Title: Eye to Eye
Pairing: Ford/Arthur
Universe: Could really be any, except movie. I'm partial to the bookverse though.
Rating: Nothing bad going on here.
Disclaimer: If I was Douglas Adams I would be doing a hell of a lot more with these characters than writing a few crappy fanfictions.
Wordcount: Annoyingly, 997.
Eye to Eye
Arthur Dent had things pretty well figured out for a British man in his late twenties.
While many of those around him still struggled with questions such as, 'What shall I do for a living?', 'Where will I sleep tonight', and the all-important 'How many bottles of supermarket brand beer can I afford today?', Arthur had got himself a good job at the BBC Radio within two months of graduating from university, had managed a down payment on a house by his twenty-third birthday, and was perfectly capable of buying higher quality pints of beer at his local pub, where he would sit and sip with his friends in a very civilised manner that belied their age.
Arthur chose to surround himself with friends who were much the same as he was. That is to say, they too enjoyed the simple pleasures in life, including returning home after a long day at work and sitting in front of Coronation Street with a cup of tea. They knew how to socialise and how to make small talk, but also had that innate sense of when enough was enough, and when it was time to leave a party and sit in front of Coronation Street with a cup of tea. They were reliable, dependable, and would never dream of asking inappropriately personal questions.
It is also worth noting that, at the time this story is set, Arthur Dent did not have a girlfriend. This was not necessarily through choice, but neither was it something that kept him awake at night in the way that sleeping pills and Great Expectations didn't. Like most men his age, he did enjoy the company of females, both in conversation and in other areas, and yet, for one reason or another, never found things developing beyond a brief flirtation.
But Arthur Dent knew that he had plenty of time for that. After all, he had a good thirty-five years left in his current situation, and he was actually rather looking forward to it.
Ford Prefect, on the other hand, was confronted with a growing sense that he did not have things figured out at all. A month ago he had boarded what these humans called an 'aeroplane', which he thought of as a very lazy spaceship that just couldn't be bothered to leave the atmosphere, and seven Earth hours later had landed in a strange place called England. Not only was England no more favourable to random passing spacecraft than America was, it also contained even more morals and more inhibitions, and those were two things that Ford Prefect had never found at all agreeable.
There was, he thought, something inherently strange about a culture that held small, thin flutes of alcohol in their hands throughout parties, and yet seemed far more interested in holding them correctly than in drinking them as fast as possible.
He said as much to the young man who had just corrected the way his fingers were positioned.
You may not be surprised to know that the man who had just tried to educate Ford Prefect on champagne glass etiquette was in fact Arthur Dent, and specifically an Arthur Dent who was quite shocked by the strange-looking short man's response.
Here, he thought, is someone with whom I could never see eye to eye.
He thought the same thing on many occasions throughout the following years. The next time he thought it was the following morning, when he woke up with an excruciatingly full bladder and an even more excruciating headache from drinking more than two bottles of champagne. He thought it again a week later when Ford banged on his door hard enough that at first he thought a bulldozer was trying to knock down his house, interrupting Coronation Street and insisting that Arthur accompanied him to this wonderful new invention known as a 'beer festival'. He kept on thinking it every time Ford asked him how many people he had slept with, what his erogenous zones were, and that time he woke up in bed next to Ford with a crusty white stain on his dressing gown, unable to remember the previous night.
He thought it most of all when he found himself on a highly improbable spaceship that was whisking him away to every corner of the universe simultaneously with someone who had just turned into a penguin and back.
The problem was, when Ford Prefect was around, a very special chemical reaction happened in his brain that caused his language receptors to no longer recognise the sentence 'Here is someone with whom I could never see eye to eye', and replace them with such un-Arthur Dent-like phrases as 'Yes, let's do something spontaneous' and 'I would very much like another shot, thanks.' And then when Ford Prefect was gone, the words would return, and Arthur would go back to his job and back to his friends who didn't have hypnotically powerful eyes and he would silently feel embarrassed about everything and he would pretend that he'd never done anything more out of the ordinary than buy large eggs in the supermarket instead of medium.
And now at night, Arthur would lie in his room on the Heart of Gold and he wouldn't have the comfort that he knew exactly what his life was going to be like for the next twelve thousand, seven hundred and seventy-five days. He wouldn't even know what his life was going to be like tomorrow. And he wanted to be mad at Ford, because this was all his fault and that goddamn alien was selfish and crazy and had done such a good job of screwing with Arthur's well-figured-out life.
But all things considered, for two people who could never see eye to eye, Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect were doing surprisingly well. Especially right now, when Ford was standing one stair above Arthur, and they were staring at each other without blinking, as their lips drew closer and closer.