Work Text:
So it happens like this:
Sebastian calls Chris on a Tuesday. Chris is taking a break from, like, the world, and sitting in a Dunks in Boston instead of in stupid fucking LA. Not that LA has Dunkin Donuts. It's fucking ridiculous there. Starbucks or broke.
Anyway. He's sitting in the Dunks, staring out the window at the thick slush piling up against the road because it's the February thaw and in a week, two weeks at most, all that shit is going to be frozen solid, and that's, like, the fucking miracle of science right there, and that's all he's thinking about, really, when his cell rings and it's fucking Sebastian Stan on the other end of the line.
Not that he minds Sebastian, but holy fuck, he'd left town just so he wouldn't have to talk to anybody. They weren't supposed to, like, follow him.
He picks up after a few too many rings, because his mom didn't raise that much of an asshole. "Hey," he says, and tries to make it sound decent.
"Hey, man." Sebastian's clipped drawl, a phrase that sounds like a fucking oxymoron unless you've actually spent any time listening to Sebastian at all, makes Chris slump back in his seat and take a drink. It's a nice voice, okay, he's not going to go all hypermasculine and refuse to say it. Think it. Same difference.
Point is, Sebastian's got a nice voice, and now he's talking with it, and maybe Chris should pay some fucking attention.
"I love the work, you know?" he's saying, which, no, Chris doesn't really know, but he'll roll with it. "I want to expand my skill set, try something new, see if my agent will let me try something new. It's just that no one's ever wanted me for that, and fuck it, I'm cute, why shouldn't I get a shot at kissing someone without it being tragic, right?"
"Right," says Chris, because this makes no fucking sense, but okay, whatever, Sebastian has feelings about whatever this is, and he's talking about it without really needing Chris's input, so this is actually working out okay for a telephone call he was totally unprepared for from a guy who maybe Chris has thought about naked a few times. This is good.
"So I can be in Boston in, like, three hours," Sebastian says, and fuck, wait, what.
"What?" Chris says, because smooth.
"The scripts," Sebastian says, which is so much clearer except what the fuck, no, it's not. "I need help picking one, man, and you're like the guru of this shit."
Scripts. Picking a script. What the fuck. He needs another coffee. And, like, a fifty-piece box of Munchkins. Donut holes make everything better, he's pretty fucking sure that's in, like, the Massachusetts charter.
"So you're coming to Boston--"
"Driving to Boston, yeah, I mean, I have a car, I should probably use it once in a while--"
"--and you want me to help you pick scripts." Chris watches as a passerby misjudges a pothole and gets her foot six inches deep in dirty ice water. The muffled sound of her swearing in a Southie accent is kind of nice. She says 'motherfucking' like she fucking means it.
Nobody fucking swears in fucking LA.
Chris moodily drinks the last of his coffee, because fuck LA anyway.
Sebastian lets out a big breath right into the phone, and Chris is fucking deaf now, Jesus. "Yeah, Chris, that's what I want," he says, and that asshole is doing something with his voice that makes Chris's brain run out his ears, because next thing he knows he's giving Sebastian the address of his buddy Mark's place out in fucking-nowhere Sudbury. Gotta be Sudbury, because Chris doesn't have his own place in Boston and fuck if he's going to bring Sebastian around to his mom's. Mark won't be a dick about it, either, because he fucking owes Chris after that bullshit last Christmas.
Last Christmas was a fucking trainwreck. Nothing could top that. Not even Sebastian Stan taking a roadtrip for fuck knows what reason and bringing his stupid mouth within a five mile radius of Chris after it took Chris this long to get over not seeing it every fucking day.
Sebastian hangs up, and Chris buys another coffee, and then he's calling Mark. They graduated the same class in high school, and also Chris has puked, like, five times in Mark's backyard, beating out Mark's three, so it's like fucking blood brothers all up in here.
He tells Mark that he needs him to fuck off so that he can borrow his house for work. Mark calls him an asshole, and asks if he needs beer or anything.
This is what friendship looks like.
God, Chris has fucking missed Massachusetts.
***
Sudbury is one of the commuter towns outside Boston, which anywhere else in the world would make it an ugly little box community, but parts of Sudbury are edging up on three hundred years old so it's just ugly in a different kind of way. Like, they've got a town law that says all the business signs have to pass the fucking Committee of Not Looking Trashy; there's a Dunkin Donuts in town, and the sign advertising it from the road is made of wood and is delicately outlined in gold paint. Which doesn't stop it from being a fucking Dunks, but it apparently makes the old rich people feel better.
It's that kind of town.
Mark's house is on Tall Pine Drive, near the plant nursery and across the street from what used to be a weird publisher for college books and shit like that. Chris and Mark used to sneak over and crash their garden space around the back of the building just to drink cheap beer and yell insults at the moon. It was great.
It's a 55+ community now, made up of houses that look cookie cutter and like the commuter town Sudbury pretends it isn't. It's a fucking shame.
Mark's a bro and just gives Chris a bone-shaking thump on the back before dropping his house keys into Chris's palm and heading over to his girlfriend's in Maynard. The place is nice, same and not the same as it was when Mark's parents still lived there. The wood floors don't have rugs anymore, but the kitchen is still awkwardly placed between the living room and, of all things, the master bath. There's a door and everything, and if he opened the bathroom's other door, there'd be Mark's room. Houses in Massachusetts get like that, though. His mom's house has an all-weather room that connects to the pantry. People still have to walk past cans of Campbells if they want to sit out in the winter sun.
Chris opens the 'fridge, and finds two six packs of Sam Adams Light. Mark thinks he's a fucking comedian.
Chris pops one anyway, leaving the cap on the kitchen counter like a red letter A for Mark to find later, and heads for the living room. There's a game console under a screen bigger than even Chris keeps around. He starts up Call of Duty, because why the fuck not, and waits for Sebastian to arrive.
***
It isn't three hours. It's closer to five. The light from the moon is bright on the half-melted snow, though blocked in places by the thick trees that grow up and around all of the old houses in the area. A car pulls up into the driveway, the lights bouncing off windows, and Chris pauses his efforts to save the Western world from fascists. A minute later, his phone rings.
"Is this really your place?" Sebastian says. He sounds tired, maybe. Not fucking surprising.
Chris goes over to the front door and opens it." No," he says, both into the phone and out into the darkness. "But I've got shitty beer, if you want to come in anyway."
"With that kind of incentive," Sebastian says, and hangs up. The car door opens, and there's Sebastian, the shape of him, anyway, pulling a duffel from the backseat before making his way over. After a moment the car's headlights turn off, and so it's by the warm light of the dining room -- because the front door is off the dining room, of course, home planning wasn't a big agenda in the 1700s or whenever -- that Chris sees Sebastian for the first time in over two months.
He's wearing a pea coat and a huge scarf, black jeans that aren't as skinny as Chris knows he used to wear, and boots with soles that look sturdy but won't do shit for him if he keeps walking like that after the ice hits. Sebastian's all forward momentum, striding forward even as he hitches up a shoulder to accommodate the duffel, and Chris almost wishes it was icy, just to see the look on Sebastian's face when he goes skidding.
But the weather is warm, and Sebastian doesn't slip, and he's kept his hair on the longer side, and also his face is--
It just is.
Fuck, Chris should've never answered his phone.
Sebastian hauls himself up the steps and stares at Chris. "Seriously?" he says. "You're in a T-shirt?"
Chris shoves Sebastian into the house. "It's forty outside. This is like spring."
Sebastian waits until Chris closes the door behind them, and then says, "You're insane. Put on a sweater or something."
"Thanks, Mom," Chris returns, and then doesn't say anything stupid again for at least ten seconds, world-fucking-record. He turns and heads for the kitchen, not looking at Sebastian for the crucial moments it takes to not feel quite so dumb anymore. He's got it pretty good by the time he turns back with a beer and bottle opener.
Sebastian's put his coat on the back of one of the dining room chairs, and is sitting to take off his boots. It's not necessary, but it's nice. Mark'll appreciate it.
Chris waits until Sebastian's done and then hands over the beer. Sebastian takes a sip and makes a godawful face. Thank fuck. Chris laughs, and Sebastian starts a long monologue about how shitty the beer is, and good, yeah, this is good. Back to status quo.
***
To say that there was a 'start' to this whole thing Chris has about Sebastian is to make it sound like there was a switch flipped or something. It wasn't like that. It's not as if one day Chris's eyes opened and boom, the thought 'I'd really like to blow Sebastian' appeared before him.
First off, that makes it sound like he wasn't thinking that all along. Chris is pretty sure that anybody who's ever met Sebastian has thought that. Definitely guys who've spent some time thinking about how they'd go about it at all, Sebastian's dick or not. Add Sebastian to the equation, though, and there's the answer, not a problem, why think about how to randomly blow a dude when you could think about how to blow Sebastian.
It passed the time in his trailer during the first few months of filming, after they'd met for the first time. And it was a great topic of conversation between him and Haley when they both got drunk at the cast party. (They'd ended up hauling away a couple pounds' worth of cookies to hide out in Haley's trailer and talk about who'd be the best fuck among the cast and crew. As far as Chris can remember of it all, Haley had absolutely agreed with every one of Chris's salient points regarding the way Sebastian looked, talked, moved, held a gun, and made a face when he drank coffee like it was motor oil he, for whatever reason, needed to drink to survive.)
The next morning Sebastian had seen the two of them crawl out of her trailer, and had made another face that was sort of sympathetic and sort of congratulatory and Chris still isn't sure which look was directed at whom. He mostly remembers wanting to lie down and die for a while, or at least until Sebastian stopped wearing those fuck-me jeans of his while standing way too fucking close to Chris.
He'd gone back home to Boston after that, where his mom had called him a sweethearted dumbass and his brother kept repeating, verbatim, what Chris had told him when he'd come out as gay. Fuck everybody, though, it wasn't like that. Or ,like, it was like that -- sure, girls, guys, whatever -- but that wasn't the point of this whole thing.
The point was Sebastian.
Who had a really hot mouth and probably a good-tasting dick and also regular girlfriends, so maybe it would be a good idea if Chris kept it in his fucking pants for a while.
Which worked right up until Sebastian fucking Stan called him up on a Tuesday and invited himself over to discuss romantic comedies.
***
The light in the living room was low, because apparently Mark was a shithead who didn't believe in 100 watt bulbs. He did like candles, though, so there was the faint chemical smell of fruit punch, mostly everywhere but especially strong when Chris and Sebastian took seats on opposite ends of the couch. Sebastian had looked polite about the smell, and Chris had decided he was gonna steal Mark's candle before he left and throw it into that 55+ community where it belonged.
There's a pile of scripts on the coffee table, six of them, all of them somewhere in the super fucking wide range of 95 to 100 pages. They all have post-it flags poking out of them, because Sebastian is apparently studying up on the genre and thinks that the best way to pick a script is by seeing which seems the most 'romantic-comedyish' and going with a winner. It's the stupidest looking thing Chris has seen in ages, and he got asked where Fenway Park was the other day by a tourist who was standing right the fuck next to it.
"I think I have to play it safe, you know?" Sebastian is saying, hands clasped loosely between his spread legs, his elbows resting on his lean thighs. "This is outside what I've done before. I gotta-- Chris, anything I do is going to mean something for the next movie down the line, you know? I have to remember that, but it's freaking me out--"
"It's 'cause you're a moron," Chris says, not really thinking about what he's saying. Except, well, part of him was, because what he was thinking was that Sebastian looked fucking gorgeous under Mark's shitty lighting and also that he didn't know what the fuck he was talking about.
Sebastian looks at him, annoyance edging over his features, and Chris pushes back his whole deal with Sebastian and points at the pile with his beer bottle. "I've seen the roles you pick. Even when the movies were fucking hack jobs you found something in the characters you played. It's the same fucking thing. Just, like, with romance."
Sebastian raises his eyebrows -- he can't do the one-eyebrow thing like Chris and, Jesus, maybe the entire rest of the world can, but he's learned to compensate -- and instead of snapping back he says, "Is that what Boston sounds like?"
Fuck. Chris slinks against the couch and takes a protective drink of his beer. "Which part?" he says, hoping it was just the swearing and he hadn't started talking with the accent. People get weird as fuck when he starts getting native at them.
Sebastian just shrugs, though, and goes back to looking at the scripts. After a moment, he says, "I don't know how to pick characters in these, man. It's easy to get something that makes sense to me in the shit I usually do. This stuff, though-- I want to expand, but shit, Chris, they're all the same."
Chris is more than a little grateful that Sebastian let the whole Boston thing go, but he also wants to take Sebastian's beer away in punishment for being a dumbass. "If I was gonna be an asshole," Chris says, "I'd tell you that all the roles you usually take are the same shit, too. All roles are all fucking the same across a genre. That's the fucking point."
"Fuck you," Sebastian says, but he says it halfheartedly. He's still looking at the scripts like they're an impossible hill to climb. Which is stupid. Chris has seen Sebastian make something deep and meaningful and tragic out of actual shit; this is nothing.
Chris makes a rash decision.
"Come on," he says. "We're gonna drink some more of this shitty beer, and you're gonna tell me the plot of all of these." He tilts up his bottle and drink the last of his (light) (terrible) beer. "Then we're gonna fucking workshop this shit."
It's a great plan. He's going to go get the rest of the beer, at which point it'll become fucking perfect.
***
Yeah, it's definitely perfect.
Right up until
1. they've gone through three scripts;
2. spent more than twenty minutes talking about one of them in particular, which stars a dancer and an artist and a train wreck;
3. broken out Mark's hard stuff and the tiny Bruins shot glasses Mark keeps lined up on his microwave;
4. and Chris says they should read through some of the lines together.
***
The thing is, Chris isn't really sure where Sebastian got the idea that he, Chris, was some kind of genius when it comes to romantic comedies. Chris likes them -- loves them -- but even he has to admit that his taste doesn't exactly line up with the average theatergoer's.
Fuck all of them, anyway. Playing It Cool was fucking great.
Anyway. Apparently Sebastian didn't get the memo about Chris's dubious taste. Instead he gets more and more excited by this one script, the one with the train wreck, as Chris acts out the lines with him, and the fact that Chris thinks this story is a winner should be a fucking clue for everybody, but the point is, now they're both drunk, and also Sebastian has found the sex scene, and they're both laughing like fucking hyenas, and Chris does that thing where he slaps his hand on Sebastian's chest, which he swears to fucking God he's been trying to stop ever since the entire fucking internet decided to point it out to him, and then, and this is fucking crucial, then Sebastian puts his hand over Chris's, pressing Chris harder against him, and seriously, Sebastian is so warm, and his shirt is so soft, and Sebastian is still laughing when he takes a deep breath in and says, "Want to make out?"
Chris's thoughts stumble to a halt.
"Okay," says Chris, right as Sebastian says, "I think that's the funniest line in the entire fucking thing."
***
Chris excuses himself to the bathroom right the fuck then.
***
It turns out that that doesn't help.
***
About ten minutes later, Sebastian's voice comes from the other side of the door, the one that connects to the kitchen. "Hey, man," he says, muffled by the wood. "It's cool if you're taking, like, the world's biggest dump, but in case you're freaking out . . ." There's a terrible pause. "Don't?" he suggests, like that's at all reassuring. Jesus.
Yeah, Chris is maybe having a fucking anxiety attack in Mark's bathroom.
He tries to concentrate on the neat little pile of skin mags that Mark keeps in a basket by the toilet, like the world's most tidy and totally alone bachelor. Chris thinks, with a desperate attention to the mundanities of life, that it's no wonder Mark goes over to his girlfriend's place instead of the other way around.
Chris wonders if Mark has ever told his girlfriend about that time they totally made out in the publisher's back garden.
Chris's brain is an asshole.
The thing is, right, the thing is that Chris was pretty okay with the idea of never telling Sebastian about his, let's fucking call a spade a spade, his crush -- and by this point in the evening, and considering how much of Mark's flavored vodka he'd drunk, Chris was also pretty okay with the idea of maybe meaningfully looking into Sebastian's eyes and pulling a line from the script and then, fuck, tenderly making a move? But since he'd been sort of planning both of those, working them through in his mind, he was totally un-fucking-prepared for Sebastian to pull a line and then not even mean it.
Shit shit shit.
The absolute worst thing, of course, hasn't even happened yet.
He's going to have to leave the bathroom.
***
He gets to it. Eventually.
And there, right there, because where the fuck else would he be, is Sebastian, leaning against the kitchen wall, with those jeans and that shirt and his hair and his boots are off and his hands are in his pockets and he has this fucking talent that makes Chris want to direct a movie just for him and Chris is freaking out again, still, holy shit, why is he even here, he's a fucking meatball--
"Don't freak out," Sebastian says, eyes wide and lips licked red.
And then, somehow, there's Chris, and there's Sebastian, and Sebastian reaches out, puts his hand on the back of Chris's neck, and reels him in. And in. And in.
***
"You are a fucking meatball," Sebastian says, later.
It's pretty fucking great, right up until Mark lets himself back into the place and sees what they've done to his liquor stash.
And what they're doing on his couch.
And later -- much later, in a Dunkin Donuts that somehow gets Sebastian's coffee just the right side of motor oil -- together and laughing and reading through shit and touching in the smallest, stupidest ways that make everything wonderful -- Chris will receive a long, inventive, and Boston-thick voicemail from Mark. Because Mark has just figured out what they'd done on his bed.
Mark ends the message with a pause, and then: "Good for you, you fucking asshole." The message clicks off. Chris is laughing so hard he might be choking.
God, he loves Massachusetts.
And Sebastian, pawing for the phone and pulling faces at his drink and slotting his knees between Chris's-- he ain't too bad, either.