06 October 2020
Prompt: Luxury
Character/Pairing: Dingo King (OC), Luka Couffaine, Jagged Stone
Rating: T / PG-13 / Teen
Notes: …it took me SIX DAYS to get Jagged in here. Be proud, y'all. xD
Dingo King is living the Good Life. Capital G. Capital L. And he is fucking loving it.
If you would have told him when he woke up that morning that he would be spending the better part of his day in Jagged Stone's personal suite at Le Grand Paris Hotel with the rock giant's infamous pet crocodile using him as her personal pillow, he would have laughed in your face. Of course, that was before he realized his new friend Marinette Dupain-Cheng was Jagged Stone's personal…ish…stylist (sorta? Kinda? It's complicated, and entirely because she's not yet legal and able to be hired full-time). Or that his best mate might just quite possibly sorta he doesn't really wanna talk about it yet be Jagged Stone's erstwhile son.
…actually, Dingo had missed a lot over a very short period of time, and he wasn't entirely sure how, but he's usually pretty quick on the uptake.
"I didn't tell you because I didn't fully know?" Luka had said after relaying the frantic message Marinette had texted him. The SOS that had begged his presence at Le Grand Paris like twenty minutes ago. "It's…been weird. I've been processing."
"I get that, but mate," Dingo had said, gesturing to the spot on his wall that used to hold the giant Jagged poster. He had thought it weird when Luka had taken it down, but he'd figured Luka would talk if he needed to.
It kind of hurt that he never felt like he needed to.
"For the longest time I just thought he was Ma's old bandmate," Luka had said with a shrug. "Jagged only insisted on the test…well, I think Penny insisted on the test? I don't even know. We just got the results last month. I've been –"
"Processing, yeah," Dingo had scoffed, but he hadn't meant it in a mean way. He clapped a hand on Luka's shoulder and grinned. "So what's your girl need? Besides you?"
Luka had shoved him off with a glare, and they'd left shortly after to meet Marinette at the hotel.
It's a complicated, convoluted mess of poor planning (on Jagged's part, never Penny's) and botched appointments, and Marinette was supposed to babysit Fang, except Jagged needed her at this junket because he had to talk outfits, and the owners of the venue were being difficult about his poor baby, and Jagged would have cancelled on them if Penny hadn't been so insistent that the meeting was crucial to launching their new label, and hey why doesn't Luka do it?
…except Luka still isn't quite ready to see Jagged yet, so there's this complicated avoidance of crossing of paths that isn't really as complicated as it could have been (the hotel is huge, and how hard is it to stagger comings and goings?), but at the end of it all Luka and Dingo had found themselves in Jagged's personal suite, with Fang, for the better part of the day. And it had been going great, and Dingo was having a ball, and Fang really was the coolest crocodile in rock-n-roll history – except they'd run out of macarons.
And Fang knew it.
And Fang gets really cranky when she's out of macarons.
So Luka had left him with explicit instructions to not leave her alone, and don't touch anything, and oh my God Ding if you fuck this up –
But Luka was only supposed to be gone for ten minutes tops, and what was the worst that could happen?
And for once in Dingo King's life, karma didn't come and bite him in the ass. Fang behaved. She actually took a nap. While he was sprawled out on a beach chair placed on Jagged's indecently huge balcony. With her head in his lap. At one point Dingo would have sworn she'd started purring, but he's Australian and well-versed in crocodiles and know crocs hiss, not purr, but either way Fang seemed pretty fucking happy to use him as a pillow.
And no one's ever gonna believe him, anyway, so he figures he might as well enjoy it, because how weird is his life, anyway?
Except Luka's trip isn't ten minutes. It's more like an hour? Which is ok, he guesses, because he kind of falls asleep in the chair with the sun beating down on him and three-maybe-four hundred kilograms of croc sitting on him, so it's not like he missed anything. It's not like either of them had any chance to get into trouble. They were perfectly fine, being left alone. Unsupervised.
Luka really should trust him more by this point, which is exactly what Dingo plans on telling him when he hears the door open almost two hours after Luka ran out for macarons.
"Well it's about fucking time, mate!" he calls when the footsteps approach. They're heavy, booted, and he wonders if Luka switched his bike for the Captain's bike to make it back in time. "And you thought we'd burn the place down. To make up for your stellar lack of faith in me, you better have extra macarons."
There's a prolonged moment of silence. Just long enough to make him…concerned. So he tips his shades up and looks back over the lounger, where Jagged fucking Stone is standing there in all his black-and-purple, yellow-striped glory looking Unamused.
"Ah…hi," Dingo says, wiggling his fingers in a nervous wave. Fang's tongue lolls out of her mouth, but she doesn't lift her head to greet her papa. Jagged's fingers tap against his elbow, and it sounds like a warning to Dingo's ears. Beside him, Marinette has gone almost as pale as her shirt, her fingers clamping onto her sketchbook in a death-grip as her eyes try to bug out of her skull.
"Who the fuck," Jagged asks, his voice sharp and piercing and covering the gasping breath Marinette sucks in, "are you?"