Title: Snapshots (Gorillaz in a Happy Mood)
Fandom: Gorillaz
Author: Me, Vinnie2757
Genre: family, phase 1-2 (Kong era), gen, fluff
Character/Pairing: Murdoc, Noodle, 2D, Russel, no pairings
Rating: K+
Warnings: none
Summary: The early years are full of the soft moments, the easy smiles and piggybacks, the laughter and the supportive hands behind backs. [A collection of moments from a time when Gorillaz were happy.]
Chapter Summary: Noodle is focused on her drawing, and Murdoc wants one of his own.
A/N: I keep writing little things for the early years so I'll sling them all together, sod it. Enjoy, lovelies~!
ONE: Octopus
It's around one-ish, early in the afternoon but after Russel's cleared up from lunch, that Murdoc comes stumbling in. He looks exhausted, and has bites all down his neck and chest, his jeans more crumpled than normal. Russel tells him to put a shirt on, but, as ever, he is ignored. Murdoc clutches his skull and with a groan, flops to the floor next to Noodle. She's sat by the coffee table, all of the song notes and lyric magnets shoved out of the way to make room for a pile of stationary, and she's furiously scribbling away at a piece of paper with a red felt-tip.
She has her tongue sticking out of the corner of her mouth and her hand and arm has red and black and green pen streaked across it. It's rather endearing, actually. She feels him looking at her, and beams at him, shoves the picture in his direction.
It takes his eyes a moment to focus, but he blinks away the swirling monsters at the corners, and looks at the octopus she's drawn on the page.
'Huh,' he says, and tilts his head a little, squints at the tentacles with each sucker drawn individually. 'That's real good, love.'
She peeks over the top of the page at hearing his voice, and he grins at her, gives her a thumbs up. Laughing that monstrous little laugh of hers, she puts the paper back down and begins drawing over the lines with a black marker pen.
For a moment or so, Murdoc watches her, scratches at the itching skin of his arm where the ink didn't stick on the retouch to his cross, and then he thumps his forearm down on the table next to her. Startled, she looks at him.
He gestures at the octopus, and then makes scribbling motions on his arm.
It takes her a moment, but she moves the paper to sit over his arm like a stencil or a transfer, and he nods.
'Yeah,' he says, gives her another thumbs-up.
Face alight, she turns and pulls his arm towards her. It takes her an hour or so, and Russel laughs, impressed that Murdoc has the patience to sit there for that long to let a child draw on him.
Murdoc sniffs imperiously. 'It takes much longer when you have a proper one,' he says, and puts his nose in the air.
Russel, sure Noodle cannot see him from where he's sat on the couch, sticks his middle finger up. Murdoc, with his arm at Noodle's mercy, and Russel's shit-eating grin telling him he'll get a smack in the mouth if he returns the gesture, settles for sticking his tongue out.
Another half-hour passes, and then Noodle is capping her pen with a loud cry and clapping her hands. The pen-tattoo, then, is done.
Murdoc examines it in interest, twisting his arm this way and that, admiring the way the tentacles coil around his wrist.
'This is fantastic!' he says, and gives his girl a big grin. She beams back, and somehow she's got pen on her face too.
He's showing Russel when 2D comes in, the drummer actually interested in Noodle's skin-penmanship, and with a gabbled sentence, the girl is tugging 2D over to look too.
'What is it?' the boy laughs, and then winces, rubs his eye. A migraine, then.
'She gave me a tattoo,' Murdoc says, proud as anything, and shoves his arm in 2D's face for him to look at. 'It looks fucking great, eh?'
2D looks a little uncomfortable, but Murdoc has no idea why, and doesn't particularly care. The tattoo looks great, and he scratches his head before making a valiant, but ultimately futile, attempt to ask Noodle if he can have the picture.
She stares blankly at him, and then pokes at the tattoo.
'It isn't permanent, love,' he tries, slow and steady. 'I'll need the picture to give the artist.'
Russel rolls his eyes. 'Just photocopy it. There's a copier down in the office. I got it working the other day.'
Murdoc considers this, and after Noodle's gone to bed, he runs several copies of the paper and his arm both into the machine.
A week or so later, he comes home with a strip of gauze taped to his arm, and Noodle looks at him in concern. She turns his arm, frowning at it. Murdoc grins down at her, and reaches to peel the gauze away. The tattoo'll be fine now, it's just because it was raining on his way out, was all. No sense in ruining it before it's even begun.
She sees the first bit of thick black and blood-red, and starts screaming and jumping. Like a child at Christmas – and Murdoc knows children at Christmas, has played Santa enough times to know how they are – she hurriedly pulls the rest of the gauze off, taking some of his arm hair with it when she yanks the tape away.
Squealing, she holds his hand and bounces up at down, almost pulling his arm out of its socket in her enthusiasm.
When Russel comes hurrying in, worried about what all the noise is for, he sees the newest tattoo on Murdoc's arm and laughs.
Murdoc bends to pick the girl up, and she all but wipes her nose on the tattoo, her face is that close. She dots her fingers along the suckers, coils her fingers along the lines of the tentacles, presses hard enough to bruise in the black sockets where eyes should be. Murdoc thinks, idly, that he should have stuck a pair of googly eyes on there, that would have really got her going.
Instead, he just laughs, and lets her admire her design imprinted permanently on his skin.
For weeks, he wears his sleeves pushed up to his elbows, or rolled up when he can be arsed to wear a button-up shirt as opposed to a T-shirt, and the paparazzi are quick to notice the fresh ink on his arm. When the pictures get sent to the press, as they always do, everyone gossips about the meaning behind the octopus. The inverted cross is par for the course with a man who wears one about his neck and curses Satan's name instead of God's. But the octopus is a befuddling thing.
When interviewers have the sense to ask about it, he's eager to show it off, proudly proclaiming that his girl designed it, often ruffling Noodle's hair or giving her a beaming grin whenever she realises they're talking about her tattoo. The fans go wild, as fans are wont to do, and nobody is in the least surprised when 2D gets a tattoo too. His is subtler, of course, because 2D is a skittish, easily-frightened kind of fellow, and it had taken at least four pints before he was even amiable to the idea, never mind actually go through with it.
(Murdoc takes full credit, because it's another of Noodle's designs, a smaller one, but it's hers, and he's the reason it's a thing at all, and that deserves credit.)
NOTES::
It's like a series of G-Bites, get it? Ha, I'm a loser.
I think out of all of them, the octopus is my favourite tattoo.
According to Rise of the Ogre, Murdoc's method of songwriting is writing a bunch of phrases on magnets and giving them to 2D to throw at the fridge, and whatever stuck got turned into a song. It makes a lot of sense, actually.
Thanks for reading, lovelies~!