A/N: So this'll just be a series of oneshot AUs (although who am I kidding, there will probably be spinoffs and/or continuations like crazy) centered around the StaticQuake ship, because I love them. Most of them are from the Awful-Aus tumblr, but I may take suggestions.
Dislcaimer: I do not own Agents of Shield, nor any of the songs/artists mentioned in this story.
Promt:
"So we've never met but our showers are on opposite sides of the same apartment wall so sometimes we're showering at the same time and we sing duets." Awful-AUs
Skye starts cursing her low paying, if enjoyable, job right about the time she realizes that the walls of her apartment are about as thin as toilet paper. And not even normal toilet paper. Like the so-thin-it-barely-even-exists stuff you can only find in the especially cheap bathrooms you think you may get some disease in.
Given, she's lived in worse situations, but there are some things her neighbors do that she really wishes she couldn't hear. At least living in her van she hadn't been forced to know, in excruciating detail, about the sex lives of the people who lived near her. With how flimsy these walls seem to be, it wouldn't surprise her if a good breeze through the window wouldn't be enough to knock them all down.
On the bright side, she learns the true value of good ear buds.
The first shower she takes after moving in is one of the strangest experiences in her life.
After almost scalding herself with the finicky controls, she hears the shower on the other side of the tiled wall turn on. It's a strange feeling, knowing that her neighbor is showering at the same time she is, but it's pretty easy to ignore, as the sound of her shower drowns out the sound of it's twin. She can almost completely forget about it as she washes her hair.
And then he starts singing.
"I'm waking up, to ash and dust..." he starts, and she just stands there for a few seconds in surprised shock, before breaking down in giggles she tries unsuccessfully to stifle with her arm.
Abruptly he stops singing, and she realizes that he heard her too. Swallowing and feeling the warmth of blush reach her face, despite not being able to see the guy, she almost considers yelling out an apology, before realizing that would make it even weirder.
To her continued surprise, he resumes singing after a few seconds. His voice isn't half bad, now that she listens to it. The version of the song he's singing is obviously a cover, the flow of the song's a bit off from the original, but she finds she kind of likes it. He finishes Radioactive, and she wonders if that'll be it, but he moves right on with little delay, and she wonders if he just has a playlist of shower songs.
"When Rome's in ruins, we are the lions, free of the Colosseum!"
Recognizing it even quicker than she did the first one, she grins. So far, she can't really fault the guy's taste. She's not too sure what makes her do it, but when he gets to the first chorus, she joins in.
"Americana, exotica. Do you wanna feel a little beautiful, baby?"
Again, he goes abruptly silent, but it only lasts a few second, before he's right back in.
"Come on make it easy, say I never mattered..."
They finish the song together, before Skye's actually struck by the fact that she just sang a shower duet with a neighbor she's never met, and she's perfectly fine with it. She can't help but break down into laughter because on what universe is that normal?
The man on the other side of the wall is silent for the next few seconds, and if it weren't for the continued shower sounds, she'd almost think he'd gotten out. Curiously, she starts a new song, keeping with the Fall Out Boy theme.
"I can move mountains, I can work a miracle.." She's worried it'll be weird as she keeps singing, but it he joins in even quicker than she did with him.
"She wants to dance like Uma Thurman, bury me 'til I confess!" He belts out enthusiastically.
He picks the song after that, before her water runs cold and she finally turns off the shower and gets out. Apparently, his goes cold too, because she hears an unceremonious yelp and she stays in the bathroom long enough to hear him scramble in an attempt to turn off the water.
It happens again about a week later, they shower at the same time. This time though, she doesn't hesitate to join him in his rendition of Don't Stop Believin'.
Uma Thurman makes a repeat appearance, and judging by the eagerness with which he sings that one, she guesses that he really likes the song.
She keeps waiting to see him. He is her neighbor, after all. They should run into each other at some point, she's sure of it. She starts humming Uma Thurman under her breath when she walks down the hallway and when checking the mail, seeing if anyone reacts. Nobody ever does.
Once, she considers going over and just knocking on the door. She even comes up with several perfectly reasonable reasons to need to talk to her neighbor, before scrapping the idea. That would be really weird right? Oh hello, we sung in the shower together the other day, how are you? Yeah, she leaves that plan on the sidelines.
Somewhere along the line, it becomes a regular thing. Despite the fact that she's pretty sure he leaves before she does for work, and get back while she's still at her own job, they somehow manage to line up their showers with almost startling consistency. She wonders if he's doing it on purpose, because she knows she is. It's fun.
The first time she doesn't recognize a song he starts, he dies off halfway through, sounding almost disheartened, before he immediately moves on to another. She knows that one though, and they trade off parts while she rinses the shampoo out of her hair.
When she opens the door to go to work, there's an plastic sleeve on the ground. She picks it up and sees there's a CD in it, labelled Mix #1. She flips it over and sees a note scribbled in what has to be the messiest handwriting she's ever seen.
Hey, thought you might like this.
She knows instantly who its from, and when she gets home she listens to the disc, she recognizes the song he'd started and memorizes it, as well as a few others she doesn't know.
The next time they sing (she doesn't like to think the phrase 'shower together' for obvious reasons) she doesn't let him start, and instead begins with the newly memorized ballad. They go through the whole CD in that one shower. Maybe she's crazy, but she's pretty sure she can hear the smile in his voice.
A month passes, then two, then three. And she's still never seen him.
Whenever she's not in her apartment, she takes to humming whatever their most recent songs were, mostly because they're stuck in her head, but also because she's more and more anxious to actually see this guy in person.
It's almost five months since she moved in before she gets her wish.
They've just finished their shower (she doesn't even care about calling it that by this point) and she's just changed into a tank top and shorts to sleep in, when she hears a knock at her door. Curious and still toweling off her hair, she answers it, and her breath catches, because it has to be him.
His blonde hair is plastered down with water, and the t-shirt he wears clings to him and is see through in a way that Skye is really trying not to look at, because whoa. It takes a few seconds for her to meet his bright green gaze, and she has to look pretty far up to do that. He doesn't seem to mind, he's looking her over too, and she finds herself blushing. She can't be annoyed, he seems just as curious about her as she of about him, so she allows it.
"It's about time we met." She finally says, not too sure what else can be said. She's not at all disappointed with what she sees, far from it, but she's curious as to what brought him to her door finally after nearly five months.
"Yeah" He agrees quickly, and it's almost strange to hear his voice not singing. "I'm Lincoln." He introduces himself, sticking a hand out for her to shake. She grabs it, and it's a surreal feeling.
"Skye." She replies, their hands drop back to their sides.
"So I wanted to ask you something." He starts, letting it hang in the air until she arches her eyebrow to urge him to continue. "So I was going to go to this concert with my friend, but he backed out. I was.. Well I was.. wondering if you'd want to come with me? I know you like their music." He adds the last bit with a smile that temporarily disables her ability to think.
"You sure know how to make a girl feel special." She finally replies, and he looks absolutely horrified and starts to backpedal, before she smiles and puts his mind at ease. "I was just kidding." She soothes, "I'd love to go."
As could be expected, they sing along with the songs at the concert, this time watching each other as they've never done before.
It doesn't take long for 'showering together' to turn into literally showering together. They still sing, when they aren't... otherwise preoccupied.
Eventually they move in together, into an apartment with suitable insulation where they don't hear their neighbors' every move. That doesn't stop them, instead it just frees them to sing louder, though louder is hardly necessary with the minimal space between them.
Exactly three years after their first duet, he gets nervous for the first time about a song. Taking a shaky breath, he meets her gaze evenly.
"It's a beautiful night, we're looking for something dumb to do. Hey baby, I think I want to marry you."
So there's that! The very first AU. The songs used, in order, are:
Radioactive - Imagine Dragons (the Pentatonix/Lindsey Stirling cover)
Young Volcanoes - Fall Out Boy
Uma Thurman - Fall Out Boy
Marry You - Bruno Mars
I hope you liked it, and I'll see you next chapter!
~TheFallenArchangel