Chapter Text
Tap, tap, tap.
Wylan opens his eyes with a groan. His admittedly sparsely furnished bedroom is still drenched in utter and complete darkness, the only source of light being the eerie green glow from the little display of his alarm clock. The screen reads 02:21 AM and yet Wylan is wide awake again. He is in desperate need of catching at least three more hours of sleep. But then he hears it again.
Tap, tap, tap.
It’s the same damned sound that must have woken him up in the first place, he thinks. A skittish, irregular tapping, like nails clicking against the other side of the hollow gypsum, coming from somewhere close to him, from somewhere right behind him.
He turns around painstakingly slowly and finds that he is, more or less, disappointed with the familiar sight of the off-white drywall behind his bed. He leans a bit closer towards the faded floral wallpaper, and as if the thing creating the noise is able to sense his presence, the tapping returns.
Wylan’s thoughts instantly jump to a mice infestation, the dilapidated building had been in desperate need of some proper maintenance ever since he moved in, but when he presses his body even closer against the wall he can make out a faint humming. Even with his limited knowledge of biology, he is pretty sure that mice do, in fact, not hum. And if they do, they most definitely wouldn’t hum the chorus to Good Old-Fashioned Lover Boy.
Who in their right mind is still awake, and humming for Saints’ sake, at half past three in the fucking morning?
Apparently, nobody has ever taught his neighbour not to make others suffer through their insomnia.
As if things couldn’t get any more annoying, said neighbour starts singing–well, if whatever irritating cat wails coming from the flat next to him can be classified as singing. If he’s being honest it isn’t even all that terrible, with a little bit more vocal training the voice could have been quite nice to listen to, maybe even soothing. Now it feels more like a blatant misuse of a perfectly fine baritone.
Just when Wylan contemplates accepting his fate, a sound of something heavy–and seemingly pretty breakable–cuts through the unwelcome karaoke performance next-doors, followed by a string of curses.
That’s it. Wylan has finally heard enough.
Even though it feels terribly snobby, like something his asshole of a father would do, he forces himself out of bed, begrudgingly throwing on a loose-fitting cardigan and a pair of shoes, before shuffling towards the hallway. The fuzzy black ball lounging in the corner only lifts its head from the cat bed and gives him a dissatisfied mrrp before going back to sleep.
Cautiously, he shuts the door behind him and enters the dimly lit corridor. Everyone that does not have the misfortune of sharing a wall with his noisy neighbour is probably still fast asleep, and Wylan can’t help but envy them. There were more appealing things than looking for a fight with an obnoxious stranger in the middle of the night.
He pulls the sweater a little tighter around his shoulders as he approaches the flat right next to his. In comparison to his own, his neighbour’s door looks a lot more worn and somewhat homey, the muted orange paint started to peel from the edges down to the once intricate wooden carvings, revealing the light brown alder slats beneath it. A colourful spring wreath made out of tulips, hollies and magnolias covers some of the damage but doesn’t do much to make it look more in accordance with existing safety regulations. Wylan wonders if a benevolent breeze could blow it from its hinges.
Just when he is about to lift his hand and knock, his movements falter. Suddenly, every ounce of bravery that his frustration had summoned comes crashing down and he wonders if he actually has what it takes to go through with it. Maybe it is better to just pop in a pair of earplugs and try to ignore it, he could get his headphones and listen to some shitty ASMR or ambience music playlist, perhaps even white noise if he feels desperate enough. But no, he is already standing in front of the door, sleep-deprived and quite frankly annoyed enough to make himself out to be the biggest spoilsport to ever exist.
Banishing the majority of his doubts, he raps his knuckles on the door exactly three times; two knocks would be easy enough to miss, and four would probably make his neighbour think of him as an insufferable prick even before meeting him. He can hear the muffled sound of objects falling onto the carpeted floor and jumpy footsteps stumbling towards him.
The door flies open, and behind it appears a young man in a baggy shirt and a pair of painfully tight shorts that could just as well pass as a pair of boxers. His black hair is ruffled and some of the curls idly fall over his brows, cutting through the steely grey of his eyes. He is quite possibly the most attractive man Wylan has ever seen. What a shame he has to have such annoying customs.
“Good morning, I suppose?” the stranger in front of him eventually speaks up, one of his hands clutching the other as if he is in desperate need of holding on to something, even if it is just himself.
Wylan’s mind struggles to retrieve the reason for his impromptu visit, he is too occupied to think of anything other than the picture in front of him. “I, uhm, sorry for bothering you this late–or early–but I live in the flat next to you, and I was wondering if you could–”
“Oh, you’re the guy that moved in like two weeks ago?” he beams, giving Wylan a toothy grin that makes his entire face light up in an instant. “I have actually never seen you around, didn’t even think someone lived there. A real shame.”
“A shame?” Wylan sputters. This is absolutely not how he imagined this conversation to go.
“It’s always a shame to miss out on such a pretty face for this long.” The man gives him a cocky wink, and Wylan is positive that his cheeks are now sporting an embarrassingly obvious shade of red.
First, this mess of a man wakes him up through his antics in the middle of the night, and now he is blatantly flirting with him? What has he gotten himself into?
“Ah,” he deadpans. “Good to know.”
Good to know? Saints, what is he even saying?
The man snorts and cocks his head to the side, just enough for the mellow light of the hallway lamps to reflect in the striking grey of his eyes. Wylan has to admit that he really is upsettingly attractive, and that without even putting in any effort. He could stare at him for hours and never get tired of it.
And he probably would continue staring if he didn’t catch a glimpse of the droplets of blood dripping from his clutched fist and right onto the floor next to him. How did he not notice this before?
“Uhm, you’re getting blood onto the carpet.” Wylan vaguely gestures towards his hand, then at the speckles of blood on the ground. “In case you want to keep your deposit you might want to take care of that.” All of his was probably one of the most awkward small talks he ever had the misfortune of experiencing.
“Oh for fuck’s sake,” he curses, his attention flickering to the blood trickling from the gash on his hand. He pulls an already bloodstained tea towel from the pocket of his pants and presses it onto the wound. Wylan feels the urge to update his tetanus shot just by looking at the scene in front of him.
“Are you–”
“Nothing bad, dropped a glass earlier and was stupid enough to just blindly reach down to pick up the shards. Turns out glass is sharp, who knew!” he chuckles, a slight hint of panic bubbling in his jittery irises. “I keep on cleaning and putting pressure on it, but it just doesn’t want to stop bleeding.”
Wylan frowns. This nocturnal trip to tell off a rowdy neighbour quickly turned in a direction he didn’t necessarily like. “A dirty towel won’t do much. You’ll need to wash it and wrap some gauze around it. Constant pressure stops the blood flow way better than just occasionally dabbing a towel on it and hoping that it’ll go away.”
“Thanks for the suggestion, but I don’t really have any gauze at hand right now, so the dirty towel will have to suffice.”
“Uhm, do you have a first-aid kit? There’s always some gauze in a first-aid kit.” Explaining basic safety measures to this guy feels like explaining metaphysics to a five-year-old.
“Be honest with me, do I look like a person to own a first-aid kit?”
Maybe some people do deserve to suffer the consequences of their own actions.
“There’s still enough stuff in my first-aid kit,” Wylan sighs. He should have probably just left him to deal with the mess by himself, but something about this man is oddly captivating. “Wait here and I’ll get it.”
“I could come with you, saves you the trip back.” The wink that accompanies his response falls from his eyelids so smoothly that it nearly looks rehearsed.
“No!” he replies, with a bit more apprehension in his voice than he would like. “No, it’s fine. Stay here, I don’t want you bleeding onto my carpet too.” I also really don’t want you to see my pathetic excuse for a flat . “Turning my living room into a crime scene after one week of living here isn’t really my idea of making a good first impression.”
“Aren’t you just a walking ball of unbridled enthusiasm, sunshine?”
Wylan casts him an unamused glare. “ Sunshine? ”
“Sarcasm, darling .”
“Darling is even worse.”
“Well, I didn’t quite catch your name, dearest neighbour.” He bends down a little closer to Wylan so that his face is on par with his–a gesture that would be alluring if he wasn’t still actively bleeding onto that nasty kitchen rag. “But I can come up with more fitting nicknames once we–”
“Wylan.” His sudden reply is enough to make both of them jolt backwards. “My name is Wylan. And I really should get that first-aid kit now or else you might bleed out right by your front door. Seems like the blood loss is already messing with your head.”
He quickly spins on his heel and marches straight back to his flat, ignoring the smug grin tugging at the corners of his neighbour’s lips. Without even facing him, Wylan can feel the burn of deep grey eyes drilling holes into the back of his head, like the scathe of someone putting out a cigarette on his skin. This encounter can’t end soon enough for his liking.
“Jesper.” Wylan is almost through the door of his own apartment when the ungodly loud shout makes him turn his head to look back down the hall again. “My name’s Jesper.”
There isn’t even enough time for Wylan to fully register his name before Jesper disappears from sight, probably continuing to staunch the bleeding with another towel or something.
For a moment, he is frozen in place, the thick lousy carpet reaching out to claw at his ankles and root him to the spot. He turns the name over inside his head, examining it as if it was some valuable trinket he had found on the side of the road. It is an admittedly pretty name and, as he does with a lot of names, Wylan thinks that it fits just right.
As much as he wants to dwell on that thought, he is rapidly reminded of the blood-stained cloth that was probably already crawling with disease, and that’s enough to push him back into action.
He pulls the first-aid kit from its designated spot on the kitchen shelves and feels oddly comforted by having something to hold, a weight that keeps him from losing his head somewhere in the clouds between the thick sludge of sleep he’s still trying oh so desperately to shake off and thinking about his new…acquaintance and.
Maybe calling him an acquaintance is already taking it a bit too far. He knew this guy for a solid time frame of fifteen minutes and will probably never see him again, is it really worth putting a label on their relationship? He may or may not be in the middle of having a small gay panic fit over this fifteen-minute interaction, but it wasn’t the first time.
Wylan is just about to leave his flat for the second time that night when he catches a glimpse of his reflection in the dressing mirror next to the door. He looks like a complete dumpster fire. His ruddy curls are ruffled, and some strands stick out in the worst places possible. There are prominent dark circles dragging down the skin under his eyes, and it is now that he notices how jarringly mismatched his clothes were. He yearns for the second when all of this was over and he could just return to the warmth of his bed, hopefully unbothered by the antics of his neighbour.
But he has already spent more time than socially acceptable daydreaming about a literal stranger, so running a hand through his hair and gently patting his cheeks a few times to at least bring a little bit of natural colour onto his face again has to suffice.
The door to Jesper’s flat stands wide open, so Wylan feels somewhat free to waltz right in. It is almost identical to his own in build, it just looks a lot more vibrant and alive. There is not one corner of the room that isn’t cluttered or beaming with colour. He is strangely enthralled by the colour clash between the bright orange sofa and the blazing green kitchen cabinets. Nothing really matches, but nothing needs to. It all makes a stunning sort of sense.
Jesper sits at the kitchen table, inquisitive eyes following every single one of Wylan’s movements as he is still busy trying to get acquainted with this eye-sore of an apartment.
“You like it? Furnished it all by myself.”
“Really?” Wylan raises both of his brows. Judging by Jesper’s eccentric appearance earlier, this is very much in character, but the lack of sleep gives him the right amount of snark to either make a friend or an enemy tonight. “If you had told me that a colour-blind toddler was responsible for mapping out your interior design I would have believed you.”
Jesper lets out a breathy chuckle and Wylan waited. He waits for him to shoot back another witty comeback or flirty remark as he did throughout their whole encounter earlier, but none of that happens. Instead, Jesper simply continues to sit there and grin like a damned idiot.
“I washed my hand as best as I could,” he eventually breaks through the silence between them. It reminds Wylan what he was doing here in the first place. “I even got a new rag to appease your demands, darling night nurse.”
Wylan scrunches up his nose. “I am most certainly not your night nurse,” he grumbles, placing the first-aid kit on the table in front of him and foraging it for the needed gauze. He certainly is not disproving the night nurse allegations. “And besides, you really wouldn’t want me to have that much power over your wellbeing, trust me.”
“You’re wrapping my hand in gauze, not doing CPR to bring me back to life. Even though I most definitely wouldn’t mind letting you practice the mouth-to-mouth part o–”
“Let me see your hand.” Wylan’s cheeks burn with embarrassment. He can barely look into Jesper’s eyes without feeling the need to sink through the floor and never show his face again.
“Saints, Sunshine, has no one ever flirted with you before?” Jesper’s comment is meant to be a light jab, and yet his words sting like a slap to the face.
Of course, Wylan was flirted with before, that isn’t the issue. Men in bars bought him drinks, people invited him out on dates, and he was catcalled more times than he could count on one hand. None of these interactions ever led to something more though. He never ended up being the guy that people took home, the one that woke up with the reassuring warmth of someone else next to him, the one that was there to stay. He is caught in an eternal limbo between ‘I like you but…’ and ‘you’re a nice guy but…’ that he just isn’t able to break out of. He doesn’t hate the flirting, he hates the hollowness he finds behind every whispered compliment and chaste touch. Sweet nothings are always just that, nothing.
“Have you ever sat still before?” Wylan deflects, his hand wrapping around Jesper’s wrist to keep it in place.
He can feel the twitch of his veins, the way his joints pop in and out of place, the tension exuding off of him. His skin is warm underneath his fingers, inviting. Wylan has to stop himself from letting the pads of his fingers run across the calloused skin of his palms and the healed scratches and bruises that adorned his arms.
“Sitting still isn’t really my forte,” Jesper chuckles, his gaze locks on Wylan’s every movement. “I’m more the physical activity type of guy.”
Wylan raises his brows in a mixture of amusement and exasperation. He reaches for the antiseptic, pouring some of it onto a clean cloth. “I figured. But I would appreciate it if you would be the silent, obedient type of guy for the next few minutes, so I can finally get this over with.”
“Obedient? Oh, I can do obedient all rig–ow!” Jesper barely even gets to the middle of his raunchy attempt at flirting with him when Wylan presses the antiseptic onto his wound. His hand jerks back a little, but the grip on his wrist is surprisingly strong, forcing him to stay in place. “Fuck sunshine, give me a warning next time!”
“Call me ‘sunshine’ again and I’ll pour the antiseptic straight onto the wound the next time,” he mumbles under his breath. He doesn’t mean it, but making empty threats at a man who he may or may never see again hardly seems even threatening.
Jesper opens his mouth and then he closes it again, abandoning the thought of talking back at the man currently treating his open wound. Well, an open scratch at best, but still.
The cut on Jesper’s hand isn’t deep by any means, it barely crosses through half of his palm, but it still needs to be taken care of properly. Wylan gained a certain familiarity with cuts like these during the time he lived with his father, so the repetitive action of cleaning, sanitising and bandaging comes to him naturally. His fingers work on their own, like an orderly clockwork.
While Wylan wordlessly works on wrapping the gauze around his hand, Jesper observes every micro-expression crossing over his features. Wylan can feel that he is being watched and he wants nothing more than to simply shrink away from the curious glimmer in his eyes. He saw the same glimmer in the eyes of his father once, until it was one day replaced with despondence and disappointment.
“You do that often?”
Wylan looks up at him, confused and a tad bit irritated. “Taking care of my neighbours’ paper cuts in the middle of the night while I could still be fast asleep? No, I can’t say that I do that often.”
“You were the one that knocked at my door in the middle of the night, sweetheart, I don’t think you can blame me.” Jesper flexes his fingers, testing the sturdiness of Wylan’s handiwork.
“You were the one singing Queen and tapping against the wall like a brain-dead pigeon.” The words leave his mouth before he can figure out a friendlier reply.
In response, Jesper raises his eyebrows so high that Wylan worries they might fly off his forehead at any second. “You heard that?” he asked, dumbfounded.
“Well,” Wylan reaches up to rub the nape of his neck. All of a sudden he’s the one that feels embarrassed. “I heard some of it–mainly some of your muffled singing and offbeat tapping. Let’s just say it was loud enough to wake me up.”
If Jesper heard the offhanded comment about his karaoke skills he decidedly chooses to ignore it. “Looks like our bedrooms share a wall then…” he notes, looking terribly flustered for some reason. “Sorry for waking you up, I just couldn’t–”
“Sleep? Yeah, I get that, don’t worry.” Although he still feels a hint of bitterness, Wylan can’t help but feel sympathetic for him. Jesper has enough charisma to flirt the leaves off a tree and the looks to match, so how can he truly hold grudges for long? “I heard a crash and I thought I should, you know, check in with you. Just to see whether the ghost of Freddy Mercury has come to haunt you.”
Again, Jesper's lips display that stupidly brilliant grin, lips wide and the upper row of his teeth sparkling like polished pearls in sunlight. “Got your phone on you by any chance?”
“My phone?” Wylan clumsily pads the pockets of his pants until he hits the familiar shape of his phone. Without thinking too much about it, he holds it out in front of him.
Jesper is quick to snatch it out of his hands and type something into it. Wylan secretly hopes that it would be his number.
“Here you go. Just in case you have something else to complain to me about.” He hands him the phone back and shoots him another wink. Somehow it feels less sure than before. “Feel free to text me if you don’t have something to complain too though.”
When Wylan returns to his flat only a few minutes later he is most definitely wide awake. He’s a whirlwind of emotions, and none of them are particularly coherent or logical. Is it normal to have a simple interaction such as this completely uproot his feelings or is he just slightly insane and desperate? He hopes for the former but suspects the latter.
Even the black tabby, who has by now moved from his cat bed to lay sprawled out over Wylan’s pillow, harbours an awfully scrutinising expression in her beady green eyes. Maybe he shouldn’t have named him after a fictional demon.
“Oh Crowley, I’m really in for it now, aren’t I?”