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The first time Adam phones Fergus while drunk, it's 4am on the morning of Christmas Eve. The shrill ringing of his mobile phone rips through the air, jolting Fergus out of a dream involving his latest policy idea, a swarm of bees and, inexplicably, the corridors of his childhood primary school. Fumbling blindly at his nightstand, Fergus grabs the offending object, squinting down at the screen in abject surprise when he sees Adam's name lighting up the display.
“Adam?” Fergus says, slightly breathless down the phone, dragging a hand over his face and willing his eyes into focus.
“Fergus,” Adam croons down the line in the response, sounding slightly slurred, and Fergus quickly goes from panic to irritation as he realises Adam is just shit-faced, and not in the worst-case-scenario potentially deadly crisis that Fergus' mind had immediately supplied for him. “It's me.”
“Yes, I can hear that,” Fergus fires back, tetchy. “Is there a reason that you've woken me up at shit o' clock in the morning or was it just to remind me that you're still you?”
“Wanted to hear your voice,” Adam says, and Fergus' stomach swoops as Adam catches himself, corrects his words. “Talk to you, I mean. Wanted to talk.” The line goes muffled for a moment, and it sounds slightly like Adam is moving around in a wind tunnel. “Everyone here is just so… Boring. They don't want to talk about…” The line goes muffled again, and Fergus seriously considers the merits of just hanging up and leaving Adam to his drunken stupor.
“Adam? Adam, is there anything specific you wanted to say or-”
“They all think we're shagging,” Adam cuts in, and Fergus' stomach drops again. “Even my mum, I reckon, even if she didn't say it,”
"Uh,” Fergus wills his brain to come up with a coherent sentence to say in response. “What-”
“Which- I don't know,” Adam continues, “Do you ever wonder why we haven't?”
At this point Fergus feels a little bit like he's just been bungee jumping, and his stomach is trailing a couple of feet behind him. “Have you thought about it?”
The silence stretches out as Fergus desperately tries to think of something, anything to say.
“I've thought about-”
“Adam,” Fergus cuts in quickly, alarm bells ringing in the back of his head. There's another long silence stretching between them as Fergus listens to Adam's breathing down the phone.
“I think I should go,” Adam says, and Fergus doesn't have time to stop him before he's being hung up on and left in the lurch.
-
The drunken phone calls happen about once a month from that night on; Fergus, unsure if Adam remembers them the next day, tries desperately to read into Adam's behaviour at DoSAC, and goes to sleep every night trying not to think about whether or not Adam will phone. The conversations rarely touch on anything quite as dangerous as Christmas Eve; for the most part, they tend to be Adam rambling about anything and everything, while Fergus is consistently embarrassed at the way he catches himself smiling as he listens. There's one occasion where Adam calls at 3am one morning, slightly teary down the phone, refusing to explain the cause for his melancholy but sounding almost painfully inconsolable. Fergus listens to his breathing across the line as Adam falls asleep, and ignores the ache in his chest as wishes he could reach out and hold him.
It's almost as excruciating as it is sweet; Fergus chooses not to examine the warmth that spreads across his chest at the idea that he is the first person Adam wants to call when he's lonely at 3am, and instead tries to focus on not reaching out and doing something he'll regret when Adam's stood so close to him in the office. The uncertainty is a painful thing, and Fergus wants so desperately to bring it up, to come out and ask Adam to his face, but he instead resigns himself to trying to make it through the weeks of late-night silences between phone calls, as he tries to pretend that he doesn't really care.
-
“Have you ever been in love?” Adam asks him one night, when he's not the only one who's three sheets to the wind. “I think I was,” he continues, “but maybe I didn't do it right. Because then surely they'd still be here.”
Fergus breathes out and changes the subject.
-
The breaking point comes with the prospect of re-election - or rather, the lack of prospects; Fergus is under no illusion, knows that this is the end of the road for him, and tries not to think about how he's going to deal with both the potential end of his political career and the potential end of his working relationship with Adam. He carries it all round with him in his chest; swallows the feeling down when it tries to claw its way up his throat whenever Adam touches him, ignores it as it wraps its tendrils round his stomach whenever Adam smiles at him. It's a terrible thing; Fergus is unsure how to deal with it, so much so that he finds himself deliberating at 3am over the telephone icon next to Adam's name, finding himself on the reverse end of the situation he's been in so many times before.
Adam sounds slightly surprised as he picks up, a slight questioning tone to his voice as he says Fergus' name down the phone. Fergus lets out the air in his lungs, steels himself and begins to speak.
“I can't keep doing this,” he breathes out as his opening gambit. “I know I'm going to lose the election. No, Adam,” he cuts him off as Adam tries to chime in. “I know I'm going to lose the election. But I can't-,” he stops, tries again. “I can't lose you as well,” he grinds out slowly, face hot, embarrassed at the clichés spilling out of his mouth.
There's a silence that stretches down the phone, and Fergus finds himself thinking back to Christmas Eve, to that first phone call, and starts planning out in his head the quickest route to Mongolia as part of his new plan to go and start a new life as a farmer where no one knows his name.
“I'm coming over,” Adam says, and hangs up.
-
It's 20 minutes of absolute agony for Fergus as he waits for the ring of the doorbell. It's even worse when it does ring; in his panic, Fergus briefly considers pretending he's not in before common sense prevails. Wringing his shaking hands, he rises on unsteady legs and makes his way to Adam.
Adam has an indecipherable look on his face when Fergus opens the door. He's breathing slightly heavily on the doorstep, like he's just run up a flight of stairs, and Fergus is at a complete loss as to what to say.
“Uh- do you want to come in-”
Adam kisses him. “You're an idiot,” he says against Fergus' lips, and it takes Fergus' brain a couple of seconds to catch up.
“I'm the idiot?” he says incredulously, “You're the one who's been- who's been…” he trails off as Adam, quite rudely in Fergus' opinion, attaches his lips to Fergus' neck. “Phoning me-”
At this point Adam introduces his teeth into the equation, and Fergus forgets his own name.
-
To his mortification, Fergus makes Adam admit that he remembers every single one of the phone calls - as it transpires, for a few of them Adam wasn't quite as drunk as he was pretending to be. It's frustratingly endearing to Fergus; the next Christmas Eve, Fergus puts his number on private and phones Adam, in a reverse of the previous year, and croons a love confession down the phone, laughing openly at the abject disapproval on Adam's face when he eventually tracks Fergus down, doubled over with laughter in the spare room. In the spirit of Christmas, Adam looks at the crinkles around Fergus' eyes, at the way his smile looks when he's laughing, and finds it in himself to forgive him. Mentally, he sends a prayer up to whichever deity it was that set him on the path of phoning Fergus drunk last Christmas Eve, and allows himself to cross the room and kiss Fergus until he's breathing heavily against his mouth. Well, he thinks as he starts on Fergus' shirt buttons. It is Christmas after all.