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All Aidan wanted was a cup of tea. Some days, that was just too much to ask.
"Bloody ... fucking hell." He might have been slightly hungover. He might have had just a bit of a headache. He might have been just slightly irritable, but he hadn't literally drunk himself blind the night before. The kettle wasn't where it was supposed to be. The kettle had been stolen.
"Dean?" There was only one other person living in the little Auckland bungalow -- only one potential thief to consider before Aidan had to contemplate the possibility that someone had broken into their house, made off the kettle, and left the television and stereo untouched. "Dean..."
He could hear his boyfriend messing about in the bathroom and, their relationship far past the point where he could be permanently put off by anything Dean was up to in there, opened the door and stuck his head inside.
"Hey, have you seen the ... oh."
Dean looked up, his eyes wide.
He was using a pair of kitchen tongs to hold out the most enormous dildo Aidan had ever seen outside of weird, fetish porn. By far the largest dildo Aidan had ever seen in real life. Just ... bright blue and realistically veiny and improbably large. An anatomic impossibility.
"Dean? Babe?"
"Don't say anything," Dean said. "Not a word."
Aidan bit his bottom lip and tried to stay quite. He couldn't manage it. "Dean, why've you got the kettle in the bathroom?"
Dean didn't even look up. He was watching the kettle, waiting for it to boil. "I'm going to sterilize it," he said, waving the dildo vaguely in Aidan's direction.
Aidan took a step back, not sure he wanted a giant smurf cock waved in his face. "And ... once you've sterilized it ... you plan to put it ... where exactly?"
"In a box to mail to Richard."
That was when Aidan lost his patience with approaching the topic delicately.
"Richard Armitage?"
"Yeah."
He shook his head. "Babe, you're going to have to stop ... waving that thing around and explain to me why you're sending Richard Armitage the dick off one of the aliens from Avatar."
Dean finally looked at him properly. "You know The Almighty Johnsons finally got a US air date?"
Aidan nodded. "You mentioned." Dean had used it as an excuse to go out drinking with Emmett, Jared, and Ben -- not that the four of them needed an excuse, and Aidan wasn't really bothered.
"Right. Well, I was talking to Lee about it -- when we were all in Wellington a few weeks ago?" Aidan remembered. "I mean, he knew I'd done television, but I don't think he'd ever heard the name of the show before."
Aidan nodded again. He was still waiting for the part that explained the giant, blue dick.
"Well, the first thing he said when he heard the name was, 'sounds like a porno'."
Aidan tried not to snicker. "Because ... American slang..."
"An 'almighty johnson' would be a giant dick, yes, I got the joke." Dean rolled his eyes. "Of course, as soon as he said it, he got all apologetic and Lee-ish about it, you know -- oh, he didn't mean to be a dick about it, ha ha, congratulations on the air date, he's really happy for me. But he didn't stop giggling about it all night. And then this morning there's a package, and inside there's a card that says, 'All set for your US premier?' ... and underneath, there's this monster."
"An almighty johnson," Aidan said. He wasn't going to laugh. He really wasn't. "I really don't think you need to hold it away from yourself and sterilize it like that, babe -- there's no way Lee sent you a used dildo in the mail." Besides, if either Lee or Richard were physically capable of using that thing, Aidan wasn't sure he wanted to know.
"Would you touch it without knowing where it's been?" Dean said, waving it in Aidan's direction. Aidan leaned back to keep it from getting too close.
"Alright, alright -- point taken. I don't need the mysterious giant dildo in my face." He angled his head to the side to get a better look at it. "And now you're going to send it to his boyfriend as ... what? Retaliation?"
"That was the general idea," Dean said. The kettle whistled. Dean plugged the sink and gingerly set the dildo down, pouring boiling water over it.
Aidan shook his head. "Definitely not good enough. If you're going to send Richard a present to get back at Lee, you can't just keep passing around the same weird sex toy. You need something better. Weirder."
"Weirder than a giant, veiny, blue dildo?" Dean said, raising an eyebrow.
"Definitely. Something that vibrates, maybe... Look, let me use the kettle for its intended purpose, and after I've had my tea, then we'll do a little research. People are into some weird things. We can do better than 'big and blue'."
Dean hesitated for a moment. "You realize that if we escalate this now, it'll just keep going? It's just going to keep escalating. A year from now, we're going to be getting a package from Richard and Lee with a rabbit-faced gimp mask and a butt plug that doubles as a fluffy bunny tail."
Aidan grinned. "I knew you were more creative than mailing black the same old boring blue dildo." He clapped his hand on Dean's shoulder. "Why wait a year? We can start with the bunny gimp mask. Or -- I was thinking -- I once saw a butt plug that doubled as a ring-toss game..."
Richard hadn't been expecting Aidan and Dean to send him anything, so he'd been surprised when the package arrived -- and too curious to wait to open it.
The note inside -- in Dean's handwriting -- said, Tell Lee thanks for the good wishes. Love, A&D. P.S. -- enjoy!
He moved the note aside to see what else was in the package. His eyes went wide. "Lee," he called, "what did you tell Aidan and Dean about our sex life?"