[fic]: to put away childish things

title: to put away childish things
author: solvent90
pairing: Scripps/Posner
rating: R
wordcount: ~3000 words.
notes: Many thanks to kdbarbaro for breaking my writer's block and for all her help and encouragement with this fic. Title from 1 Corinthians 13:11 (Bible, King James Version): "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things." The poem Scripps quotes from is Auden's If I Could Tell You.

to put away childish things

Scripps doesn’t like London much. It’s not that he hates cities – he’s fond enough of Sheffield, in its way – but London, with its veneer of glitter over the grime and grey, depresses him far more than the solid block flats of home. He summons up the image of Oxford – honey-coloured stone and rain-wet cobbles, the hushing green chestnut trees opposite his window in college – and stuffs his hands in his pockets, feeling slightly better, trying not to inhale stale beer and sweat and smoke. The bass thumps up through his feet, and the pounding of his headache falls into obliging sync.

“You’re not enjoying this at all, are you,” Posner shouts, materialising suddenly at his elbow. His eyes are glittery, feverish; it might just be the horrible neon lights, or he might have taken something. Scripps fervently hopes he hasn’t – Posner drunk is bad enough, fuck knows what he’d do on anything stronger.

“Not as such, no,” Scripps replies. It was a mistake to try to sound dry – the noise of the club simply swallows it and Posner leans inquiringly closer, one hand on Scripps’s wrist. It’s a startlingly casual touch – Posner, sober, is always wary about how and who he touches – and Scripps frowns. He’s definitely taken something.

“What did you –”

“We can go,” Posner interrupts, his eyes roving restlessly over the crowd and coming back to Scripps. “I’m –” He rubs his hand over his mouth, his expression dissatisfied. Dakin, of course, has long since disappeared. “We can go.”

“All right,” Scripps says, trying not to sound as devoutly grateful as he is. It comes out sounding too sympathetic instead and Posner bites his lip and suddenly looks like himself, dark-eyed and sober, unhappy. Scripps suppresses a moment of shameful relief at the familiarity of that expression, out of place as it is here, and takes his elbow, nods a we’re off to Timms and shepherds him out.

"It’s not going to get easier, is it?" Posner says quietly on the bus home, his face turned towards their pale, jolting reflections in the black window.  He’d done his best not to watch Dakin, the whole evening. Dakin hadn’t noticed. Scripps looks down at his own hands. It will pass, he ought to say.

“I don’t know,” he answers and Posner nods and shuts his eyes, clasping his hands together. Scripps tries not to watch him and can’t help himself. There’s something about this sort of pain, he thinks, that’s compelling, oddly lovely, like poetry. He looks away, annoyed at his own callousness – it’s one thing to cultivate detachment, it’s another to treat a friend’s pain as something aesthetic – and catches sight of Posner’s reflection in the bus window opposite. The black pane captures and multiples him, in ghostly doubled lines – his profile, the curve of his cheek, the line of his jaw, the red shadow of his mouth. The image imprints itself vividly in Scripps’s mind, startling, and there’s a long moment where all he can think is oh. Oh.

Back in college, he can’t sleep. He clasps his hands over his knees, watches the slow brightening of stars over the still, peaceful spires of the University and feels his heart pound in bass, rough and chaotic. It will pass. It will pass.

*

It doesn’t, ironically enough, pass.

Posner takes to going off to London every now and then, with some of the crowd from his college. Meeting new people, he says with a would-be reckless frightened smile that Scripps doesn’t find hard to interpret. Scripps smiles, tells him not to do anything really fucking stupid, and has to bury his face in his hands later that night, not sure if he’s more ashamed of the stupid jealous ache that’s settled just below his breastbone or of the impulse to picture, in great detail, Posner out and about and meeting new people. The pain, the fucking fucking pain, and it’s that thought that finally knocks a crack of laughter out of him, something in his chest squeezing fiercely down.

He goes to church. Reads Wilde; reads Housman; reads Auden. Writes bad poetry himself, and tears it all up, ears flushing red as soon as he tries to reread even a line of it. Posner drifts in and out of his rooms, now and again, wanting to talk about Mr Hector and Drummer Hodge and the essay he’s writing on Elizabethan farms and, finally, Dakin and Dakin and Dakin.

Scripps listens, makes the tea, and chucks books at Posner’s head when he gets sentimental or allusive to the point of ridiculous. Posner always chooses to sit in the armchair right opposite the windows in Scripps’s rooms, fiddling with a pen or the lace of a shoe or his cuffs, his long eyelashes limned in shifting shades of gold as the afternoon wears on. It’s extraordinary how easy it is to keep his voice steady, just the same, how easy it is to see when Posner’s being an utter pillock and to laugh at him, unforced, how easy it is not to fall to his knees when Posner looks up, pleased, at the discovery of some thought and the light catches in the blue of his eyes. He doesn’t have even the slightest urge to serenade.

*

“So,” Dakin says. He’s sprawled flat on his back on the quad, white shirt unbuttoned, sunglasses hooked in the pocket, fag held at a casual tilt between his long fingers. 

“Mm,” Scripps answers, eying the pose – such a twat – and then opening his folder of notes. He really doesn’t care about medieval architecture.

“Don,” Dakin says and Scripps pauses, his hands stilling between the pages of his notes. Dakin’s turned his head towards him, squinting in the sunlight, and Scripps forgets, he always forgets, that Dakin’s endless fascination with himself doesn’t absorb his attention to the point where he can’t actually see what’s under his nose. “It’s not me, is it?”

Scripps laughs, despite himself. Arrogant git. “No.”

Dakin frowns, pretend-offended, but Scripps can see some of the tension go out of him.

“Good.” Pause. “You all right?”

“Fine,” he says evenly. Medieval architecture. He considers a sketch of a fortified tower, aware of Dakin’s cautious sidelong attention and ignoring it studiously. He’s had years of practice at ignoring Dakin. Dakin has years of practice at letting him.

*

Posner doesn’t come around at all for the whole of Trinity in the second year, and Scripps glimpses him only once right at the end of term – on the river, laughing in the midst of a chattering group. He looks faintly tanned, flushed with pleasure and cheap wine, the sunlight picking brown glints out of his hair. One of the blokes in the group has a casual hand on his ankle, thumb curling over the bone. He looks older, his eyes calm and steady, the quirk of his mouth less eager-to-please, more challenging. He looks good.

“What?” Dakin says, turns to follow his line of vision and nearly drops the pole. The punt swerves dangerously and Scripps swears and sets to with the oar and by the time they’ve sorted themselves out, Posner’s group has vanished around the next bend in the river.

“Fucking hell,” Dakin says. “Get him.” His voice is startled, amused, and – speculative, Scripps realises, registering the realisation a split-second after the visceral feel of it, the way it makes his gut turn over and the back of his neck go slowly hot.

Dakin’s opening his mouth to say something more, sly, when he meets Scripps’s eyes and his expression changes with comic suddenness, eyes going wide. His mouth actually drops open.

“Don’t –“ Scripps’s breath comes short. He inhales, harshly. Exhales.

“He needs –”

“Right,” Dakin says distantly, eyes still that perfect shocked round. “No. Yeah. Won’t lay a finger on him.”

“Good,” Scripps says.

There’s a long taut silence. Dakin steers them carefully back to the college boathouse, they put the punt and oars away, and then Dakin takes his elbow and pulls him firmly into a corner. He’s all caught up now and Scripps is expecting the demanding, gleeful curiosity. He isn’t expecting the sharp look of concern behind it.

“You –” Dakin actually points accusingly, actually speechless. Scripps laughs and hears it come out shaky, strange. Dakin takes his shoulders in both hands, familiar and unfamiliar all at once – Dakin grabs him all the time, casually, but this is self-conscious, deliberate.

“You’re not all right, you great ponce,” he says flatly. “Don. You’re not.”

Scripps closes his eyes. No. He supposes not.

Dakin snorts impatiently, if Scripps had said it out loud, and Scripps laughs again – better – and opens his eyes so that Dakin can glare at him properly. He does, shaking his head with that you idiot look before taking his hands off Scripps to scrub them through his hair.

“Has it actually occurred to you to tell him?”

Scripps rolls his eyes.

"No," he snaps. "But now you mention it – that would go down well, wouldn’t it?"

Dakin’s mouth does something complicated and, when his expression settles, it’s startlingly deprecating, or would be on someone else, the humour in his eyes blacker, more brittle, than it usually is. Scripps remembers mentioning Irwin to Dakin once, casually, and the quality of Dakin’s shrug when he had, his hard little smile.

“He’s not me, mate,” Dakin says finally, his tone strangely gentle. “And this isn’t school. You don’t know, it might.”

Scripps says nothing, listening to his own breathing, loud in his ears. Dakin considers him for a while and then shoves his hands in his pockets and smiles sharply, cocking his head to one side.

“But of course the real question,” he says softly, “the question is whether you want it to.”

*

Scripps can count the number of times he’s been to Posner’s college on the fingers of one hand. He gets a bit lost, in fact, looking for Posner’s room – he remembers the number but not the staircase and they all look the same – and finally he has to ask the porter, ears burning stupidly, as if the man can tell something just by looking at him.

His hands are clammy when he looks at the shut door – "15A.," it says in neat print, "David Posner" – and he doesn’t want to knock. He wants to go back to his room and look at the empty armchair and feel that drowning, lovely pain overtake him.

He knocks. The door opens.

*

“Scripps,” Posner says, surprise in his voice, “hello,” and Scripps takes a deep careful breath and looks at him properly for the first time in a year. His hair’s a bit damp, curling, and he’s wearing a faded blue T-shirt exactly one shade lighter than his eyes. Fuck, this was a bad idea.

Posner peers at him uncertainly. “You all right? Sorry, come in.” He steps back from the door.

He potters about with cushions, apologising vaguely for the state of the room and moving books off chairs, offers Scripps a fag with an inquiring look before he lights up himself – still self-consciously – and sits down on the rumpled bed, nodding Scripps to the chair. He’s got a poster of Bette Davies up on the wall and a red T-shirt crumpled on the floor.

“So.” He tilts his head, taps ash into a saucer. There’s a toothpaste stain on his T-shirt. "What’s the matter?"

Scripps's voice sticks in his throat. He clears it, shrugs.

“You haven’t been to mine much this year,” he says.

“Oh.” Posner’s eyes clear and he looks up at Scripps, half-smiling, reassuring. He thinks he understands. “I’m all right, really. I –”

Deep breath. Scripps looks at his hands on his knees, his blunt sensible nails in the grey morning light, takes another, and interrupts.

“I know,” he says. Breathes. “I’m not.”

It’s a little bit funny – Posner’s honestly nonplussed look, the way his face goes blank with surprise, as if Scripps had suddenly put on a dress and started to tap-dance, or said Akthar and Timms are getting married, or something else it hadn’t occurred to Posner to even consider expecting.

“Oh,” he says cautiously. “Um.”

He tries to adjust his face to look sympathetic, but it’s mostly still perplexed and Scripps does smile then.

“It’s all right,” he’s starting to say when Posner interrupts him.

“Is it – you know, a girl?”

Oh, fuck. He’s blushing; he can feel it, heat crawling up from under his collar.

"No,” he says. “Not – a girl.”

Posner’s eyes seem to widen very slowly. Quick on the uptake, as usual, and Scripps feels obscurely guilty. All that time at school he thought he was the only one – a homosexual and a sad fuck, he remembers Posner repeating back to him once, reporting Dakin, and winces.

“I wasn’t sure,” he says, quickly. “At school. I didn’t know.”

Posner tips his head to one side.

“But now you – know?”

“I,” his flush must be visible by now, he thinks. Posner’s meeting his eyes dead-on, something unreadable and strange in his expression, and he can’t look away. “Yes.”

“Oh,” Posner says. “Right.” He looks down at his hands, stubs his cigarette out with thoughtful deliberation. Then he looks up again, mouth quirked, and there’s an edge to his expression Scripps doesn’t recognise at all.

“And so here you are,” he says, and stands up.

Scripps blinks, uncertain; there’s a moment of pure physical confusion when Posner steps close and bends over him; and then Posner’s hand is cool and firm under his chin and he’s – he. Scripps gasps – even in his stupidest fantasies, he hadn’t imagined this as a possible scenario – and Posner tilts his chin up further and licks deeper into his mouth.

It’s a harsh experimental kiss, Posner’s hands gripping the sides of his face and showing him what to do, but when Scripps’s hands come up to grab his wrists, it isn’t to stop him. He makes some noise, low in his throat, and Posner hums back, touches his cheek, and then lets him go, eyes dark and considering.

He licks his lips. Scripps’s skin is humming all over, like he’s been dipped in fire, but there’s a cold feeling at the pit of his stomach, a sense that this is all going wrong. 

“You don’t even fancy me,” he blurts out, and Posner raises his eyebrows at him, that new bright hardness in his eyes.

“I do a bit,” he says, off-hand. “Always have done.”

Scripps stares. He’s still trying to drag together a reply when Posner reaches out and touches his mouth, running his thumb lightly over Scripps’s wet lower lip, and all the words fall out of his head at once. A shudder of heat jolts through him and his eyes fall half-shut entirely without his permission.

“Pos,” he says, a name he hasn’t called him since year 7, and his voice sounds terrible, shattered, pleading. It makes Posner pause and, for the first time, look faintly unsure.

“Do you know what you want?” he asks, and Scripps shakes his head dumbly. Anything. Nothing. Everything. It’s in his face when he looks up, he knows, and Posner hisses like he’s been burnt, hand dropping away, that knowing look vanishing and leaving him off-balance and wide-eyed and himself again.

“Scripps,” he says. His hand hovers ineffectually about Scripps’s shoulder, not touching, and he looks anxious, sympathetic. He tries a smile, a little shrug. “It’s only - you can tell me.”

Scripps shuts his eyes. He thinks of Oxford and neon and Mr Hector in his helmet, Irwin’s grey face at the funeral, Dakin’s shuttered eyes and recent ungracious kindnesses. Posner’s reward, and the way Posner kisses now, as if he never means to wait for anything ever again, all taking. The way the light falls in his own empty rooms, the memory of when he was fifteen, the vicar's sermon on the virtue of chastity and the quality of charity. Charity suffereth long, and is kind. Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endures. He smiles helplessly, ruefully.

“If I could tell you I would let you know,” he says, and knows Posner catches the reference by his sharp inhale, the twist of his smile.

“All right,” he says, “you’d best have a drink,” and it’s only hours later, when he’s kneeling over Scripps in the late evening light, hair falling shadowy over his eyes, after he’s unbuttoned Scripps’s shirt all the way down, and run warm curious fingers down his sternum, that he kisses him again and takes up the lines, whispering in his ear.

Time will say nothing but I told you so, he murmurs as Scripps’s breathing turns uneven and ragged, tasting the wine from his mouth, Time only only knows the price we have to pay, and Scripps arches up into the clever, sensitive curl of his fingers and comes abruptly, ridiculously soon, with an urgency that feels like pain, a sense that he’s been stripped down to the nerves.

Posner’s eyes are black in the fading twilight when Scripps looks up at him, all the glitter gone and all the anxiety too, and he guides Scripps’s hands when Scripps reaches to fumble with his jeans, flings his head back. Scripp stares at the fragile, determined set of his mouth. The next line is because I love you more than I can say. When Posner comes, he drives his teeth into his lower lip, his head dropping forward, and Scripps grips him tight, dips his mouth over his forehead afterwards, and says nothing.