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“Elias, we do not need a fancy coffee maker,”
Jon took the latte and cappuccino making keurig from Elias’ unresistant hands and neatly placed it back on the shelf, shifting it slightly so that it was lined up perfectly with the one next to it.
“I have absolutely no idea how to use that and I Know you don’t drink coffee,” he continued and Elias felt a soft pang in his heart watching the completely unnecessary gesture of gentle diligence. There was His Archivist: taking care to not disrupt the Ikea coffee maker display. Oh, how he loved him.
“It’s for the aesthetic, my dear,” he explained primly, a smile tugging at the corners of his mouth at the returning glare Jon shot at him. He really couldn’t care less about the coffee maker, but Jon impassioned responses were just so lovely that Elias simply could not help himself from riling him up so.
“We are not spending $200 on a coffee maker we won’t use for the aesthetic,” Jon huffed, turning his back on the display and on Elias in a show of petulance. Despite Jon’s apparent discontentment, he did not stop Elias from slipping a hand into his and using the new-found leverage to turn Jon back around to face him (and if he also happened to tug Jon close to him so that he leans ever so slightly against Elias’ chest then that is simply a bonus).
He takes a moment to savor the way Jon’s gaze keeps flickering down to where their hands were joined (he was so sweet that way. They were together in Ikea, buying furniture for their house because they were moving in together and Jon still got distracted by holding hands. Beholding above, he was lovely).
“Alright, no fancy coffee maker,” Elias agreed as if he had ever cared about the coffee maker in the first place, using his conveniently close proximity to quickly press a kiss to Jon’s cheek that caused the other man to smile and duck his head against Elias’s shoulder (absolutely lovely),
“How do you feel about these cabinets? I personally quite like the silver accents against the dark wood,” Elias continued, crossing the display hall to consider a set of model cabinets, a bemused Jon in tow.
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Elias hadn’t even wanted to go to Ikea in the first place. Neither, really, had Jon. Their presence there was the result of a compromise; a compromise that they were both very pleased with, though they were both still pretending to be put out by it (Elias with significantly more success than Jon).
Jon had originally tried to insist that there was no need to buy new furniture as, between the two of them, they had plenty (Elias, who had seen Jon’s sparse flat and what Jon had tried to label as ‘adequate furniture’, stringently disagreed).
Elias, on the other hand, had wanted to hire an interior decorator to take care of the design elements and the more tedious aspects of furnishing a house so that he and Jon could get to engaging in more important things.
Jon had vetoed this plan almost immediately, declaring in no uncertain terms that he was “not going to let someone completely random choose things for our home Elias!”
Elias eventually acquiesced because Jon had called it their home and he was so horribly weak to Jon referring to anything as theirs.
Their Institute. Their patron. Their relationship. Their home.
Elias’ heart sung with these little possessive reminders: reminders that they were connected, that Jon was his and that he, in turn, was Jon’s. In Beholding and now in life they belonged to each other, once and forever. It was always meant to be - Elias was The Heart of the Institute and since Jon was The Archives, Elias was his heart. Elias had always been his and Jon was always going to bound to him and only him. And now, he would wake up everyday next to his lovely, beautiful, perfect Archivist.
The thought of this future (their future) was enough to drag Elias, who didn’t do department stores, to Ikea.
He found, as he led Jon around the twisting maze of the store (a store he was pretty sure was Spiral-aligned in some way) pointing to different furniture options and bickering with Jon about such simple, unimportant, time-wasting details like color schemes and texture, that he was enjoying himself immensely. This domesticity, this simply and utterly human ordeal of making a home together, was something that Elias had never before had nor desires, not with someone he had truly cared about anyways. To his continued surprise, he did not regret this what he would have once called ‘foolish time-waster’.
Even if it meant arguing with his love about whether their cat, The Watcher’s Meow, required a tiny human bed to sleep in.
No, Elias decided, watching Jon’s eyes light up as he enthusiastically discussed the benefits of different cat bedding, gesturing wildly with the hand not currently entwined with Elias’ own.
He did not regret this at all.