The Tip of the Iceberg
Characters: Denmark, Fem!Norway, Fem!England, Netherlands, mentions of Scotland and Sealand.
Pairings: ...Let's just stick with Denmark/Fem!Norway and eventual Iceland/Fem!Norway. Final pairing will be Ice/Fem!Nor.
Rating: M. It's high school, and I'm portraying it as realistically as possible while still making it story-shaped. So yeah, M.
Genre: Romance
Warnings: Language. Genderbends. Language. Absolutely blatant references to sex. Teenagers being stupid, hormone-ridden creatures. References to both Firefly and Doctor Who.
DISCLAIMER: I don't own anything I reference. Ever.
Chapter 10: In Which Poor Decisions Are Made
"C'mon, die, you fucker!" Søren growled at his TV, pressing random buttons in an attempt to kill the computerized zombie he was facing. "C'mon, that's it, die already you little – AGH!" he screamed as the doorbell rang, jumping about a foot in the air as his character on screen was eaten.
The doorbell rang again. Søren rolled his eyes, paused his game, and got up, untangling himself from the cords of his various gaming systems as he did so.
The doorbell rang again and again. Whoever this is is persistent as hell, Søren thought irritably, opening the door. "Yeah, what – Nora? What're you doing here?" he asked, shocked that she would come over at 9:15 at night and a little embarrassed that she'd caught him without a shirt on and wearing his Spongebob pajama pants. Fucking laundry day.
"I just – I needed to know something. This was a stupid idea, I'll go now –" she said, turning around to go back to her car when Søren caught her by the wrist.
"Uh, no, you do not get to leave me hanging like that. What did you want to know?"
Nora sighed deeply, trying to gather her thoughts. "I just – if I were to call off the bet right now, say that you'd won, what would you do?"
"Are you thinking about calling it off or something?" he asked, eyes sparkling with poorly-hidden excitement.
"No, I'm just asking, purely hypothetically, what would you do if I did?"
"I – I dunno. What kind of answer are you lookin' for, here?"
"Would you break up with me?" she asked quietly.
"Wha – break up with you? You kidding me? After how goddamn hard I worked to get you? Forget about it, no way," he answered immediately.
"And you're not just dating me because of the money? Or because you think I'm hot?"
Søren blanched a little, though it wasn't visible in the darkness of the entryway. "Well, that's why I was initially, but then I got to know you better. It's beyond that now, I guess."
"You guess," she repeated, sounding a little disappointed in him.
"Look, you're fucking gorgeous, okay? I would do almost anything to have sex with you. But I – I respect you enough to wait," he admitted, shocking even himself with his words. "And the money was an awesome incentive in the beginning, but now, I just – I don't really care, yanno?"
"You.. you don't care?"
"Not really," he said, shrugging.
That was when Nora tackled him, her mouth on his, causing him to rock back slightly where he stood in surprise, then moving on to deepen the kiss.
"W-what brought all this on?" He asked once they surfaced for air, shocked by her behavior.
"It's a really long story," she whispered, arms still wrapped around his neck. "I don't really want to explain it right now."
"… Okay then. You – you gonna stay over, or goin' back home now?" he questioned somewhat nervously.
"I don't – it's up to you, I mean, if you want me to stay, my mom's not expecting me back or anything," she said, equally nervously.
"W-well, my parents are out for the night, so if you wanna stay, I guess you can…"
"I – lemme get my stuff first. I'll be right back, okay?" she asked as she ran back to her car and pulled a bag out of the passenger seat.
"A-all right," he said weakly, running to his room in order to attempt to clean it before she entered it.
He had just stashed all his walkthroughs and Shonen Jump magazines when she knocked lightly on his bedroom door. "Nice room," she commented, setting her stuff down at the end of his bed. He couldn't tell if she was being serious or making fun of him. He suspected the latter.
"So, uh, how do you wanna do this?" he questioned, staring at her as she stripped off her jacket and took off her shoes.
"The usual way, I suspect," she said sarcastically, blushing furiously as she did so.
"Seriously, Nora, are we gonna – are we going to have sex, or what?"
"Would I have said I was staying over if we weren't?" she demanded of him, midway through pulling her t-shirt off.
"I thought you didn't have sex before the third date," he said carefully.
"And I was under the impression that we had technically been dating for at least a month now," she retorted, rolling her eyes and pulling her shirt off the rest of the way. "You've got condoms, right?"
"Wha – oh, yeah, shit, be right back," he said quickly, running into his bathroom and rummaging through the cabinets. "Shit, mom, don't tell me you got rid of them," he swore frantically, breathing in a sigh of relief when he found the condoms. He took a deep breath, trying to calm his nerves, before walking back into his room, trying to keep it cool, when he stopped dead in his tracks.
Nora was perched on his bed, wearing nothing but her bra and panties, wearing a look of mixed impatience and boredom on her face. "Took you long enough," she muttered, glaring at him a little bit.
"You are so bipolar sometimes," he sighed, more to himself than to her.
"Nothing I haven't heard before. Are we going to do this or not?" she asked impatiently.
"Oh, believe me, we're doing this," he told her, clicking his light off, pulling off his pants and practically leaping on her.
What have I done? Nora asked herself in abject horror, staring at the ceiling and finally realizing that she had fucked up beyond anything she'd ever done previously. She hadn't felt half this bad when she slept with Berwald – this feeling was more akin to how she felt when Berwald had admitted to her that he was gay.
This was her fault, she admitted to herself. She'd been drunk – drunk off the fact that Søren liked her for her, not just because she was hot, not just because she had $950 attached to her.
And she should've known better than to have sex when she was drunk.
Søren continued to snore on without a care in the world.
"You're shitting me, right? She actually had sex with you." Lars said, clearly shocked.
"I am not shitting you. We actually fucked," Søren bragged, swaggering to the fridge and looking for something to eat.
"I'm so proud of you!" Lars cooed at him, "You're actually having a healthy relationship!"
"Oh, fuck you, man!" Søren spat into the receiver.
"No thanks. I've got Maddie for that," Lars retorted. Søren could just see the shit-eating grin that his best friend was wearing.
Bastard.
"You're disgusting."
"You're the one who called to brag that he fucked his girlfriend. Seriously, who does that?"
"Seriously, Lars. Fuck you, and fuck your noise. You're a douchebag, you know that?"
"Takes one to know one, douchecanoe."
Søren hung up abruptly, throwing his phone over to the couch.
"Doesn't take you long to start bragging to people, does it?" Nora asked, seeming to appear out of thin air, fully dressed and with her things packed up.
She looked incredibly disappointed in him. And angry. But mostly angry, he noticed, swallowing nervously.
"I – I wouldn't say Lars is strictly people," Søren stammered, closing the fridge behind him.
"Well, I would. He'll tell Madeline, then she'll tell Alfred, who'll tell Morgan – and then Morgan will be pissed at me for not telling her, and spread it around through Feliks or Eli, and then the whole damn school will know. Thank you, Søren, so very, very much for giving me a reputation as a fucking whore," she seethed, walking out the front door and slamming it shut behind her.
Søren stared at the door in shock, before sinking to the ground.
How had things gone so wrong so fast?
Nora had never before been more grateful that her first speed dial contact was Morgan as she pulled over on the side of the road and hit '1'.
"Nngh - Nora? What is it?" Morgan asked, sounding rather sleepy.
"M-Morgan? C-can I come over?" she begged into her phone, trying to choke down tears.
"What – what the hell is going on? Are you all right?" Morgan demanded, sounding immediately more awake.
"N-no, I – I'm not all right. I fucked up. I fucked up so badly," she sobbed, shaking in her seat.
"Where are you? Do you need me to come and get you?"
"No, I- I'm already halfway to your house. I j-just needed to know if I c-could come over."
"The front door's open for you whenever you get here; just come straight into my room. I'll let my brothers know not to bug you."
"T-thanks, Morgan. I'll be there in like, five minutes," she sniffed, wiping away tears with her other hand.
"Take as long as you need. Just be careful, all right? I don't need you dying on me."
"All right," she said, hanging up the phone and continuing to drive towards Morgan's house, grateful that the roads were mostly deserted.
She pulled up to Morgan's house about five minutes later, quickly turning her car off and walking to the front door, trying to calm herself down before she went inside and broke down again.
The muffled shouting of Morgan's brothers worked its way outside as she waited.
"Peter, go get the door!"
"Get it yourself, Jamie! I'm in the middle of a game here!"
"You little shit, I'll delete your entire game history –"
"You wouldn't dare!"
"I would too, and break your Halo disc as well!"
"I'll get it! Christ, you two are idiots!" Morgan shouted at the two of them, yanking the door open. "I'm sorry about them. I thought I said you could just come in?"
"You did," Nora confirmed weakly, "I just wanted to pull myself together before coming in. 'S'not going so well."
"It doesn't look like it is. Come on, I'll get you some tea."
"How about some coffee instead?"
"Haven't got any – James finished off the last of it this morning. I've got some more of that citrus stuff that you liked. D'you want that?"
"Sure," Nora replied, sniffling and wiping at her tears.
"All right, just head to my room. I'll let that lot know that we're not to be disturbed," the British girl said, gently shoving Nora in the direction of her bedroom.
"Kay," Nora murmured, shuffling off to Morgan's room and flopping down on her bed.
Morgan entered about 10 minutes later with two cups of tea in hand. "They'll leave us alone."
"What'd you do, threaten to hit them with the cricket bat again?" Nora asked, sitting up and taking the tea from Morgan.
"And that'd I'd make lunch and dinner if they bugged us. Now, tell me, what happened? You look like a right mess."
"I am a mess. A really big, idiotic mess."
"That doesn't tell me what happened."
"I – I slept with Søren." Nora confessed.
"You – oh, Nora, why would you do that?"
"I was - I was drunk. There's no other way to describe the way I was feeling." Morgan just sipped at her tea, looking at Nora expectantly. "He – well, I went over to his house, because you and Berwald and even kind of my mom said he wasn't a good guy, but I just – I didn't want to believe it, so I went over to his house to ask him if I called the bet off, would break up with me, and he said that he wouldn't and that I was pretty and that he wouldn't have sex with me unless I wanted to, and I did want to, so we did. But then I realized afterward that we shouldn't have, and I just felt stupid but I still stayed, and then when I got up, he was already talking to Lars about how we'd done it and then I blew up at him and left and now I'm here," Nora explained in one big rush, abandoning the tea and flopping back over in a heap and curling in on herself.
"Oh, Nora," Morgan sighed. "It's been a while since you did anything this stupid, hasn't it?"
"I'm not sure I've ever done anything this stupid. It doesn't feel like I have."
"I don't know what to tell you. Did you give him a chance to explain what he was doing?"
"He was telling Lars that we'd fucked – his words, not mine," Nora hissed, starting to cry again.
"I did try to warn you, Nora."
"I know, I just didn't want to believe it," Nora choked out, trying to wipe her tears away with no success.
"So, what are you going to do now?" Morgan asked after Nora's sobbing had died down.
"I have no clue. Can I just stay here for a while?"
"Of course. You can stay as long as you like," the British girl informed her as she stood up. "I'm just going to go order Chinese for lunch, and then I'll be right back, all right? We can watch Doctor Who or Firefly or something off of Netflix."
"Y-yeah, that's fine. Thanks."
"No problem. I'll be right back."
Nora just laid there, curled up into a little ball, until Morgan came back in. "I ordered Won Ton soup and Orange chicken for the both of us. Hope that's all right."
"Yeah, s'fine."
"You want to watch something off Netflix?"
"Anything to get my mind off of my stupid self," the younger girl sighed.
"Well, all right then. No romantic comedies, I assume?"
"Hell no."
"Didn't think so. Firefly or Doctor Who?"
"… Doctor Who. The new stuff, though. Something with Ten, preferably."
"Any specific companion?"
"Martha or Donna," Nora answered quietly, uncurling her body from the tightly rolled ball she was in. "Not a huge fan of Rose, unless she's with Nine."
"Hm. D'you want to watch the ones with the Master?"
"Nah. The Shakespeare one sounds kind of good. Or the one with Agatha Christie. Or the Pompeii one. I like all of those."
"… The Unicorn and the Wasp it is, then," Morgan replied, queuing that particular episode up.
"Don't be surprised if I fall asleep during it, though."
"If you do, I'm just going to switch the episode. But why would you fall asleep?"
"I didn't exactly get quality sleep last night," the younger girl said, letting out a choked laugh that sounded more akin to a small animal getting run over by a car.
"Got it. I'll wake you up when the food comes."
"I said don't be surprised if I do, not that I would. I'll probably watch a couple of episodes and then go home and crash."
"No, you'll stay here. Driving while sleep deprived is bad, remember?" Morgan lectured, pausing the show.
"Fine. I'll text my mom and let her know," Nora sighed, pulling out her phone and proceeding to do exactly that.
"I'll warn my parents. We'll get you something for dinner, too," Morgan said, resuming the show.
The two of them lapsed into silence, simply content to watch the antics of The Doctor and Donna.
A/N: Here you all are, an extra-long chapter just for you! (The plot bunnies have really been biting lately, which is why you're all getting an update every 3-4 days. This is really not normal for me at all.) I hope you all liked it.
Yes, Nora is really that stupid sometimes. And so is Søren. High schoolers aren't exactly known for their stellar decision-making skills. Especially when it comes to sex.
And Morgan's answer to any problem is tea and Doctor Who. Or Firefly. (If you have any questions about either show, please ask! I will do my very best to explain. Or direct you towards the proper Wikipedia page.)
Please review!