title: under control
playlist/inspiration: who'd have known- lily allen, under control- parachute, all too well- taylor swift, how to be a heartbreaker- marina and the diamonds, complicated- avril lavigne, alone together- fall out boy
disclaimer: I own absolutely nothing you recognize
warnings: strong t for implied situations but nothing too graphic, some drunkenness and partying, copious FRIENDS references that make little to no sense but I kept them in anyways (?)
They stand in the middle of a frat house, surrounded by blaring music and sweaty, dancing bodies, crushing mostly-empty Solo cups under their feet.
Ally turns her nose up at the scene.
"This smells like irresponsibility."
Austin laughs and helps her out of her navy blue jacket, hanging it on the coat rack over a pile of coats that had probably once been hanging themselves, but had subsequently been haphazardly dropped to the abnormally shiny wood floor.
"Come on, Ally, you can't graduate college without at least going to one clichéd party."
"I was doing that just fine until now, thank you." She shrugs away from a topless guy twirling his shirt over his head with the one hand that wasn't occupied by an overflowing cup of beer, leaning back towards Austin and he wraps his arms around her shoulders protectively.
"I mean, come on, Austin, we've been to a Grammy after-party. And even just that was enough partying to tide me over for the rest of my life."
Her best friend chuckles. "Dude. You've still got a lot of loosening up to do. Ally, you are a Grammy-award winning songwriter who is about to graduate summa cum laude from college. You deserve to have fun once in a while."
"This isn't fun for me!" She protests.
He leads her over to the (surprisingly free of traffic) keg and fills up two cups.
"Maybe this can help change your mind." He smirks, handing her one. She takes it reluctantly and he bumps his cup to hers, sloshing lukewarm liquid down both of their wrists.
"Cheers."
Ally stares blankly at the cup in her hand as Austin downs half of his in one gulp.
"You don't have to drink it if you don't want-" He starts, but Ally tilts the cup to her lips and chugs as much as she can at once.
This happens to be the majority of the cup.
"Well then!" Austin laughs. "Didn't know you had it in you, Dawson."
He's not sure if it's the alcohol speaking, or the natural competitiveness he'd always managed to bring out in her, but suddenly she cocks one eyebrow and her innocent doe eyes sparkle dangerously.
Refilling her cup, she mentions passively: "Then there's a lot you don't know about me."
After three cups, he's still hanging onto his last bits of sobriety (although just barely), but Ally, she was (to put it bluntly) thoroughly wasted.
Austin watches from the walls as Ally flails about on the dance floor.
She never could dance, he remembers, laughing softly to himself. It's so cute.
(But that was the alcohol talking.)
Her glittery skirt shines under disco lighting and he keeps his eyes intently on her, watching over her protectively.
"Hey there." Someone whispers seductively. He turns to his left where a girl with alcohol heavily laced in her breath stands, blonde hair tousled.
"Hi." He says politely, inching in small increments away from her.
"You're Austin Moon, right?" She says, running her fingers up and down the sleeve of his worn leather jacket.
He raises an eyebrow. "Yup, that's me."
"That's so hot." She whispers huskily, suddenly grabbing his shoulders and wrapping one leg around his waist.
He immediately pushes her away with more force than he intends, knocking her down to the wooden floor. She lies there with seemingly no intention of moving, giggling maniacally.
Normally he would've helped her up, but she seemed content where she was, and he had other priorities.
He inched his way onto the dance floor (which was really just a blocked off space of the large common area, but they all seemed to pretend just fine), finishing off the last of his drink as he wove through the hordes of people, searching for his best friend.
There she was, smiling widely as she tangled her fingers into some brunet guy's hair.
He can see her laugh as the guy whispers something into her ear.
At some point, he feels his red plastic cup crumble in his hands and drops it to the ground with all the rest.
He weaves his way through the rest of the crowd that separated him from the only girl he ever was truly in love with (God, where was his mind going anymore?) and grabbed her wrist.
"Oh, Austin!" Ally exclaims. "Hi-iii!"
"Ally, we have to go." He grumbles through gritted teeth. "Now."
"Whoa, whoa, who's the party crasher?" The brunet guy laughs, as if Austin was the one at fault here for wanting to protect the most important girl in his life.
Austin grabbed the guy's collar and pulled him closer.
"Now you lis… listen. Ally and I have known each other since we were fifteen years old. That's a loooooong, long time. I know every piece of her, inside and out. If you think I'm going to let some douche she's just drunkenly taken interest in take advantage of my girl, guess again." Austin hisses, trying to control his speech as much as possible.
The guy pulls back, stunned.
Austin tugs Ally away before any more words can be exchanged.
"Hey! When…where…." Ally trails off, too intoxicated to finish her sentence.
He gets them all the way to the front door before he realizes neither of them is in any state to drive home.
Not knowing what else to do, he guides her to the staircase, where she immediately falls over.
He blinks at her crumpled form, laughing helplessly.
"Oh my God." He groans. Trying with all of his might to keep her steady, he scoops her up and drags them up the stairs.
Finding an empty room with a bed, he lays her down before settling down next to her.
After a few minutes of staring into a blank ceiling, lit only by random fairy lights strung around messily, he feels Ally shift her body so she's facing him.
"Austin? Are you awake?"
She seems to have regained some of her composure.
Reaching out blindly to find her hand, he grabs it and squeezes gently. "Yeah…yeah, I'm awake."
"Can we talk?"
He laughs. "Alls, it's like four in the morning and we're both drunk. I don't think this is time for conversation."
"My mom always told me that late-night conversations were the most honest. And drunk, late night conversations? Basically limitless. " She murmurs groggily.
"Fine. Talk."
She turns to look him in the eye, and for some reason, he feels insecure underneath her gaze.
"No, you know what? You're right." She says softly. "I don't want to talk."
He feels her inching closer, and closer, but he doesn't pull away.
"I think this says everything."
Suddenly, he feels her lips on his, and they taste like alcohol but the feeling is one he knows well.
"Ally." He murmurs, gently pushing her away. "Alls."
"Mm?"
"We can't, can't do this. We're both drunk and if we let anything happen now, we're going to just wake up and regret it in the morning."
It's not even a big deal anymore, crossing the border from friends to more than friends. He's not even sure they were ever strictly on one side.
It's actually almost comforting.
(Or maybe it's double masochism. He's never been able to discern that one.)
Ally sits up straight. "Do you really think that's just the drunkenness talking? Do you really think that, after seven years of unresolved feelings, I take this all lightly? I don't know why we've never been able to figure this- us- out, Austin, but I know it means something."
Even when she's drunk, she's right.
"But do you really think this is the time to discuss it?"
"Yes, because kissing you is obviously code for 'let's have a discussion'." Ally remarks, the bitter sarcasm heavily laden in her voice.
"Oh." He says, and that's all he says before he kisses her again, fervently and heatedly.
It's amazing how little he cares about anything else when he's in her presence.
She wakes up first the next morning, knowing full and well what happened last night, and to her disappointment, she regrets it more than she'd like to admit.
Austin wakes up just when she's managed to collect the pieces of her clothing strewn around the floor.
She tosses a shirt at him as he stretches.
"God, my head hurts like a bitch." He moans, slipping his arms into his sleeves.
"Tell me about it." She laughs bitterly, tugging her own shirt over her head.
After they're fully clothed again, they lay there in a bed that doesn't belong to them and he watches her chest rise and fall.
"We are so screwed up." She laughs, squishing a pillow over her face. "We can win Grammys and graduate college, and yet after seven years we're still pulling this crap when it comes to our relationship."
And she's right. It's screwed up that he can sit here and know that she's not going to puke up her alcohol (and neither will he, God knows how they both escaped that misfortune), and know her favorite song frpm when she was ten (The Sweet Escape by Gwen Stefani) and that they even fucking sit here and discuss the utter screwiness of the entire situation with her but he couldn't explain the situation itself if his life depended on it.
"I've never been able to figure it out." He laughs, leaning back against the wood headboard.
"It's like…. when we say we're just friends, there's the tension- the knowledge- that we're not, and then if we try to say that we're in a relationship, we get awkward again. Maybe our entire problem was just labeling ourselves wrong."
Ally removes the pillow from her head and inhales slowly.
"So what are we going to do now?" She asks, in a small voice. "Do we try again, or do we just continue calling ourselves best friends who occasionally sleep with each other?"
"I feel like our entire life is one huge, long, episode of FRIENDS, but I can't figure out if we're Monica and Chandler or Rachel and Joey."
"Of course, out of all the people in the world, the one I choose to spend my time with is the one who compares his relationships to 90's television." She giggles, hitting him with the pillow.
"Hey, not all my relationships. Just you and me."
"Has there even been anyone else? I mean, really been anyone else?"
He looks back on the past twenty-two years, the past seven in particular, before shaking his head.
"Nope. Not even in the slightest."
"So maybe we're like Rachel and Ross. Minus the multiple marriages."
He nods. "Don't they end up together in the end?"
Ally shrugs non-committedly. "Yeah, they did. Us? We may never know."
"I want to try again." He declares, because Austin Moon has always been an act-on-impulse kind of guy and he never thought before he spoke. It was a passionate way to live, but it usually led to a lot of mistakes.
"I want us to try this again. You and me. We're college graduates now, and we're successful musicians, and if we can do that, I think the least we can do is work out a way to be together. No labels, no excess. Just you and me. Just Austin and Ally."
"It's never going to be that easy, Austin-"
"And why not? Come on, Ally, we both know that we are made for each other. We know each other backwards and forwards in every way possible, neither of us can envision being with anyone but each other, it's insane to think that we can't at least manage to try. And maybe, this time will be different."
He watches her as she places her hands over her cheeks and sinks down into the mattress. He knows she's crying, so he wraps his arms around her and presses his lips to the crown of her head.
"I can't, I can't keep hurting both you and me like this," She says quietly. "If we do this, we do it right or not at all."
His hazel eyes widen as he realizes what she means- if they don't work out this time, they're done for good.
Maybe she's got a point.
People who are meant to be don't try and fail so many times.
But he couldn't bear to lose her.
"I promise." He holds out his pinky, because even though they're twenty-two and not seven, he can't think of anything more binding than a pinky promise.
She takes it with caution, as she did everything. He knew a million different thoughts were racing through her brain at this very moment and she was probably very, very scared.
Not of falling in love with him. She probably had to be secure with that at this point.
She was afraid of failing. Again. This, and dancing, were the only two things she'd ever really failed at and it was a foreign feeling, a lonely feeling, especially when it could end up losing her the most important person in her life.
"Do you trust me?" He whispered.
And she nodded, because time and time again, she did, and always would.
"Then have faith in me. Have faith in us."
She looped her finger around his without saying a word. She wasn't going to promise to always have faith, but she could promise to try.
a/n: sigh tessa you're fourteen stop writing about this stuffso a lovely anon on tumblr asked me to write a fic based off of the song "who'd have known" by lily allen and this is what's beginning to happen?
frankly, I'm quite worried about the fact that this is a two shot, but I legitimately could not write more for this at the moment, but because it was a request, I certainly wanted to at least get something out. It's definitely not my favorite thing that I've ever written, but I hope you enjoy it anyways and here's to hoping that I actually finish it woooo yay
(: tessa :)