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Vince got a look in his eye sometimes, a look which Howard had long ago titled as the ‘Monkey Brain Override’ look. It was a gleam, and a twitch - usually in response to something shiny - though Howard had first seen it in response to the Jungle Gym in the playground of their primary school, when he’d been showing Vince around on his first day. Seven year old Vince had been tiny, more eyes than boy, and Howard hadn’t been sure how he felt about having to be his official buddy. But then he’d seen that look, that slightly feral *the apes have escaped containment and have taken over the brain space!* look, and he just knew he would be sticking around to see what sort of chaos the tiny creature might cause. It was better than playing checkers in the library during lunch break at any rate.
Little Vince did not disappoint.
Neither did slightly taller but no less feral twenty-something-year-old Vince. He was wriggling his fingers like he was an ocelot getting ready to pounce. (And yes ocelots weren’t generally thought of as having fingers but phalanges were phalanges as far as Howard was concerned, and mammals had phalanges ((phalanges was in the top ten in Howard’s ‘favourite words list’ which he hid under her pillow)).) Vince was definitely up to something.
Howard looked around the flat, trying to figure out what Vince might be about to ambush. It would be something shiny, he didn’t doubt, or something sweet. Double points if it was both. Howard increased his visual search, suddenly concerned that it might be something shiny which looked edible but actually wasn’t. They’d been through that trip to A&E not once, not twice, but thrice, and that was more than enough, thank you very much and good day, sir. Having to explain to the nurses that his platonic best mate/housemate/band mate/legal-dependant-on-account-of-his-simpleton-status friend had swallowed another Christmas bauble just because it was glittery and shaped like an apple was just… not Howard’s idea of fun.
There didn’t seem to be anything lying about that Vince might take a sudden interest in though. The flat was actually very spick and span. Bollo had been dumped the week before and instead of going in to a depression spiral and sitting around in his own filth had decided to obsessively clean their living quarters from top to bottom. That was a coping mechanism which Howard both understood and approved of. Bollo had been so out of breath from all his dusting he hadn’t even been able to tell Howard to shut up, which meant Howard could follow him around and provide positive feedback and quote poetry useful for the mending of a broken heart. (Eventually he had taken Bollo’s asthma puffer out of his pocket and left it on the bathroom sink where it could be found. But only once Bollo was too tired to tell him to shut up.) It had been a very productive weekend.
But! Howard was getting distracted! And contractually that was Vince’s wheelhouse which meant that Howard had to get back to being manly and striking poses and stopping Vince from accidentally falling out of windows when he tried to grab a rainbow. (In Vince’s defence it had looked deceptively close.) Howard scoured the room again, but couldn’t see anything worth pouncing on and yet the ‘Monkey Brain Override’ alarm was still clearly blaring in the space between Vince’s ears. Howard could tell because he knew that look well and because Vince was looking right at him and-
Oh. Vince was looking right at him.
A moment later Howard was overwhelmed by a small body covered in sequins, his last clear view was of black hair flying about Vince’s intensely focused face. The grabby hands were terrifying and Howard only just managed to hold back a very unmanly shriek, settling instead for an entirely manly squawk as Vince collided with him and sent them both flying to the floor. His own brain went in to emergency mode and prepared to play the standard recording of: “Don’t kill me! I’ve got so much to give!” on his brain secretary’s gramophone but was stopped by the most unexpected sensation.
Howard’s brain shut down entirely, for the time it took to internally recite the alphabet forwards, backwards, and forwards again, before it rebooted enough to inform him that the sensation he felt was Vince’s lips. Against his lips. “Kissing,” his brain librarian informed him from his leather, wing backed chair, holding up his dictionary to the appropriate page.
Kissing. He was kissing. He was kissing Vince. He was being kissed by… Vince.
“Mmm,” Vince hummed eventually, pulling back just enough to speak. Howard tried to look up at him but his eyes couldn’t focus as such close range and all he could see were blurred blue eyes and flushed cheeks and sticky pink lips. “Mmm, sweet.”
And then it clicked. Howard had been eating a cupcake. He’d made a whole batch, in fact. But instead of picking one up and eating it himself, Vince’s brain had zeroed in on the sweet that Howard was eating instead, and the icing that clung to his moustache. Howard deadpanned at the camera, because frankly it was called for and sometimes the fourth wall just needed to be broken because Thus was what finally drew Vince in to his arms? Really? A cupcake?
Vince’s brain was completely unfathomable, a maze of glitter and monkeys and fabric swatches and cats and hairspray and sugar and nonsense and Howard was going to give him a piece of his mind because Vince was… oh… kissing him again.
Howard surrendered. There were worse things in the world than being snogged senseless by your platonic best mate/housemate/band mate/not-actually-a-legal-dependant-on-account-of-his-simpleton-status friend. Perhaps now they could do away with the ‘platonic’ part. Howard would quite like that actually. The cupcakes had been for Vince, after all. They were his favourites and the icing was quite shiny.
Truth be told, he’d been secretly madly in love with Vince since that first day on the Jungle Gym, after all, when he’d witnessed the full weight of the Vince Noir grin as the odd child had hung upside down from the monkey bars with his arms and hair dangling, giggling like a hyena and telling Howard he looked just the same from that angle as he did the right way up. It was a mad monkey brain but Howard adored it.
“Mmm,” Vince purred again, his fingers kneading at Howard’s chest in a very ocelot fashion. “Sweet.”
Yes, Howard had to agree. It really was.