A birthday present for a dear friend of mine. I apologize if the characterization is at all off; I've only written about a hundred words' worth of Arthur before, and I've never written Ivan at all. But it's my friend's OTP, and thus I wrote it. Happy birthday, lovely!


Ivan draped his arm across Arthur's shoulders. Arthur sank under its weight, leaning over to rest his head on Ivan's chest.

"What are we watching?" Ivan asked.

Their movie nights had gotten to be a regular thing over the last several months as they'd slowly gone from dating to being serious about one another. Every Friday night, they would swap off getting to share a movie that they'd loved or had been badgered into watching by other friends.

"Some movie that Alfred is coercing me into watching," he said, grimacing. "If I don't sit down and watch it this weekend, he's sworn that he's going to kidnap me and make me watch it." Arthur looked away, his cheeks going a bit red. "And, if I do say so myself, I rather prefer your company."

Ivan squeezed Arthur's shoulder affectionately rather than smiling, and Arthur rolled his eyes.

"What's the movie called?" Ivan asked, rephrasing his earlier question."

"Right, of course," Arthur said. He wriggled out from under Ivan's arm to grab the remote. "The English title is Welcome Back Mr. MacDonald. The strange thing is that it's in Japanese with English subtitles. It's a live action movie—of course the title caught Alfred's eye."

"Is it about fast food?" Ivan asked. He felt a little skeptical himself, but if the worst case scenario was listening to Arthur make fun of a terrible movie, it hardly seemed like a bad deal to him.

"He wouldn't say." Arthur pursed his lips, then hit play. "It was d*mnably hard to acquire, though. Alfred wasn't willing to part with his copy."

They settled onto the couch. Ivan leaned back against the arm of it and let one leg sink to the floor; the other he slipped between the back of the couch and Arthur. As he'd hoped, it prompted Arthur to recline against him as the movie began. Settling his arms around Arthur's chest, he watched.

"Rajio no Jikan?" Arthur murmured, squinting at the screen in disbelief. "Why in the world would they translate Radio Time as Welcome Back Mr. MacDonald?"

It only got more absurd from there. Ivan had to suppress his laughter as Arthur shouted at the screen.

"No, you—grow a spine already! Stop caving like that!"

"If you've written something, you can't just let them—ah, and she still won't listen to me."

"How are you not strangling one another right now?!"

And, perhaps most amusingly of all: "Why does it keep cutting to the truck driver? Is he the only one listening to this train wreck of a show?"

But the movie went on, utterly heedless of Arthur's entreaties for sanity, and, so suddenly that it caught Ivan by surprise, Arthur began to laugh.

"Is this how Alfred feels when I make him watch Monty Python?" Arthur said, gasping for air between bursts of laughter. "God Almighty, this is absurd!"

His laughter was infectious—soon the both of them were laughing so hard that they couldn't hear the movie. Every time one of them would catch their breath, the other would make eye contact and laughter would overtake them again.

As the credits rolled, Ivan pressed a kiss into Arthur's hair.

"I'm telling him that I hated every minute of it," Arthur swore, tilting his head back to look up at Ivan. "You won't rat me out, will you?"

"It was a dreadful movie," Ivan said, putting on his most serious face. "I would never dream of telling him otherwise."

For a split second, they stared one another down. Arthur was the first to crack, to no one's surprise—Ivan kissed him again on the forehead, then joined him in laughing.