Pairing: Ford/Arthur

Words: 1444

Disclaimer: Hitchhikers belongs to Douglas Adams. The Faust quote belongs to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

I would like to say that this chapter is the reason I started writing this story, but my lying skills are being better put to use convincing my family that I am not insane.

The pronunciation failure about a third of the way down the page is my own and I was completely sober at the time. It predates the first chapter of this story, but that's okay because it's mostly a flashback anyway… which is not technically a spoiler because you should be able to infer that from the title anyway.

And if not, I have just saved you some confusion. You may now rest easy knowing you won't end up like that poor fellow who asked Simon Jones why his character was specified as a "five foot eight descendant" at the beginning of the first episode.

Zen & the Art

Of About A Year Ago

The last time Arthur had been in the pub down the road from his house had been the day his house had been knocked down to make way for a bypass (as well as his planet, for nearly the same reason, though hardly on the same scale).

Not that time, but many times before that, Arthur and Ford had been at that same pub getting very drunk.

"Where w'going nex'?" Ford slurred, slinging an arm around Arthur's shoulders as the barman kicked them out for the night.

Arthur stumbled, partly because he was almost, but not quite, as drunk as Ford but also because his friend had misjudged the location of his shoulders by several inches and, in consequence, fell on him.

"Huh?" he asked, steadying himself (and therefore both of them) against the outside wall of the closing pub.

Ford squinted into the distance. Not any particular distance, just a distance. He was in no state to be very choosy about which one. "Wrrrrrr," he replied vaguely.

"I think," said Arthur, making a valiant attempt to sound sober, "I think I'd best be going home…"

"Hrrrrrmmmm," burbled Ford.

"You should come too," Arthur added charitably. He was beginning to suspect, if dimly, that at this point Ford couldn't have found the way out of a paper bag if there were great bright neon signs there helping, much less the way to his own flat. "You can sleep on the sofa."

"I can unconscious on the sofa," Ford corrected, then lurched to the left. "O-kay, le's go then!"

"No-oo, I think 's this way…"

Luckily it was late (or early) enough that there weren't any cars to worried about as they stumbled down the road together, a confused tangle of flailing limbs.

Every once in a while one of them would fall over, and then the other would do the same to keep him company. More often than not it was Ford who fell first. After a while Arthur wondered if he was doing it on purpose, because every time Arthur half-landed on him he would burst into wild giggles and flail in a particularly unhelpful way which Arthur, if he hadn't known better, might have mistaken for groping. By the time Arthur had convinced himself he knew better and hauled them upright again, the giggles had subsided and they continued on their way until the next mishap – usually about forty-something seconds later.

Arthur stopped in front of his gate and inspected it blearily, trying to remember how to open it while Ford batted at the flowers growing up the side of the fence with one hand. "Ford, d'you…" He trailed off, because Ford's other hand had wandered up and started playing with his hair. "Er, what're you doing?"

Ford grinned, a white flash in the darkness. "Fighting the floating roses."

"Fighting the froze—" Arthur blinked. "Flighting the fl— fliffify fliflafluhfla." He paused, gathered himself, and took care to enunciate properly. "Fighting the floating what?"

"Roses!"

"But…" He tilted his head in profound puzzlement, getting the feeling he was missing something. Ford was giggling at him again. "Those aren't roses."

"You're right!" Ford laughed. "It's Faust!"

"Those flowers are Faust?"

"Yes!" He leaned over and inspected the gate, then kicked it open. "'S unlatched, c'mon."

"Have you read Faust?" Arthur asked dubiously.

"I read," replied Ford, "…a packet of breakfast cereal!"

He collapsed into giggles again, and Arthur couldn't help rolling his eyes (albeit with a certain unshakeable fondness) as he hauled his extremely drunk friend up the path to the front door.

"The day you start making sense," Arthur said as he searched for his house keys, "I'll… well, I'm either gonna get very drunk, or never touch another drink again…"

Ford shot him a rather askew look which implied that he didn't believe a word of it, and also that he would probably be passing out soon. "Which?" he asked, just as Arthur found his keys and tried to fumble the wrong one into the lock.

"Dunno, I'll figure that out 'fit ever happens."

Several minutes later the door swung open and they shuffled inside, Arthur aiming them in the general direction of the sofa. After he dropped Ford off there he would crawl into his own bed and sink into oblivion for the night… Sounds great, he thought with a yawn, 'm tired.

He couldn't quite figure out, a minute later, how exactly it had happened. The next morning he wouldn't remember much of it either, and after a year the memory would only be a convoluted sense of déjà vu in a bathroom cubicle at the far dead-end of time.

The important points – which were, by some freak of cognition, regurgitated from the depths of Arthur's unconscious memory some time not very long after that particular instance of déjà vu, at the prompting of his very improbable arrival at a destination he had not expected – are these:

Ford fell over, again, and Arthur was pushed backwards over the arm of the sofa with Ford more or less along for the ride.

In a moment of panic Arthur tried to keep them both from bouncing off the sofa and landing on the floor, and to this end he threw one arm over the back of the sofa and another around Ford. They landed, bounced, and settled into the sofa cushions.

When Arthur's head had stopped spinning and he decided that he had blinked at the ceiling quite enough, he tried to move. He couldn't.

"Ford?"

Ford mumbled something unintelligible.

"What?"

He mumbled it again, nuzzled his cheek against Arthur's chest, and passed out.

"Ford…"

Arthur shook his friend, but Ford's quiet, even breathing didn't change. His only response was to shift his legs a tiny bit, but, as one of his legs was nestled up against Arthur's groin, that wasn't particularly helpful.

Blushing bright red in the darkened room, Arthur failed to bite back a started "Eep!" that he was very glad Ford wasn't awake to hear. He was also extremely thankful that Ford was in no condition to notice the other reaction, which he was quite content to blame on the alcohol and the unexpected contact and not on a sudden prompt to question his own personal preferences.

Slowly, carefully, Arthur let go of Ford, braced himself against the cushions, and eased closer to the far end of the sofa. This put more distance between his groin and Ford's wayward leg, but had the unfortunate side-effect of dragging himself under the rest of Ford's body weight. Arthur let out a whimper in spite of himself, wondering how that much pressure could be generated by someone so thin.

This led to the thought that maybe he was all muscle, which had the indecency to make the pressure worse.

If this is what being very drunk does to a person, Arthur thought with a particular sort of vague indigence that only an Englishman in such a situation could muster, then that's it. No more time spent in the bottle for me…

He made it to the end of the sofa and would have breathed a sigh of relief, but Ford, who was still very deeply asleep and very definitely had his head in Arthur's lap, took the liberty of sighing for him.

Arthur made a noise somewhere between a groan, a moan, and a very quiet shriek, and flailed his way over the arm of the sofa. He slid onto the floor and, having thus completed his very haphazard journey across the length of the sofa, curled up on the carpet. One of his hands crept down of its own accord and rubbed against the bulge in the front of his trousers until the pressure relived itself with a spine-tingling jolt, and he settled into a pleasant drowsiness that carried him gradually into sleep.

In the morning he woke up very hung over and very puzzled as to where exactly he and Ford had been the night before, how he had ended up falling asleep on the floor next to the sofa, and what exactly had happened inside of his pants sometime during the night. Ford, of course, had no idea (not that Arthur even considered bringing up that last part), but he had enjoyed some very pleasant dreams.

About a year after that night, Arthur Dent dropped from the wormhole he'd just traveled through and found himself sitting on what was apparently the same sofa in what was apparently the same room, still thinking about Ford pressing against him and still blushing, and for no particular reason suddenly recalling the first time Ford had seriously infringed upon his personal space.