Curtainly, Dear

If there ever was a question Steven Stone never thought he'd hear, it would've been:

"Have you seen my mother's old curtains?"

This, of course, was exactly what his dear boyfriend Wallace asked him one particularly foggy Saturday morning. It had been a long week, which Steven had spent mostly stuck inside the couple's shared house in Mossdeep going through the company's budget for his father. The previous night especially had been a late one so when the blue-haired man hovering by the study's door opened his mouth Steven had to do a double-take just to check that he hadn't imagined the words in his sleep-deprived mind.

"Pardon?" He asked when he had finally made sense of what he was asked, because in the end it didn't make any sense.

"My mother's curtains," Wallace repeated slowly, like talking to an idiot which pretty much was a synonym for Steven before he'd had his morning coffee, "you know, the ones with the Luvdisc pattern. They were pretty much the only thing I brought along from Sootopolis and I definitely I saw them in the linen closet a few weeks back, but now they're nowhere to be found."

Absorbing the information the steel-type user frowned. "Sorry, I haven't got the slightest clue. What do you even need them for?"

"I promised I'd find them for your lovely cousin here," Wallace replied with a smirk and as if on cue, Melissa Stone popped her head into the room.

"Hi Steven!" She beamed. "Working hard, aren't cha?"

Steven's frown deepened. "What are you doing here?"

"What kind of question is that?" Melissa scoffed. "And here I thought I'd come and visit my favorite cousin just out of the goodness of my heart."

"As if… and besides, I'm your only cousin."

The water-type trainer in the room seemed to realize that it would be wise to cut in before the siblings' bickering turned any worse.

"That's enough of that, yes?" He asked with a gloomily sweet voice that left no room for argument. "Steven, in case you don't remember, Mel's moving to Unova next month and we agreed to donate some décor to her."

"Yeah, Steven," Mel piped in with a purposefully annoying tone. "I'm leaving the country in less than thirty days and you're being all sour."

Steven uncharacteristically stuck out his tongue. Her flushed face was rather worth giving into the childish impulse.

"Now, about those curtains," Wallace started again, looking part worn part amused. "I'm pretty sure they were still in the cupboard a few weeks ago, so either they grew legs and walked right out of there or you've misplaced them somewhere. I strongly suspect the former."

Despite himself, Steven laughed.

"Alright alright," he chuckled, standing up. "I'll come and take a look… Mel, it would be tremendous if you could make me a cup of coffee."

She scoffed playfully. "Oh, I don't know Steven. After your hurtful words I'll have to consider that carefully."

Nonetheless, she was already walking out of the room and towards the kitchen before she had even finished the sentence. Steven smiled a bit after her before following Wallace to the laundry.

"Right then," he mused, opening the closet, "what do they look like?"

Wallace threw him a dirty look.

"I'm sorry, dear, but I don't keep tabs on what our curtains look like," he deflected and the other man broke into a grin.

"Yeah, I know you don't… It's just… I almost expected you to remember them."

Steven raised an eyebrow. "Where from?"

Wallace's answering smile was nostalgic. "They used to be draped over the kitchen window at my house when we were small. We hung around there quite a lot, so I thought it would stick in your memory."

Steven had then a revelation.

"Oh, you mean those curtains!" He grinned remembering one particular incident from their youth when, during a minor food fight, he'd accidently flung a belue berry at them, causing a permanent stain. Needless to say, Wallace's mother hadn't been very pleased with either of the boys even when they'd tried to explain they were only practicing for pokémon battles. "I do remember them now. Weren't they really pale yellow? I think I would've realized if I had seen them around…"

"I'm not so sure, dear, if you don't mind me saying," Wallace said with a chuckle. "More often than not you seem like you don't even know where you are, not to mention what you're doing."

"Hey," Steven tried to protest, but couldn't really muster up a properly offended response. He knew there was some truth to that sentence, after all.

He dug around the closet aimlessly for a while, before remembering that a few days before he'd actually been there looking for a table cloth. He had indeed moved some curtains out of the way then, but now that he thought about it he couldn't for the life of him remember where he'd put them.

"Really now," Wallace sighed when Steven told him all this. "Sometimes I think you'd forget your own name if I wasn't repeating it to you all the time."

So with no hope of finding the missing curtains easily Wallace and Steven began a full scale search around the house, just to find them right where they'd started—in Steven's study. They were in a neatly folded pile on top of the side desk and Aron had nested itself into them. Melissa found it all terribly funny when they were finally gathered around the kitchen table for some well-deserved morning coffee.

"That's so like you, Steven," she managed to wheeze out between laughs.

Wallace agreed and Steven, at a disadvantage, grumbled and resigned to his fate. Afterwards, when Melissa had left with the promise of coming over once more before her departure to Unova and Wallace had gone off to buy groceries, Steven slinked back into his study in hopes of finally finishing his work. Back in the room, he soon noticed that Aron had found a new nesting place. Staring at the sight he let out a deep breath and smiled. It was one of Wallace's spare capes, which he suspected the man had specifically brought there for the tiny pokémon.

He might've not been expecting to spend his morning looking for curtains, but hose few lost working hours hardly mattered when he had been reminded through such a small thing how lucky he had always been—even as a child—to have someone like Wallace to call his.

End

A/N: "How about I write a pointless fic about Steven and Wallace and let's say curtains and hmm let's add my stupid oc Melissa in there because that's fun, right? And while at it, let's make the title a really bad pun!"

I'm not even sorry.

Irrelevant note: originshipping was one of my first ever slash ships and one of the first ships I ever wrote fanfiction for… gosh it felt good to write about them after all this time.