Chapter Text
Scaramouche and Childe aren’t dating. They were, and now they’re not, but for a while before that they weren’t either, which was fine with both of them, mostly, except for how Childe was off kissing normie girls and Scaramouche was getting into screaming matches with tall blue-eyed white guys and they were both acting like everything was fine.
It started like this:
Ajax’s family took a trip to the Grand Canyon when he was still a teen living in Russia. Even back then, he was an energetic kid who didn’t particularly care for the rules, and the boundaries between national park and national missing child are so thin if you’re a 15-year-old with undiagnosed ADHD and a poor grasp on written English. He took some turns he probably shouldn’t have taken and skidded down some untrodden paths that he definitely shouldn’t have trodden.
And then it was just him, Ajax, alone in the Grand Canyon National Park for a desolate couple of days, accompanied only by his own thoughts and the scorching Arizona sun.
He was rescued eventually, of course, because the National Park Service is no joke. And he achieved internet stardom while he was at it, too, which was very impressive, albeit wildly unethical. The rescue team was definitely not supposed to be filming any part of the incident, let alone uploading it to nascent video publishing platforms.
Anyways, teenage Ajax got his first taste of YouTube fame and life in star-spangled America, and then he was a normal high schooler back in Russia with an abnormal dose of canyon-related PTSD. To their credit, his parents tried their best to be understanding. They sent him to counseling and even said mostly the right things, but they were speaking to a kid who’d spent a week of complete solitude in the arid wilderness of the southwestern United States, and really, there’s not much that any parent can say in that situation.
Before the canyon, he’d been a great older brother, and he tried to be a good one afterwards too. But there were weeks after he came back where he didn’t talk much to anyone, let alone his little siblings. Ajax was a thoughtful student, a considerate son, and a reliable brother, but now he had a feeling for how fragile it all was in the grand scheme of things.
He ended up spending a lot more time shut away in his bedroom, fixated on the screen of the clunky old PC handed down after his older sister went away to university. Video games were fun, and a great distraction from all of the other stuff he didn’t want to confront about his life and himself. Like his newfound insomnia, for instance, which was also leaving him with a lot more time than he knew what to do with. Sleepless nights seemed like a natural opportunity to start trawling North American servers—much more active than the European ones, and also the only ones where people were actually awake at the times he was logging on.
Besides being enjoyable and distracting, video games were something Ajax was actually really good at. He’d always had great hand-eye coordination, so he was a natural at just about every first-person shooter and fast-reaction dungeon crawler he could get his hands on.
Even if his spoken English wasn’t great and text chats usually moved too fast for him to follow, he could carry his own weight and then some in co-op. Once he’d dug up a headset with a built-in mic from a box of his sister’s old stuff, he could even interject from time to time with his own commentary, murmuring reminders to cover the left or go back to base while his family slept on in neighboring rooms. He was a pretty good teammate, if he did say so himself—good enough that no one really picked him out of the group to comment on.
Which was why it barely registered when someone finally called him out by name: “Childe, get your ass over here now.”
His in-game handle had been selected mostly on a whim. He’d thought it was kind of funny for Ajax from small-town Morepesok to transform into a sophisticated young master, especially given that he wasn't the oldest son in his family by a long shot. "Childe" had been something like an in-joke with himself when he’d chosen it, but no one ever actually addressed him by it; his username was like a middle name that way, or a name you picked out for a foreign language class. In all, it took him a couple seconds to recognize that the voice on the in-game comms was actually addressing him.
“O-on my way,” he stuttered, and then immediately cursed himself for sounding like an awkward teen.
He was good at the game, goddamnit, and he deserved to act like it! Ajax resolved to prove himself in a trial by combat as he peeled off from the rest of their team to follow the source of the voice—some guy with the display name Scaramouche; a fan of Queen, maybe?—into the next room.
As it turned out, Scaramouche had led him straight into an ambush. Jerk. It wasn’t like he could have known any better, probably, but Ajax still felt a sort of righteous indignance as he swooped in next to the other player. Frustratingly, he was good at the game. Better than Ajax, even, and the steadiness of his in-game movements revealed that he had far more experience as he mowed down opponent after opponent.
A rush of adrenaline flooded his system as he leaned closer to the screen, carving out a space in the horde of robots and enemy agents alongside his teammate. The glare of the screen seemed nonexistent, his grip on the controller stronger and more confident than ever, as he and Scaramouche worked back-to-back to clear the room.
When at last their area of the map was clear, the other player rotated in-game to face his character. Ajax held his breath as the microphone icon above his head switched to unmuted.
“Not bad,” came that voice again.
It cut just as crisply through his boxy old headphones, but softer this time, less demanding now that they had exited the heat of battle. It sounded like a boy around his age or younger. Probably also in high school, but too early for his voice to have cracked.
Ajax brightened at that. He was good with kids—Anton and Tonia could (and would!) both testify gladly to his prowess as an older brother. If Scaramouche was younger than him, it might be cool for them to play together more regularly.
He’d never had a buddy that he could regularly bug about this kind of thing. And besides, he wasn’t close to any of his classmates these days, so it wasn't like the competition was tough. It wasn’t that he was unpopular or being bullied or anything like that. He just…didn’t feel like any of them really got him these days.
The idea of a gamer friend gave him the courage to unmute himself and reply back, keeping his voice low as his family slept on. “Thanks. You were good too.”
He was hoping for an encouraging response, something like a “Hey, wanna try that again?” or at least a “Thank you”, but Scaramouche just scoffed into the microphone. “I’ve been playing this game since release and you’re the only half-decent player on the whole team.” His character crouched repeatedly onscreen, then crept forward into the next room.
“Keep up if you can, Childe.”
Ajax’s jaw dropped a little bit, but this mean stranger had successfully hit on just the right buttons to awaken his competitive streak. He found himself hunkering down in front of his computer with newfound dedication. His pride was at risk now, and the raised stakes were exhilarating. This wasn’t just a way to kill time on a sleepless night—this was personal, and he intended to prove his worth very personally.
“I’ll do my best, Scaramouche.”
He heard the other player scoff again as they advanced forward, and then they were entering another active zone and all was lost in the rush of combat. Ajax made it a competition to see who could rack up more kills throughout the round, watching the numbers tick up steadily. As good as he himself was, Scaramouche hadn’t been bluffing when he claimed that he’d been playing since the game’s release; he had the skills to match, staying a few points ahead for the rest of the match.
By the end, the two of them had almost single-handedly carried their team to victory. Ajax felt himself preen a bit as he leaned forward and typed a quick “gg” into the game chat as they were all returned to the lobby.
A moment later, a ping! in his headphones alerted him to an incoming notification. He clicked to the exclamation point in the corner, heart racing, to find out that a user named Scaramouche had sent him a friend request.
“you were passable”, said the text beside the incoming request.
Ajax grinned at the screen. He accepted in a second and, as they say, the rest is history.
⚡💧⚡💧⚡💧
The problem was that Ajax was still in high school, so even after he crawled into bed at some ungodly hour, riding the residual high of his triumph with Scaramouche, he had to drag himself right back out come morning for school.
The day passed in a blur, the usual mess of exhausted note-taking and scribbled due dates in between half-hearted greetings to his classmates. And then he was rushing home and up into his room with an eagerness that seemed to take his mother and older siblings by surprise.
Tossing his bag to the floor, he waited impatiently for his sister’s old computer to boot up. At long last, he logged into the game and saw, to his surprise: Scaramouche was online.
He sent an invitation to a game, which the other player accepted with surprising speed after a short delay. One match led to another, which led to another, until hours had passed and Ajax and his siblings were being called down for dinner.
“sry,” he typed hastily into the chat. “dinner and hw. be back later 2nite.”
Scaramouche took his sweet time to respond. It was a few seconds of Ajax hovering over the keyboard as Tonia yelled his name from the stairwell before his reply came: “ok. run along now, be a good boy. i’ll wait.”
He couldn’t smother the surprised smile—nor the smoldering flush—that rose to his face at the message as he exited the game and jogged downstairs, doing his best to evade his family members’ questioning gazes. Instead he seated himself at the table, helped Anton up into his chair, and began to serve himself dinner with a hunger he hadn’t felt in years.
As promised, the green blinking dot next to Scaramouche’s name indicated he was still awake when he turned on the computer much later that night, after his siblings had gone to sleep and his parents were conversing in their bedroom.
Now that surprised him. Even if Scaramouche hadn’t acted like he was younger, his voice suggested that he couldn’t be that far off in age from Ajax. Which meant that he probably had responsibilities of some kind; school, at the very least, unless he was somehow old enough to drop out.
The more he and Scaramouche interacted, the more he started to get a feel for the other boy and his strange schedule. As the school year progressed, Ajax had less and less time available right after school, so their meetings tended to take place more in the quiet of night, when he was the only one awake in the house. Even with the time difference between Russia and North America, where he assumed the other boy was playing from, Scaramouche was always online whenever he checked, and he always responded to Ajax’s game invites.
They didn’t talk a lot at first outside of text in the chat, especially when Ajax’s siblings were still awake and roaming the house to ruin the mood. Eventually, though, Scaramouche broke their informal silence by unmuting in game, claiming it was annoying to keep opening the chat and typing mid-fight.
He had a point about that, and besides, Ajax liked listening to Scaramouche’s voice. He hoped that wasn’t too creepy a thing to say. It was a nice voice, smooth and a little higher than his own, with only a hint of a lilting accent where his own was heavy and clumsy.
He’d been learning English in school for a long time now, but playing video games on North American servers had actually done much more to improve his skills than any in-class exercises had ever. And playing with Scaramouche was a masterclass in listening and speaking: he had a razor-sharp wit and talked super fast, so Ajax instantly felt like an idiot if he took too long to reply or stumbled on his comebacks.
Maybe that was why, when his parents’ late-night discussions finally culminated in a whole-family meeting at the dinner table dropping phrases like your father's job and branch transfers and New Hampshire, it was Scaramouche that came to mind first.
There was plenty else to be sorted out: with the move, Ajax and all his siblings would be switching schools all the way across continents, which he was sure must be a logistical nightmare for his parents. Everyone was suddenly busy, and there was a stack of empty cardboard boxes taller than his father standing in the hallway outside his room now, along with a pile of tape rolls taller than Anton to match.
Possibly because his family was so preoccupied, it was Scaramouche he confided in as the move grew closer.
He wasn’t…embarrassed of his English, exactly. He had more than a half decade of experience under his belt by now. He was definitely the best in his class, maybe even his whole grade. But his accent was still obvious, more obvious than he’d like it to be when everything else about him was already so obviously Russian, and Scaramouche had a nice voice, and told him honestly when he was being a douchebag or dragging the team down. These were both desirable qualities in a language practice partner, he reasoned. So it was perfectly justifiable for him to nervously type out a message requesting such a thing from Scaramouche.
“also”, he added, keys clunking loudly in the quiet of his room, “u kno more swear words than any1 else i kno lol”.
This reply took an unusually long time to come back, even by Scaramouche’s standards. At last, the ping! he’d grown so familiar with echoed tinnily from his headphones, and he scrambled to read the text on the screen.
“first lesson: add me on a real messaging platform. i’m tired of opening this stupid game every time you want to talk to me.”
Ping!
“second lesson: stop using ‘any1’. any person with eyes can already tell you only have 1 brain cell left. no need to remind us all the time.”
⚡💧⚡💧⚡💧
Ajax wrangled together a Skype account, sent his username (childe11, even though childe hadn’t been taken, because it just felt kind of wrong without any numbers at the end) to Scaramouche, and waited until he got a notification of a contact request.
“This person would like to connect with you,” announced the text. He expanded the notification to see a profile with an icon of what looked like a lightning strike. Cool.
Scaramouche (skirmisher.06)
don’t make me regret this.
The thing about Scaramouche, he was beginning to realize, was that he put up a tough front. It seemed to be a valid one, even; whenever they gamed together, he always had more than enough skill to back up his aggressive commentary, and no internet-typical trash talk had ever seemed to faze him in the slightest. But his actions didn’t match up with that attitude at all.
As Ajax had predicted, Scaramouche was actually a great language learning partner. Aside from his total preference for honesty above sentiment, he gave specific and constructive feedback on everything from pronunciation (“soften your Rs a little more, you sound like a political cartoon of a Bostonian”) to nuances of slang that wasn’t taught in classrooms (“if someone said ‘salutations’ to my fucking face, I would knock them out”).
It turned out that English wasn’t his native language either, and he’d actually been born and raised in Japan. Like Ajax, he’d learned some amount of English through the school system, but had still been unprepared after moving to North America himself. Scaramouche knew personally how frustrating the adjustment had been, and despite his uniformly dour attitude, Ajax appreciated his insight.
Scaramouche never talked about his personal life much over the span of their late-night calls, but from what he could piece together, his parents weren’t around much, and he didn’t have any siblings. He seemed to be in high school as well, though Ajax had always been too shy to pry about his age directly, but he’d never mentioned any close friends or classmates at his school. It seemed that, for the most part, he lived his life completely and utterly alone.
This was a fairly novel idea to Ajax, who had grown up smack dab in the middle of three older siblings and two kiddos. He tried to imagine himself in the midst of his parents’ big old house in Morepesok, now mostly packaged up into cardboard boxes and ready to be sold, without anyone else around.
To him, it felt impossible. Although he’d drifted substantially from his parents and older siblings since the Grand Canyon trip, the constant background hum of their daily lives seemed inseparable from his own existence. He couldn’t imagine trying to go about his days without Tonia or Anton around to bother and spoil and help out either.
From the blasé way that Scaramouche talked about it, it seemed like things had always been this way. It didn’t bother him simply because he didn’t let it, and he didn’t let it because he couldn’t remember any other way that life could be besides stiflingly lonely. Ajax’s heart sank at the thought. He could picture the little green icon blinking next to Scaramouche’s name every time he logged on, a less and less frequent sight as his family’s departure for the US approached. It was no wonder that the other boy had picked up online gaming with such gusto.
Despite popular belief, Ajax wasn’t a complete idiot. Based on, well, everything about Scaramouche, it seemed like what he would hate more than anything else in the world was pity. Any approximation of it directed towards his new buddy would effectively ruin their unexpected bond, and he was really starting to warm to the idea that they might be friends for a long time. So Ajax kept his mouth shut on the topic, something which Scaramouche seemed quietly grateful for, if the increasing duration and sincerity of their calls was anything to go by.
Months passed. Ajax’s parents sold their beautiful old home in Morepesok, painted over the wall where he’d dutifully kept track of his siblings’ heights over the years, and packed up their children onto a flight headed for New England. Ajax let his grandmother kiss him goodbye on both cheeks even though he was almost sixteen and getting to be twice as tall as her, and carefully held Tonia’s hand on the way to the airport while Anton sniffled into his shirt.
Childe left a message to Scaramouche on Skype informing him that he’d be offline for a while as his family moved, joking that they’d finally be in the same timezone. Scaramouche replied that his awful sleep schedule meant it had never made a difference anyway. Then he must have thought he’d sounded too harsh (which he did think, from time to time) and wished him a safe flight, which made Ajax smile as he disconnected his sister’s old monitor and carefully packed it away in a bundle of old quilts.
Unsurprisingly, it took the family a few weeks to settle in properly at the new place. While life in small-town New Hampshire wasn't worlds away from what he’d known in Morepesok, attending an English-speaking school in America was very different from being one of a million Russian-speaking kids in Russia. While he spent his every waking moment at home helping his parents cook, clean, and unpack, Ajax enjoyed the mystique of being the only Russian kid at his new school the moment he walked through the doors.
It helped that his recent growth spurts seemed to have finally settled him into the shape of a tall young man, not a comically lanky teen, and he’d always had a kind of easygoing charm that now seemed accentuated rather than hindered by his foreign accent and expressions.
And, of course, the kids—and counselors—at this school had never known of a “pre-canyon” Ajax. As far as any of them knew, he was just the tall new kid with red hair.
He took it as the fresh start that it was. Even before his family’s trip to Arizona, at his old school, Ajax had been astoundingly average, just one of the dozens of locals in his cohort who had been born and raised in Morepesok. In the aftermath of his impromptu escapade into the Grand Canyon, he’d become increasingly withdrawn; at the time, he’d been barely capable of spending time with his family, let alone his classmates, and any friendships he’d once maintained had deteriorated into silence.
Now, there were suddenly people in his grade who thought he was cool, who wanted to do things like invite him to house parties and ask him questions about his old life. He had a social life now. On top of attending his classes and moving into the new house, there was a new influx of human contact that suddenly made every day feel that much more busy.
By the time he was finally set up at his new desk, Anton and Tonia sleeping soundly in the neighboring room and his parents all but passed out from exhaustion down the hall, it had been about a month since he had last contacted Scaramouche. He waited anxiously as the familiar Skype call tone rang out inside his headphones. After a long few seconds, he heard the sound of another person joining the call, and then Scaramouche’s voice, slightly scratchy but wonderfully soft.
“Hello?”
Ajax beamed. “Scara! I missed you!”
Oops. He hadn’t meant to coin the nickname. Eh, whatever, it was cute and Scaramouche liked him enough that he’d let it slide. Probably.
“I see you’ve been hard at work coming up with new ways to disappoint me while you were away,” Scaramouche said dryly, but there was a smile in his voice that was impossible to hide.
Translation: I missed you too.
He grinned even though Scaramouche couldn’t see it—they still hadn’t worked up to video calling each other, though Ajax had become more comfortable revealing information about his personal life over the span of their relationship. His older sister had done a good job at drilling internet safety into his head before she handed off her old computer to him, and he’d tried to abide by the guidelines she set out for him before leaving for university.
By now, though, he and Scaramouche had been talking for almost a whole year. He figured that was sort of a long con if the other boy had been planning to do something like hack him or steal his identity, and despite his constant abrasive speech, Scaramouche had never truly said anything that had made him feel uncomfortable or unsafe.
“Nah, nothing like that,” Ajax dismissed. “Just unpacking and helping take care of the kids. You know I disappoint you without even having to try.”
Scaramouche tried and failed to suppress a laugh, which rapidly transformed into a sigh of exasperation. “You’re right. I don’t know why I’d expect you to invest any more effort than necessary into something that requires you to use your brain and think.”
It went quiet except for the soft sound of static and breathing. Then, Ajax said, “So, how have things been on your end?” just as Scaramouche asked, “How’s New Hampshire?”, and then the atmosphere seemed to shift, tension melting away as they both laughed. From there, the conversation flowed naturally, and Ajax relaxed into his chair as Scaramouche drawled on about the incompetence of his group members for a history project and complained about how sunny the weather had been lately.
“You’re the only person who could be angry that the weather is so nice,” Ajax laughed. “Why does it upset you? Don’t you enjoy it?”
Scaramouche made an indistinct sound of dissatisfaction. “It’s winter. It’s not supposed to be this warm out.” He exhaled. “Besides, I prefer rain or clouds over sun anyway.”
Ajax perked up. “Like your profile picture?”
“…right. Sure.”
“I bet you just dislike the sun because you burn easily,” Ajax said knowledgeably. “Anton is like that too. No matter how much sunscreen he puts on, he always turns bright red if he stays out for too long. I bet you wear a giant hat around all summer whenever you go outside to avoid sunburn.”
The other boy was quiet, which he took as confirmation that he was right. Thinking about the weather led him to wonder what it must be like in Russia now, since the winters in New England were mild by comparison, and then Scaramouche was prodding him with questions about his new school.
They chatted on for another few hours, Ajax reveling in the company of a friendly face (voice?). To be honest, Scaramouche was a shitty listener—he interjected constantly with commentary and questions, but Ajax was perfectly happy to indulge whatever tangents they ended up on each time, and the net result was a conversation that felt much more interesting than when he spoke to any of his classmates.
By the time he checked the clock, it was a nasty shock to see that he’d have to be awake in just a few hours for school again. This time, he felt well and truly tired. His insomnia had eased off somewhat in the weeks since the move, more or less beaten down by the constant exhaustion he faced during the day, and late-night talks with Scaramouche seemed to ease some of the more restless parts of his mind.
Besides, as his companion had pointed out, they were in the same timezone now. Scaramouche hadn’t specified where exactly, but he was located somewhere in Canada also in Eastern Standard Time. Thus, even accounting for both of their unhinged schedules, there was no longer a need for Ajax to stay up so late just for them to stay in regular contact.
This suited him just fine. As it turned out, it was Scaramouche’s turn to compromise in the coming months, as Ajax settled into his new life in the US. Apparently, Scaramouche would be graduating high school in the spring, and as such had a barrage of university applications to fill out, essays to write, and projects to complete that often kept him away from his computer, as he complained incessantly. In particular, he often referred to the pains of assembling and sending out a portfolio of some kind. What this consisted of, Ajax had never asked, but it was evidently annoying enough that Scaramouche had even more steam to blow off whenever they gamed together.
Speaking of Steam, they played a lot of different games together these days. It had begun with a new release in one of Ajax’s favorite franchises; he didn’t really know anyone else who played, since none of the new friends he’d made at school were into gaming, and the series was violent enough that he didn’t want to ask his siblings. Scaramouche was a friend, and besides, he was good, and as they’d discovered long ago, they had excellent synergy as a team. After mastering the first-person shooter they’d first met in, they co-opped in everything co-oppable they could find, and they were damn good at it. On one memorable afternoon, they’d even tried two-player Tetris (actually the worst they’d ever performed as a duo before).
So, yeah. Scaramouche was busy a lot, but they tried a lot of new things together these days. Even if he wasn’t kept up at night by insomnia as he’d once been, Ajax appreciated the company, and he enjoyed having a friend who he didn’t feel like he needed to put up a front around. The kids he knew from school were cool and all, but Scaramouche was—well, Scaramouche, and that was that.
That, as it stood, lasted them a very comfortable couple of years. Of course, tons of important stuff happened in between. For one, Ajax’s parents, in a turn of events that surprised them all, welcomed yet another red-haired, freckled child: darling Teucer. And, c’mon, how could Ajax not spoil him? He had his big brother’s giant blue eyes, he was the sweetest kid ever, and besides, the alternative was dealing with all the paperwork involved in becoming a US citizen or else thinking on his own applications for university. Ugh.
Plus, he was the only sibling Ajax had who hadn’t known a time before their trip to the Grand Canyon. His relationship with Anton and Tonia hadn’t been affected as badly, thank goodness, but he knew that his parents and older siblings still saw in him the turbulence of the following months sometimes. Their love for him was unconditional, but it was haunted by the version of him that had come out of Arizona swaddled in a shock blanket, unspeaking, unmoving, whiling away the hours staring at the ceiling of his room. Teucer had never endured this change. To him, Ajax had only ever been his favoritest big brother in the world.
Scaramouche, meanwhile, had packed up and moved out of his parents’ huge old empty house to be a Real Adult away at college. He hadn’t disclosed the region initially, but Ajax pieced together based on context clues eventually that he was attending school somewhere in Quebec, a suspicion that was eventually confirmed by Scaramouche’s occasional late-night rambling about French-Canadian politics.
The portfolio, it turned out, was for visual arts, in support for his new major in art history. It surprised him to hear—he wouldn’t have pegged Scaramouche for that kind of guy at all, especially given how much time he spent complaining about having to write dozens and dozens of papers on frescos of baby Jesus.
Maybe that was why it didn’t come as much of a surprise when, a few years in, the stubborn asshole packed himself up all over again and moved to Ontario to pursue a degree in art proper. Ajax remembered the transition well; he had just received the news from his parents that the application had gone through, and he (along with the rest of his siblings) was now officially a citizen of the United States of America. Some of his classmates had gone out with him for dinner to celebrate the news, and he was sliding over to his computer still riding the high of fountain soda and cheap beer nicked from Abby’s brother and drank on the curb on the walk back home.
Teucer, Anton, and Tonia were all long in bed. He was now the oldest of the siblings still living at home, with both of his older brothers occupied by higher education and his oldest sister working close to their grandparents’ in Russia. His father was working late, and his mother had already retired for the evening—he poked his head into her room and waved a cheerful hand to let her know he’d come in for the night before wishing her sweet dreams, and then he was pulling up his Skype window and hitting the call button next to Scaramouche’s icon (still that image of lightning striking, how utterly predictable) on instinct more than anything else.
The call only rang once or twice before Scaramouche picked up, and then he was greeted by the wonderful, familiar sound of that grouchy voice.
“He—”
“Guess who’s officially an American citizen,” Ajax sang. He heard a sniffle from one of the adjoining rooms and then someone rolling over in their sleep, and he coughed into his hand. Continuing at a lower volume, he leaned in closer to his monitor. “This guy!”
“Can’t even finish saying hello before you’re crawling up my ass,” Scaramouche complained, but he didn’t sound that irritated. He never did, these days.
“Want me to leave and rejoin so you can do it again? Would that make you feel better?”
“No,” said Scaramouche, to the empty call. He sighed and waited for the sound effect indicating that another person had picked up. “Hi, Childe. Sorry that doing paperwork for the government wasn’t enough to stifle your patriotic spirit. Maybe you should try strangling yourself with the red tape next time like a real bureaucrat.”
“So mean,” Ajax admonished. “At least if I crawled up your ass I’d be chasing out whatever came up there before me and died.”
He heard a long, staticky exhale from the other end. “Yeah, I just finished getting moved into my new dorm and I think I might actually kill someone by the end of the week.”
The sound of shuffling echoed throughout the call. In the distance, he could faintly pick up doors slamming and people laughing and talking. He checked the time—it was almost 10:00pm and a Friday night, so the noise was unsurprising.
“Honestly, I’m surprised that you’ve managed to make it this far in life without killing anyone. Or maiming, or any other form of graphic violence,” he tacked on at the end, because you could never be too sure with Scaramouche.
True to form, the boy only scoffed. “That’s as far as you know. Unlike you, I’m not so much of a meathead that I wouldn’t cover my tracks. Or brag about it over Skype.”
“I wouldn’t brag about it over Skype!” Ajax protested, but he was laughing too, because Scaramouche was funny even when he wasn’t trying to be, and he was still a little bit tipsy from the beer. He turned up the volume to catch the laugh back, just a light little scoff that managed to make his whole face feel warm.
“You would. You’d brag about it over Skype because you’d be too obsessed with your own genius plan to cover your tracks, and then the FBI agent assigned to your computer would show up at your house to send you away in handcuffs in front of your crying mother,” Scaramouche deadpanned.
He heard the sound of wood creaking and then a door swinging shut. The peripheral chatter from Scaramouche’s dormmates faded away, and then it was just the two of them.
“Speaking of eventualities, you’re going to be shipped off to university soon too, aren’t you?”
Ajax groaned. “Don’t remind me. I just sent out my last round of applications. At least I have a few months before I hear back and I have to make a decision.”
“Do you know what you’re going to study?”
He propped his legs up on the table. “I dunno. I don’t have anything I’m really that passionate about, except for maybe…gaming, I guess? But I don’t really know if I could make a job out of that. Even if I did, it’d probably be a good idea to have a degree as a backup. Save my mom a heart attack.”
Scaramouche made a tch sound. “Just in case, you know, the whole professional gamer thing doesn’t work out. Right.”
“Hey, you never know! Esports is a rapidly growing field!”
“Go get your fucking bachelor’s in economics, business boy. I need someone to be paying the bills while I’m busy being a starving artist.”
Ajax lazily mock saluted his computer screen, even though Scaramouche couldn’t see it. “Sir yes sir. I’ll be sure to study extra hard next year so I can bankroll all of your weird dietary choices, you parasite.”
“Our planet is dying, Childe,” Scaramouche said primly. “My decision to consume primarily plant-based foods was made in the interest of preserving what little integrity is left on this earth. Just because none of it is stored in you doesn’t mean you need to act jealous. Now,” he said, and Ajax could make out the creak of leather as he shifted in his chair, “I have three portrait studies due at the end of this week and my upstairs neighbor is smoking enough weed to give the state of Colorado a run for its money. Are we going to play video games or what.”
And on it went.
Life went on, interspersed as always with late-night calls and blind playthroughs and denying accusations of cheating because, yes, Xx_animeluvr_xX, they were really just that good at the game, thank you very much. Ajax agonized over his college applications for all of two weeks before giving in and writing them all in a burst of slightly manic energy, well in advance of the deadline. (The constant looming sense of dread was making it really freaking hard to enjoy anything else in his life, and he’d always been fine with words.)
A few months later, he broke the ice and sent his first ever photo of his face to Scaramouche after receiving his first inaugural acceptance letter in the mail. They hadn’t really done any properly IRL stuff before, which was nerve-wracking. But they’d been talking for almost three years by this point, and by this point, he was certain that Scaramouche wouldn’t be the type of person to be weird about his appearance.
Plus, without being too insufferable about it, Ajax had recently come to the realization that he was hot. Which. Like. Growing up, he’d never been unattractive, exactly. More like unremarkable, or maybe uninteresting. Especially next to his siblings, who all shared his nose or his hair or his eye shape in various combinations. His grandmother told him he was handsome, and his father made jokes about girls at school occasionally, and that was about the extent of the attention that anyone dedicated to his appearance.
But it wasn’t until this summer, when he’d picked up a seasonal job at the local kayaking place and consequently spent a lot of hours out in the sun teaching tourists how to paddle, that things had started to change. The physical exertion had been a wonderful way to tire himself out and push his body to its limits, and he’d missed it a lot after the season ended. Some of his new buddies at school were gym rats, real into lifting and the like, and once the summer ended he’d picked up a routine with them. He spent a couple afternoons a week working out now, and finally, finally, there was his jawline! He had a real jawline now! Abs, even! And his limbs looked so much more proportional to the rest of his naturally long, lean body when they were toned with muscle.
So, yes. Ajax was finally having the revelation that he was a single and attractive young man—an epiphany that seemed to be supported by the sudden increase in eyes on his body whenever he went out in public with his shirts strategically unbuttoned at the top and bottom, which was much more often these days—and Scaramouche was going to have to face that, damn it!
The picture he sent was a nice shot, if that counted for anything. He’d taken it mostly on a whim with the shitty front camera of his brother’s hand-me-down phone. In the center of the frame, Ajax held open the acceptance letter right next to his grinning face. His signature orange hair was stylishly messy, bangs framing his face, and he was wearing his favorite maroon sweatshirt. The whole photo was blurred at the edges with movement where he’d been too excited, but he thought that gave it character.
He waited…not anxiously, exactly. In anticipation? Yeah, that was it. He waited in anticipation of Scaramouche’s response impatiently by his computer for almost ten minutes after sending the image, spinning around in his desk chair and then switching to pacing after that got boring. The bastard had never dropped his habit of leaving Ajax hanging at crucial moments in their relationship. Or whenever he got bored. Or whenever he thought it might be funny. (Man, Scaramouche was a real asshole.)
In prototypical Scaramouche fashion, his stream of consciousness was rudely interrupted by the man himself. The Skype chat buffered for a moment, and then pinged to alert him that it had successfully downloaded an incoming image attachment.
Scaramouche had sent a photo back.
Ajax scrambled towards the computer, almost knocking the keyboard off the desk in his haste. He clicked on the image attachment giddily to reveal an image of a guy he assumed was, well, Scaramouche.
He was standing next to a window with the blinds drawn, letting natural light stream into the room. Behind him was an unmade bed, and next to that was some kind of wooden stand with a canvas set up on it. An easel, maybe? It didn’t matter. Ajax was focused too on the person in the foreground of the image to care.
He had dark hair and dark eyes, underlined with bags visible even with the mediocre image quality. His hair was short in the front and longer in the back, cut in an honest-to-God bowl cut with an effortless fringe, but Scaramouche managed to pull it off somehow. Dressed in a black turtleneck and exactly the kind of expression he’d always imagined accompanying that smooth, wry voice, he offered a sardonic thumbs up to the viewer.
Scaramouche (skirmisher.06)
congrats on baby’s first college acceptance. is this the first time someone’s ever told you they want you for who you are?
Fuck.