Chapter Text
They tumble through the door to Hobie’s flat laughing.
“That was fun!” Gwen says. Hobie punches her on the shoulder gently.
“Hands down one of the best shows I’ve ever played.” He pulls his mask off and grins. There’s a bright, happy glint in his eyes that Gwen hasn’t seen in a while. He’s flashing through the whole colour spectrum rapidly and she thinks she might need to grab some sunglasses. Her head feels a little like it’s been stuffed with cotton. “You’re a right whizz on the drums, Gwendy. Should’ve told me before.”
“I did lose a stick though,” Gwen says. They’re both still breathing a bit heavily in the aftermath of the chase. She’s sure that she’d cracked it away with the force that she was slamming the beat out with, but still. An annoyance. She won’t mourn it too hard though. She takes off her own mask, frowning and tugging on the sleeves of her sweater. She’s had another growth spurt recently and London is cold for her, even in Spring. Her body also still hasn’t quite adjusted to the unbalanced hormone levels which makes it much worse.
“‘M sure you can find some more at HQ,” Hobie says, pulling off his boots before collapsing on the ancient couch. The boots get tossed in the general direction of the doorway. Gwen lines them up next to Hobie’s converse. Yeah. She’s damn lucky he doesn’t care a whit for being possessive over most of his personal things. She’d never have gotten shoes that fit otherwise. Not in this universe.
“Gonna shower,” she tells him.
He waves a hand and makes a vague noise of general agreement and doesn’t lift his head from its place as she goes to find a towel.
-
“The water’s broken again!” Gwen calls, shivering and dripping. There are shampoo suds in her hair and they’re threatening to drip into her eyes. She wipes them away into the sink. At least she’d managed to scrub down before the pipes had creaked an ominous protest and the warm spray had turned into an icy trickle. She wraps her towel around herself in a vain attempt to keep her teeth from chattering too hard.
“Two ticks!” Hobie’s voice is fainter through the door and down the hall. “Gotta find a spanner, d’you got a screwdriver in there with you?”
After casting around for one, Gwen yells back an affirmative. It’s sitting next to the cup with the toothbrushes. Probably left over from last time. A few minutes later, there’s a knock at the door.
“You decent in there?” Hobie asks.
“Yeah, come in,” Gwen says.
“Water should still be warm in the sink, you can wash your hair out there if you don’t mind pretzelling yourself up.”
Gwen doesn’t mind, as it happens. These are small prices to pay.
It’s not particularly nice, having to wash her hair out with one hand, the other hovering over her towel to make sure the knot she’d tied is holding up, but it’s normal. It’s… good. To have that. In the mirror, she can see Hobie is in a similar corkscrew position behind her, brow furrowed as he takes the spanner to a length of pipe that looks like it’s five seconds from rusting right off the wall. That or it’s fused. Gwen doesn’t know. She washes her hair out in silence, with Hobie’s soft cursing at the shower for company.
Hobie gives Gwen a blanket afterwards while she’s reading with an apologetic cant to his brows before disappearing and after a few minutes, there’s a loud clang, a yelp, and the oil heater shudders to life. He comes back and flops on the couch beside her, wriggling around her to leech some of the heat. She considers him for a moment before extracting the blanket and wrapping it around the both of them. There’s a confused few minutes of shuffling and eventually they end up sandwiched together, Hobie having pulled Gwen back into himself, bracketing her with his knees, which really are some of the most knobbly things Gwen has ever come across. She wonders if she can get him to eat more and worries at a forming hangnail for a moment before putting the thought aside and returning to her book.
It’s quiet, with only the pages turning and her and Hobie’s soft breaths. There’s the clunking heater too but she can tune that out. Yeah. It’s peaceful.
“Wanna watch a movie?” Hobie asks.
Gwen knocks her head to his shoulder affectionately and groans. “What’ve you got?”
In retrospect, Gwen probably should have guessed that Hobie owned not one but three copies of The Rocky Horror Picture Show on VHS. She manages to stay awake for a while until the combined heat of Hobie, the blanket and the still-protesting heater lulls her into stasis. She falls asleep to the opening lines of Sweet Transvestite and can’t bring herself to feel much more than safe and warm.
-
“Want me to give your jumper a little go-round?” Hobie asks. The Rocky Horror Picture Show is still playing, albeit quieter than how it had started out. Hobie is worrying at the thin material at the elbows of Gwen’s sweater. It doesn’t seem like he’s doing it consciously.
“What do you mean?” Gwen says. Usually she can parse the meanings through context but she’s just woken up and is feeling politely fuzzy around the edges.
“You’ve got holes in your jumper. I can patch ‘em for you.”
“Oh. Didn’t know you sewed,” Gwen says, struggling upright. She’s managed to burrito them both up at truly improbable angles.
Hobie gives her hair a couple of gentle tugs. “You havin’ a lark? Gwen. Gwendy. Luv. Who do you think patches my shit? The bloody coppers?” She can't see his face from this angle but she imagines his expression is one of fond incredulity.
“Oh.” Gwen says again. Then. “Alright. That would be nice. Thanks,” she adds belatedly. Hobie laughs softly, just once, a huff of air that ruffles Gwen’s hair. The dye is fading. Maybe she can scrounge some up in this dimension.
“Wicked. Shove over then, I’ll grab the kit.” Hobie says, eeling his way out of the blanket burrito and ending in a heap of limbs on the floor with a hard oof. “I’m too old for this shit.” he groans, disentangling himself and rolling his shoulders. One of them clicks disturbingly loudly.
“You’re nineteen,” Gwen says flatly, and receives a truly filthy glare and a neat twist of Hobie’s middle and index fingers. He remembers she’s American and folds his index finger down.
“Too old,” Hobie repeats. He cracks his knuckles and ambles off.
Gwen takes her sweater off and snatches more of the blanket to combat the cold as she hears the heater click off. She buries herself in her book again but watches out of the corner of her eye as Hobie comes back and sinks into the other end of the couch with a soft sigh. His sparkly eyeshadow has smudged a little. He has a little bag with him, fit to bursting with small pieces of fabric that shift colours and patterns from one blink to the next. He rifles through it until he finds a couple of pieces that he seems satisfied with, sticking some pins into his mouth and settling back. He has the look of someone barely registering reality. Like he’s content. His slippers are mismatched but both have little multicoloured pom-poms bobbling around happily. Gwen wonders how she hasn’t noticed before.
“You’re not what I expected,” Gwen had said honestly when they’d met for the first time. They had gotten lunch together at the spider society’s cafeteria after their first assigned mission.
“Wouldn’t be any fun if I were, innit?” Hobie had replied. He’d taken a large bite of the honestly fantastic — if deeply weird-looking — burger and had proceeded to tear Miguel to verbal shreds when she had mentioned how grouchy he was. He would do the same when she would accidentally let slip what had happened with her father, a few weeks later.
Hobie returns her newly-patched sweater with a look of deep satisfaction a few hours later, as she’s boiling down some frozen stock cubes for a soup. It has new elbow patches that sparkle with moving galaxies of pink and blue. He’s reinforced the collar and cuffs with some sort of climbing ivy pattern that flashes with dappled green. It’s beautiful and she tells him that outright. His smile gets minutely wider.
Layers upon layers. She would do well to remember that.
They proceed to immediately clash shoulders trying to rescue the soup before it boils over.