Title: Get Your Armor
Author: dorianslover
Pairing: Eric Shanteau/Lance Armstrong
Rating: PG-13 (Lance swears. A lot.)
Disclaimer: none of this happened; don't own the boys; the usual.
Summery: Secrets can not be kept secret for long.
A/N: Putting off writing my biology paper like a BITCH! Wrote this instead.
Eric didn’t have to be up yet, but he was anyway—simply because Lance was up. Eric fought back a yawn, raising his left hand to his mouth to muffle the sound. He looked around the living area of the French apartment Lance used every year during the Tour and let his head lull back against the back of the couch. Across the room, subtitled CNN was playing on the TV, but Eric wasn’t paying much attention to it. He stared at the ceiling and waited for Lance to come back out from the bedroom, where he was busying having a business or pow-wow session or something with several members of the Team RadioShack, among others. He yawned again. Lance wouldn’t have kicked him out of the bedroom, but he had voluntarily left. Some things were of no concern to him; this was among them. He had been doing this for ten days to date—getting up at 4-or-5 in the morning to give Lance some privacy. Under normal circumstances, he would have been awake anyway, but the jet-lag from Texas to France was quite the bitch and Eric was having a hard time adjusting. He yawned again and he brought his left hand in a fist to his mouth. He closed his eyes and shook his head hard. He had to stop yawning; he didn’t want to be yawning around Lance because he knew Lance was exhausted enough and didn’t need any reminders of that fact.
Eric pulled his head back up and looked over at the TV. The news anchors were beginning the sports coverage and he wondered what he had missed in his time in France with Lance. Baseball news was first; something about the Rangers and the Yankees and the Red Sox—Eric didn’t pay much attention because he had never been a fan of baseball. He yawned once more and slightly lowered his face, resting his forehead to his right hand and slowly slid it down to muffle the sound. He looked up again; something about Phelps’s bid for the 2012 Olympics. That wasn’t news to him; that was his reality. The anchor looked down at the papers in his hand briefly before looking back up. “And the cycling world is being rocked this morning with scandal,” Rafer Weigel began. Eric’s head snapped up. “First, it was the Tiger Woods scandal last year, then Michael Phelps’s shocking marriage to Ryan Lochte earlier this year; now, it seems cycling is getting it’s scandal of its own. Photos have been leaked, reportedly showing seven-time Tour de France winner Lance Armstrong caught in a passionate kiss with another man!”
Eric’s jaw dropped and it felt like all the air in his lungs had been punched out of him. A paparazzi shot covered the screen. He couldn’t help the utterance of “Oh, my god,” that escaped his lips. He tried to utter Lance’s name, but he couldn’t get anything out. Finally, he managed a yell. “Lance!” Eric turned his head back towards the hallway that lead from the bedroom to the living room.
The door swung open and a half-dressed Lance emerged. “What! What the fuck do you want!” he demanded. Eric looked back to the screen, and under Lance’s raised voice, the sports anchor on HeadlIne News continued.
“The other man is rumored to be Eric Shanteau, the 2008 Olympic swimmer who shocked the world by beating the favorite, fellow Texan swimmer Brendan Hansen, and by admitting a few weeks later that he had been diagnosed with testicular cancer, the same cancer that Armstrong fought way back in ’96.”
Lance stood open-mouthed and scoffed. He crossed his arms across his bare chest and shook his head. He ignored the rest of the report then the main anchor’s reaction. He looked back to Eric, but he didn’t say anything. “What do we do now?” Eric whispered weakly. He leaned forward, lacing his fingers together and resting his elbows on his thighs.
Lance ran his tongue along the inside of his cheek. “We’re going to clear this the fuck up,” he replied. He looked back down to the back of Eric’s head. What he wanted to do was to walk to the couch, lean down, wrap his arms around him, and hold him. What he did instead was shake his head and turn back toward the bedroom. He dropped his arms and bit a small piece of flesh off from his cheek. “Pain in my royal fucking ass! Christ!” he swore, accented with a punch to the wall, as he walked back to the bedroom.
Eric slowly closed his eyes. He didn’t know who or what Lance was talking about, but it had hit him square in the chest. He hung his head and on the coffee table in front of him, his phone began to ring.