When Ivan Braginsky opens his mouth despite his speechlessness, the Frenchman had a bad habit of robbing his unspoken words with his tongue.
And it took Ivan until the second week to confirm these coincidences as fact.
He felt his lungs collapse the moment his eyes locked with Francis's smile - if one could call it that. A trivial thing, because an element more valuable and rarer than gold shouldn't exist on the features of a man capable of frustrating Ivan to the point of scarring over his wrist with a fork- he cast his eyes down at flesh peering just so from the white sleeve where the tissue scarred over. A sense of fulfillment replenished the oxygen in his lungs; he felt his hand slide closer, closer, closer to the touch the four parallel works of art on his wrist. Stopping. Retreating. Falling back to that more familiar place against his thigh.
Not yet. Not ye— wait. Not yet? No, not "not yet" - not at all.
A dozen plates tipped awry on the tray, and he elevated it a few inches to avoid the distracted figure of the broom-clinging plongeur, having to hold the leftward side in attempt to balance it. A drop of half-eaten Bouillabaisse sloshed out of the nearest bowl and landed on the redhead's shoulders. With a quick 'Mes excuses, Ivan,' he busied himself with mopping up the already white-enough-to-make-a-pearl-turn-green-with-envy floors between the two counters that separated Ivan and Francis.
"Qu'est-ce qui ne va pas?" the Russian placed the tray on the table, using what limited French he learned from months of entrapment in the same kitchen ("Oui chef", "Bonjour madame", "bienvenue" ). He pretended not to notice the way that Francis's shoulders twitched at the mispronunciation of his native tongue (and Ivan knew how to pronounce them because he'd felt them in his mouth, on his tongue, his neck, and-)
"Rien," But Francis's tone strayed very far form just 'nothing', and he confirmed it with that smile of his. A smile that was suddenly forced so close to Ivan that he found himself sandwiched between Sous Chef and stove. Whatever insults Ivan had tainting his tongue were swallowed… by the vast expanse that was Francis's hungry tongue, and distantly he wondered if it was preparing fine food for eight hours a day that made him always so hungry- (not to say that the taste of Ivan's mouth could be as pleasing to the palette as a peach-stuffed duck or a creme brulee, as Ivan spent the vast majority of the day gnawing at his lip until it went raw.)
It had become a rather nasty habit of Ivan's to bite, and he noted that even as he chewed away at his own chapped lips daily, it just took a single bite to scar over those pretty lips of the sous chef's and put them in a worse state than Ivan boasted daily. At the very least, it caused the Frenchman to retreat.
The end of shifts in the kitchen meant knowing that nine-oh (Ivan!)-two was the latest time to depart, lest the unfortunate member of the brigade de cuisine lays eye on something unsightly that wasn't day old bread. At the very least, the two employees confined their unsightly actions to the counter top where Francis spent days peeling onions and nights peeling Ivan's clothes. The other employees spent the morning after putting vegetables through extra washes after rumors circulate that visits to the fridge were for more than fetching the potatoes for their soups.
And it wasn't to say that Ivan particularly enjoyed the extra attention dished out from his superior, but because he was so worried about his lack of credentials over the other applicants that had serving experience that he felt it necessary to succumb to the attention in fear that it was the only thing keeping him in the job.
But he guessed that the pay was important enough to him that he would allow himself to be pinned against the prongs of a slowly cooling stove top, driven to the edge of ecstasy by the bane of his existence until his voice was even louder than the pots and pans that had been swept off surfaces and onto the floors.