too confusing with her and at how it annoys the hell out of him that she manages to make him feel anything- not just anything, he clarifies, but that awkwardly je ne sais quoi* feeling that is somehow a rainbow of sunshine and warmth at the same time as it's aching stabs in his gut that completely scare him shitless, and he makes sure to emphasize on just how much he doesn't like it.
He doesn't like how scared he feels with that single emotion.
Lysander sits there and takes all the ranting with a knowing smirk on his face.
Tancred finishes with a long rant about how she left like it was all okay when nothing in the world is ever going to be okay anymore, and how he really has no idea why he thinks that.
How he sat there in the park for six hours, just taking it in.
How he didn't register that they'd broken up until the next morning, and how he didn't move from his bed the entire day.
And after talking so much about it that he somewhat feels like a giant pansy now, Tancred says, "So now I'm here and everything in life is pointless and Lysander, man, I don't even know what I'm doing."
Lysander nods, smiling now. He clears his throat dramatically and says, "You know, three years ago, I met Lauren. Three years ago, I had the single most horrifying experience of my life. Three years ago, I fell for a girl."
"Oh yeah? How'd it go?" Tancred asks, smiling faintly.
Lysander and Lauren. A Wonder Couple if he'd ever seen one.
"See, the thing is, for the longest period, I hated her. Lauren."
"What?" Tancred sits up and gasps. This was new.
Lysander nods. "I was fourteen, and she had me blushing and stuttering and acting like a twelve year old girl who'd met her teen idol. Quite embarrassing. I didn't like it, I'll tell you that. I actually treated her like crap. But you know what?"
"I know how this goes. She jumps you and tells you to man up and now you're an item, skipping into the sunlight." Tancred smirks, because he remembers the exact day Lysander told him that with the most ridiculously love-struck look ever that Tancred accidentally laughed and had to make his own food for lunch instead of bumming it off his best friend that entire weekend, which sucked.
"Wrong."
"What?"
Lysander smirks. "I finally get why I hate her so much. Because I fear what she turns me into. How she made me feel like a blubbering fool. That I'm only scared of the raw feelings."
"What have you been smoking." Tancred is too busy freaking out internally to come up with anything more clever.
"I am total serious." Lysander says, amused.
Tancred knows Lysander can see the fearful look on his face as the other boy finishes the story.
"So I tell her I like her- I think. And then she tells me to man up and finally, we frolic in fields of daisies."
"Oh."
"Oh."
Tancred feels his throat tighten. "Oh." He says it again, just because.
"Oh indeed." Lysander chuckles, and Tancred briefly considers socking his face for being such a sodding, insensitive git.
Tancred swallows thickly. "That's...a nice story."
They have at more Call of Duty.
Lysander still wins.
The week after at Bloor's is the most awkward week he's ever been forced to attend.
Because it was the week after Emma left him…
And everyone acted too goddamn normal.
Truth be told, it was like nothing ever happened.
Even Emma acts like she didn't just break up with him. She acts like they're just friends. Like before.
"Bye Tancred. We'll just go back to normal, yeah? I'll try not to like you, and you can go back to how you were before."
It didn't feel right anymore. It didn't feel normal anymore.
He grunts as he settles back onto the bus, Lysander looming beside him.
They get off at the same stop. Tancred trudges home, throws his stuff into his room, and tells his mom he's going out. She gives him this look that only moms can pull off, like she knows something without knowing anything because he hadn't really told her anything, and she just reminds him dinner is at 7.
He walks to Lysander's house and drags his knowing friend to the park.
He spills again, only this time, he gets it.
Lysander just takes it in stride and comments: "Yeah, now tell her this."
"This is a shit situation," Tancred mutters both to his friend and to himself, strolling (pacing) back and forth on the paved walkway.
And it is.
Because it is only then he realizes that he actually does care, and he royally screwed up.
"Caring is shit," Lysander shrugs beside him.
"You're not helping."
The next week he tries to get her to see his newest revelation.
If she does, she's not saying anything.
He isn't making it obvious either though, because he doesn't really know how, so he can't talk.
But it's killing him.
This isn't normal anymore. He wants normal back.
Normal was sitting under a tree, not talking, but holding hands, alone, but that was really, really, inexplicitly good.
Normal was flicking paint at her and her flicking paint back until they have a small war, but she suggests a truce and kisses him, even though he obviously won.
Normal was "Where's Tancred?" "With Emma." and vice versa.
Normal was him and her, and him feeling but too scared to admit it.
Only he wanted to admit it now.
He wanted that normal back.
The Tancred and Emma normal.
Not Tancred and Emma and Co. normal; that was before and he hates it.
He has to get normal back.
So, before he leaves the bus that Friday night, he almost screams at her to meet him at the park tomorrow, 6pm.
He runs off in embarrassment with Lysander chuckling mirthfully behind him.
"Hi."
"Hi."
That was the most awkward greeting he'd had ever had, ever.
"Is anyone else..." She doesn't finish.
"No, it's just you and me." He grins back. It's not very charming like he'd hoped, but he thinks that's okay.
"Oh."
"Yeah." Actually, no, he does have to be a lot more charming.
It goes silent.
They chat a little, the small talk normal.
It's not the right kind of normal though, and he's left wondering if she can feel how wrong it is too.
She stands as he accidentally (on purpose) grabs her hand.
"Tancred, I cannot do this anymore. I just can't." She says, close to tearing up and hugging herself, not him.
He feels like he should hug her.
He refrains.
"But Em, I-"
"No, Tanc, look. Someone put you up to this again, didn't they?"
He doesn't answer. He should say no, because that's the truth. He can't bring himself to do it because he's busy racking his brain for a way to get her to realize what he was trying to say without sounding like an idiot and making sense at the same time, because right now he isn't sure if he can do either of those.
She suppresses a sob. He curses to himself for not doing anything. He had to be able to do this. Because he finally got it. He was ready and he had to have it back.
But she doesn't say that. "It just won't...you don't like me and I'm trying not to care and it was nice while it lasted...But you didn't actually care at all and I did, a lot, and so it won't...it will never work. It all worked out better when neither of us did, when we were young and nobody cared about anything, so we have to go back to that. Just... please." she shakes her head with a shaky sigh, and she is just starting to walk away when he frowns.
Not again.
She can't walk away again.
Not when he gets it, finally.
"No, we can't." he says, hesitating largely but he's unable to just let her go. "Em, I can't."
"Why not?" She breathes out angrily, not looking at him. He grabs her shoulder, and she fights to not look back. She's tense, and he's sort of afraid. "Tanc, it just doesn't...Please stop," she begs.
He ignores her request, feeling like an asshole, but he can't stand to see her walk away again. "Because it's not like before Em. I don't...I didn't… you know… before. I know that. I didn't care and that was true and it wasn't right of me to pity you like that because it only made things worse-"
"Can I leave if you're just going to talk about how it didn't work? Because I know all that."
"No," he pleads. "Don't. Because now... now I do. I get it. I do care." He takes a deep breath, feeling a giant load being lifted off him from that babble. Confidently, he smiles and says what he's been waiting to say to her for probably longer than he's ever known. "I care a lot about you Emma, and I am like, not even lying when I say this, I swear."
She's stunned. He walks in front of her. He tilts her chin and tries to smile like Prince Charming down at her shell-shocked expression. He doesn't want to acknowledge that he knows he looks like he's insecure and just spilled his guts out, because he really feels that way but he doesn't want her to know. "That's why we can't just go back. Because that would mean I don't…care and I do."
"Oh." she sighs weakly.
"Oh." He repeats.
"I..."
He wants normal back.
So he makes it come back.
Only this time, he kisses her.
And for the first time, since he realized it, Tancred lets those urges to kiss her sweetly and enjoy it and bask in Emma take control.
He likes it.
She gets it, and he does too.
And now, they were back to normal.
That's all he really needs.
"Hey, Lysander."
"Tancred."
"I got normal back."
Somehow, he knows Lysander will understand, and his friend does, laughing loudly before asking him if he walked across the oh-so-terrible street just to tell him that, because that was why phones were invented, stupid.
Tancred shrugs, and pulls out a game.
"You up for another round?"
His friend grins and lets the blond in.
Black Ops is back on, blaring loudly through the speaker once more.
This time, Tancred's team wins.
Fin .
*je ne sais quoi: A quality that cannot be described or named easily