Author's Notes: Are you surprised? I am.
Warnings: Homosexuality, substance abuse, sex, and Swords' Unbeta'd Present-Tense of Doom ©.
Pairing: Ike/Marth.
Disclaimer: I don't own Super Smash Brothers.
Summary: Reality is never quite like the stories told. [Modern AU] -Yaoi, slash: Ike/Marth-
Ambient
By SSBBSwords
He doesn't see the message until he is fumbling to turn off his phone's chiming alarm early one morning. He needs to meet with his editor in an hour but what is this terribly ambiguous text? When did telemarketers stop making calls and start sending texts?
As he changes into a sweater paired with slacks, he muses at his inability to calculate how long it's been since he last looked at his phone. It requires knowing today's date, which he obviously doesn't, but he's so accustomed to this drifting numbness to time that he doesn't even care.
Upon reaching the publishing office, he takes a seat and idly watches the receptionist answer the phone. He catches the emboldened numbers off a wall calendar and can finally make some comparison to the timestamp on his mobile's touchscreen.
Four days. He supposes a normal individual would be alarmed upon discovering such a long-missed message, but social rules didn't apply to spam.
His mind wanders to when he could next pay visit to the grocery store or whether or not he remembered to do laundry when he suddenly recalls the title 'Ike' and he pulls out his phone to study the text again.
Since when did anonymous messages come with attached names?
"Marth." His editor startles him out of his incomplete revelation, and with a mental shrug, he tucks the mobile device away to be forgotten until the next serendipitous moment.
He stands across the towering shelves of wine while leisurely reading the description of the bottle supported within his hands. His joints ache and he wonders if he should take that as an omen to cut back.
He wonders about a lot of things but to no avail, as the triviality of his thoughts correlate heavily to quotidian routine. He gently places three bottles into the plastic basket slung painfully at the crook of his arm and briefly considers going to a doctor. The idea dissipates like wafted smoke.
Someone as young as that liquor store clerk must drink, right? No, that's not necessarily true. That person looked—
He grips the handles with his dominant hand and wishes liquid and glass weren't so heavy. –like someone who could bear a lot of weight.
He halts in his steps between the produce and dairy aisles. He knows the answer to his particular preoccupation because he has had that experience and—
Oh. What are the chances that he could have another night like that? Because while he can work with his fingers just fine, the oddly frequent chore is just a weak mimic of the authentic act. He finds everything distilling to a point of concentrated monotony.
And it is right around the bakery section that he realizes his phone must have never fallen out in the first place that night. Yet it had greeted him so innocently on top of his clothes the next morning.
Setting the basket down by his feet, he opens the forlorn text message and the type box sits expectantly blank.
'Who is this?' he taps out and sends before heading to the checkout lines.
It is a quarter to midnight and he is on his third glass and twenty-ninth page when he hears a foreign beep across the room. It is both the alien tone and manifesting dehydration that breaks his momentum.
Migrating to the kitchen sink, he listens to the grainy sound quality of water rushing through metallic piping and into a cup as he unlocks his mobile, only to come face to face with a text conversation under the heading 'Ike.' To have a dialogue built and stored out of alternating speech bubbles in a remote device is… strange.
"You didn't want to know," reads the impersonal font restricted to the left side of the screen.
It is the past tense and allusion to a direct command he had once given that young man that causes his breath to catch. So his phone had been confiscated long enough for the clerk to enter a name and number as a contact.
As if cued, another text pops up: I'd still tell you.
Water runs over the edge of his glass and a third of the liquid sloshes out further when he uses the same hand to shut off the faucet.
"If you want," is added as an afterthought.
The influx of messages begs for attention, and recollection of the other's willingness to please comes unbidden with an unrivaled amount of ancillary examples. A flush overtakes his body. He does want an encore of the previous encounter but he still doesn't want to be any more involved with such a distraction.
Releasing his bottom lip from betwixt his teeth and having to wipe his wet hand on a dish towel, he types: I want something else.
He doesn't expect the younger one to fall silent first. Or even for two whole days. He stops to contemplate the surreal rarity of his tracking the days since a last (however sparse) exchange.
When he next receives a notification, he is locked in a mature staring contest with a package of over-the-counter sleep aid. He surprises himself with a relieved exhale, which is followed by a mortified cough. He knows he can't consume this product, but he nonetheless can't help entertain the risk.
"Okay," states the simple text.
At such a response, he can't be sure the other understands what he had been implying, and even if 'Ike' did, shouldn't the reply be something in the deprecating lines of "Figures" or "I know you do."
Okay? The feeling rolling in his stomach is akin to fluttering and with another glance at the drugs on his desk, he recklessly sends: Now.
He drinks water to avoid holding his breath for the length of five minutes before he receives another incredibly short message: Okay.
He nearly drops the glass. Is this for real? His mind screams no, but his body lurches toward his room to shower and change clothes, and he knows this is going to end badly. Badly like self-served disappointment and humiliation and shattered fantasies.
He knows exactly where the other's apartment building is, but can't bring himself to ask for a room or number or code to be let into the complex. He finds the young man loitering outside the lobby.
Appearing genuinely bewildered at his approach, the other offers as an excuse, "I thought you were kidding."
"No, you didn't," he says, tilting his head up and fisting the other's shirt around the waist to bring them closer together.
Wrapping a hand around his hip and trailing another along his jawline, the taller man echoes agreement between stinted breathing, "No. I didn't."
-tbc-