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Satan and the Angel

Summary:

Last week, Ocean requested fifteen minutes alone with Constance after rehearsal. The two of them fell into deep conversation, then, raced to clutch each other’s hands, all blushy bashfulness and big smiles, and no.

No, it was not at all relevant to Noel’s quality of life in any way whatsoever, and therefore, of course, there were no feelings on the matter.

He and the entirety of the St. Cassian Chamber Choir are just here on the afternoon of their first date to witness Ocean fuck it all up. That’s all.

Or: Noel and the Choir spy on Ocean's and Constance's first date.

Blackrose Week Day 3: Third Wheel/Double Date

Notes:

(See the end of the work for notes.)

Work Text:

“Alright.” Penny smacks her hands together. “What’s the briefing, loverboy?”

Noel’s eyes narrow. “Briefing? What is this, Mission Impossible? Am I James Bond?”

“I don’t think those two things are related.”

“Whatever. I wouldn’t know. The movies I watch are actually good.”

Ricky frowns. His finger begins to repeatedly jab at the HEY button on his AAC.

The volume’s maxed, because of course it is. Noel scrambles. “Okay, Jesus, my bad, I apologize for my transgressions, just, shhhh.”

Supposedly pleased, he lifts the finger.

Mischa gesticulates around with two hands, emphatically. “You are all slow as shit. I cannot see them any more!” he booms.

“Yeah, well,” retorts Penny, “that’s the point, buddy. They’re not supposed to know we’re here.”

“About that.” Noel rips off a pair of pitch-black aviators and flaming orange baseball cap to readjust, and resists the urge to chuck them both in a passing dumpster. “Were the…disguises really necessary?”

Her head swivels around to fix him with a hard stare, and even beneath her bucket hat and heart-shaped sunnies, she looks appalled. “Uh, yeah. Or else they’d notice us.”

“Penny,” says Noel, endeavoring not to fling himself in the Gorges du Verdon, “anything with a pulse in a hundred-kilometer radius is noticing us right now.”

Penny snorts, waving a dismissive arm. “Sure, they are.”

This is rapidly becoming a worse idea by the millisecond.

It’s a little shameful to admit it was Noel’s idea; the Three Musketeers over here haven’t let him forget it, but sue him.

He needs to know Ocean O’Connell Rosenberg doesn’t royally fuck things up with Constance Blackwood. Or be there to bear witness to it when she does.

Some fateful months ago, fifteen minutes before rehearsal, the Devil Herself had ushered him into the storage closet with frenzied urgency, yanked the door shut, and shoved the key in her pocket, effectively imprisoning him.

He corked open his indignant mouth. “What the actual hell is clinically wrong with—”

“Noel,” Ocean had cut in, looking on the verge of implosion, “how did you know, you were…”

She trailed off, then performed some incomprehensible motion with her hands.

Noel’s eyebrow arched high. “Having a stroke?”

“No.”

“Lactose intolerant?”

“No! Ugh.”

Ocean chewed her lip, started rapidly tapping a Mary Jane against the carpet, flitted her eyes around at the boxes of sheet music and defunct tubas, like someone might be waiting for an ambush in one. She leaned in close. Reflexively, Noel recoiled backwards.

“You were. Um…” She sighed, with great resignation, then whispered, in the smallest voice imaginable: “Gay?”

A portion of all irritation disappeared.

A portion.

He had a pep talk with her, there in the musty-ass supply closet, during which her world seemed to change several times over. It was then that an otherworldly, possibly Satanic force compelled him to hold her when her face sunk into her hands and her trademark obnoxiousness was superseded by ferocious anxiety.

After that, when her alarm to prep for rehearsal had sounded, she’d promptly stood upright, swiped at her eyes with the heel of her hand, thanked him for what might’ve been the first time since grade seven, and left.

Last week, Ocean requested fifteen minutes alone with Constance after rehearsal. So, naturally, they all clambered in front of the window to the auditorium to watch with bated breath. The two of them fell into deep conversation, then, raced to clutch each other’s hands, all blushy bashfulness and big smiles, and no.

No, it was not at all relevant to Noel’s quality of life in any way whatsoever, and therefore, of course, there were no feelings on the matter.

He’s just here on the afternoon of their first date for aforementioned fuck-up witnessing. That’s all.

“I will not wait for you anymore.”

Mischa’s gruff declaration pulls him from that particular thought-train.

“They go”—he hurls an arm in the general direction of Fission Ave—”that way! Hurry the fuck up.”

And there he goes traipsing down the street.

Noel, along with Penny, flails to catch up—Ricky, of course, is on wheels, and effectively faster than everyone else like the laws of physics are a mere suggestion to him. “Okay, good lord, chill!” hisses Noel, chest heaving just to keep up. Christ, why does he have to be, like, seven feet tall with the physical prowess of a Greek god?

Penny, jogging at his right, snorts. “When did you care so much about this?” she asks breathlessly, some kind of tickled look on her face.

Mischa twists over his shoulder to stare at her like that’s the stupidest thing he’s ever heard. “A-hole cannot date. Is funny.”

Ricky takes one hand off a wheel to slam a concurring CORRECT on his AAC.

After a left turn off Fission and another harrowing three minutes of sprinting down Tenth, there at the end of the road: a familiarly, obnoxiously orange head of hair, and purple curls bouncing alongside.

“Stop, stop, stop,” whisper-shrieks Noel, thrusting one arm out like a traffic barrier. Everyone screeches to a graceless halt in an alleyway Noel might be interested in dying tragically in, but not particularly in crouching behind a dumpster in. He bites back whatever complaint to that effect. “There.”

They’re ambling down the sidewalk, Ocean in the sundress he picked out for her (thank Jesus), Constance donning a blouse and seasonally-appropriate jean shorts ensemble.

They seem to be chattering at an appropriate volume, smiling, gesturing. That is, until Ocean barks out the most abrupt, unnatural laugh he’s ever heard in his life at something that was undeniably not funny in the least.

It all goes silent.

Noel smacks a hand to his forehead. “Kill me. Killing me would be less painful.”

Penny snickers, jabbing a finger in Constance’s direction. “Made for each other.”

While Ocean’s face is sufficiently red as it undergoes the five stages of grief in three seconds flat, Constance is nodding along encouragingly, similarly pink in the cheeks as one palm over her lips is concealing an enormously amused grin.

Ocean promptly holds up a finger and excuses herself into the nearest storefront. The door jingles behind her.

As soon as she’s out of earshot, Constance bursts into snorts on the side of the road.

“Oh, dear God,” mourns Noel. “I need a drink.”

“She’s enjoying herself!” protests Penny. “That counts for something!”

Mischa sniffs, looking pleased with himself. “See? What I tell you? Cannot date.”

“Is one’s ability to date not subjective?” Ricky points out. “I think Constance would argue she’s a master of comedy.”

Noel levels him with a stare. “Don’t defend this.”

“Quiet, she’s coming back out.” Penny shoves them all dumpster-side.

When Ocean emerges, it’s with an arm behind her back. She clears her throat emphatically, and Constance spins around. Noel may or may not hold his breath.

Clutched in one shaking hand, Ocean produces a budding, yellow rose, from—the florist. She’d ducked into the florist’s, Noel realizes.

“Smooth,” says Ricky.

Shocked and appalled at this actually good move, Noel watches slack-jawed as Constance flushes dark, and takes it from her with a stammering sort of thanks. The thorns were even chopped off—by Ocean. If the band-aids plastering her fingers are any indication.

“What kind of dimension is this?” mutters Noel.

“See? Knew she could do it.” Penny looks far too smug about this.

“Is fluke,” says Mischa, airily. “She will fuck up more.”

Ricky’s brow quirks. “Not you praying on her downfall.”

“They’re moving!” Penny leaps up. “Go, go, go!”

Everyone scrambles.

It’s more punishing schlepping past the florist, making a right on Tenth, and further, further down, everyone floundering to inconspicuously shove themselves behind the nearest wall, trash can, or unassuming pedestrian.

This goes on for too long.

“Where the hell is she taking her?” hisses Noel, after one too many times being given the death glare by ancient Mr. Lambert that he just knows lives nextdoor and won’t let him hear the end of this. “If she makes us disturb one more octogenarian, it’s over.”

And then it comes into view.

“The park,” says Ricky, rolling up with a pensive look on his face.

Mischa pops open his mouth to announce, with great volume, to what might be the entire Canadian population: “That is lame as—”

Penny claps a hand over his mouth. “Shhhut up, shut up, shut up, what on Earth do you think we’re doing here, genius?”

He starts spouting some things with the general cadence of cursing, but unintelligibly nonetheless either because it’s muffled by her palm, in Ukrainian, or both.

“Both of you, can it,” snaps Noel. “We’re losing them. Pick it up!”

Penny snickers a little, as everyone starts scurrying down the ungroomed gravel of Fission Park. “Ooh, I don’t care about Ocean and her stupid lesbianism,” she says, in an abhorrently inaccurate impression. “Ooh, my name is Noel, and I’m a big fat liar.”

“You’re dead to me.”

“I can’t hear you over all the caring I’m doing.”

That doesn’t deserve a response, so Noel doesn’t dignify it with one.

They catch up, right by a bed of flowers someone might’ve planted a century ago, because they’re now all overrun with weeds.

“—still nice,” Noel catches, from Constance.

“Shit,” he blurts, reflexively. “Too close, too close, get behind the, the—”

Bench, it turns out, as Mischa promptly sandwiches everyone beneath in what may be the most uncomfortable contortion anyone has invented ever.

”Get your finger out of my face,” Penny grits out.

”Get face out of finger,” Mischa protests right back.

”Shut your traps,” Noel hisses.

They do.

“They, um. They are.” says Ocean, within earshot, now. If he peers past Ricky’s shoe, he can see her. “You’re right.”

She may not have ever said that to anything walking God’s green Earth.

Constance hums. “Guess it’s not the name that matters, is it? Dandelions can be pretty, too.” She freezes abruptly, mid-step. “Oh, hold on a sec.”

“What?” shrieks Ocean, instantaneously, backtracking several shuffles. “What is it? Is everything alright?”

“All good,” Constance giggles. “Shoe just came undone. Let me tie—”

“I’ll do it!”

Before she can maybe rethink this, Ocean drops to her knees and starts to tie her date’s shoe.

A collective groan passes through the underside of this park bench.

“Christ on a tricycle,” moans Noel, out loud.

A half-bewildered, half-flattered Constance pauses. And Noel watches her head swivel in their direction.

“Fuck,” whispers Mischa.

“Shit,” whispers Penny.

“Fuck-shit-fuck-shit-fuck-shit,” spams Ricky.

“Connie?” Ocean’s risen from her shoe-tying station, brow furrowed. “Are you okay?”

She takes a second, wherein four sets of breaths are collectively held until Noel fears oxygen deprivation.

Then: “Yeah.” Constance shakes her head. “Probably a raccoon, or something.”

Everyone exhales.

“A raccoon? Do you think it had rabies?”

“Oce, I don’t think— You know what, hey, how about we keep walking!”

They do.

“She needs Zoloft,” observes Ricky.

“A lobotomy,” says Noel, “is what she needs after that. Who drops down and ties their date’s shoe?”

Mischa tries to jump up, smacks his head against the bench, then shimmies out to, successfully this time, vault to his feet. “They are moving!” He points, emphatically. “Go!”

After picking himself from between Penny’s arms and Ricky’s legs, they, too, do.

It’s a clunky tango, of sorts, switching rapidly between thundering down the path so as not to lose sight of the two of them as Constance scutters to keep up with Ocean’s unnatural strolling pace, and performing impromptu Cirque du Soleil-esque maneuvers behind the stumps of convenient jack pines (benches are out of the question now). Somehow, miraculously, neither of them appear to be any the wiser when Constance tugs Ocean’s sleeve before—

“The playground,” realizes Noel.

“Wait, wait, stop,” he hears Constance call, from behind a trunkful of tree bark.

“Get closer,” Penny hisses. “I can’t see.”

“I think we’re cutting this a little close, guys,” says Ricky.

Mischa sniffs. “Cowards.”

And starts clambering up the tree.

Granted, it is not a particularly tall jack pine. But, still: “Jesus, fuck, what are you? A chimpanzee on Adderrall?” Noel wonders aloud.

“I am someone who can see,” Mischa whisper-shouts back down, once he’s reached a marginally sturdy branch to perch himself on.

“Well, damn.” Penny shrugs, like there is simply no other rational option. “Can’t argue with that.”

Noel gawks. “What the hell kind of substances are you all—”

Ricky puts the brakes on his chair. “Here, Penny, stand on my handles.”

She beams. “Oh, thanks.”

“Sacré bleu.” Noel attempts to will away an oncoming cluster headache. “I cannot believe I’m being publicly seen with you.”

But he still scales a branch and hangs on for all he’s worth.

“Aww, look, Mom would take us here after Pre-K,” he can now see Constance reminiscing, terribly soppy. “Remember those swings?”

Ocean lets herself be yanked back by the hand. She looks practically jittering out of her skin. “Oh. She, um, right, yes, ha-ha! She would. Let’s go!”

Constance doesn’t budge. She frowns, quiet for a minute. When Ocean, after too long, realizes she is not, in fact, going, she turns around to look at her.

“Hey, we’re not in a hurry,” says Constance, a little soft. “Let’s sit for a sec.”

Ocean pops open her mouth to protest, then seems to think better of it.

Constance plops herself down on a swing. A beat, and Ocean follows.

Noel looks around the trunk of this jack pine. Everyone’s silent, eyes fixed.

“I remember,” starts Constance, already giggling, faint, “when the rust on the chains turned your fingers red once. We had to run and dunk your hand in the lake to show you you weren’t dying.”

Mischa snickers. “Annoying as kid, too.”

Murmurs of agreement.

Ocean lets loose another robotic laugh, but with half the verve. “Ha, yeah,” she says, like she’s only half processed this anecdote. Her lep thumps against the mulch at about a thousand kilometers per hour, staring uncomfortably intensely into Constance’s eyes.

Constance pretends not to notice. Quietly, she reaches a hand for hers, moving to twine their fingers together just as Noel has disgustingly watched them do about every day during rehearsal.

And Ocean flinches. She drops her fingers like hot coals.

Constance frowns.

Ocean blinks. Regret flashes across her face, hot and fast, every muscle in her body apparently blue-screening.

Then: “Ocean, are you having fun?” asks Constance, serious.

Ocean then appears to go insane.

“What?” she caws, spinning around to face her so violently the chains on the swing jangle in protest. “Yes! Of course I am! Do I not look like I’m having fun? Why don’t I look like I’m having fun? Because I am! Really, seriously, Connie, I—”

“Oookay, whoa, that’s why!” Constance plunks two hands on her shoulders, and like a sedative, Ocean’s running mouth and flailing arms immediately stop dead. She really needs to teach him how to do that. “You’ve been weird all day. Is everything cool? Is this, okay? I want you to have a good time, Ocean!” she says, passionate. “I mean, this is supposed to be a da—”

“Exactly!” bursts Ocean.

In the jack pine, several hands fly to mouths.

Second by excruciating second, realization dawns on Constance’s face. Then, she softens. “Because this is a date,” she tells, more than asks, her. “Not just…friends hanging out.”

Ocean shrinks. She nods, small.

Constance shuffles her sneakers across the mulch, swing inching closer. “Well, a date doesn’t have to be, different, Oce. You know that, right?”

Ocean looks thoroughly confounded. “It…doesn’t?” she peeps.

A laugh puffs out of Constance. “No, not at all.”

“I…don’t understand.” Ocean scooches closer in turn. “Doesn’t dating mean, flowers?” she rattles off, counting on shaking fingers. “Walks, in the park? Stuffed animals, and fancy dinners, holding doors and tying shoes and, um…” She falters, appears to suddenly grow twice as frantic, then cracks on, “…kissing?”

Penny smothers a snort behind her palm.

Constance grabs for Ocean’s hands, and this time, succeeds. “Ocean, Ocean, no,” she tells her, like this is aerospace engineering to her. Which, it might be. “It doesn’t have to be any of that stuff. Dating is, like, whatever you want it to be.”

Ocean’s swing nudges, even closer still. Noel feels everyone hold their breath in tandem.

“Um, well. What…do you want it to be?”

Constance grins. “I think I want it to be, you’re still my BFF.”

Close.

“Okay.” Ocean nods. “I like that.”

“And, you know. Maybe, some dating stuff on the side.”

Closer.

Noel puts a bracing hand on Mischa’s shoulder, and oh to hell with it. Yes, fine, he cares. He cares a whole damned lot about Satan and the angel she somehow managed to land. It’s all he can do not to jump up except that would probably send him tumbling several meters below so he settles for gripping the cotton of Mischa’s Eminem-plastered t-shirt for all it’s worth.

He can see each individual rise and fall of Ocean’s chest, eyes wide, cheeks flushed. But certainty crosses the expression on her face.

“Like kissing?” she breathes.

Ocean’s swing creaks closer.

Penny starts punching her fists in the air. Ricky spams YES YES YES YES at the minimum volume. Mischa is whisper-shrieking a LET’S GOOOO. Noel, too, finds his primal instincts urging him forward on this precarious branch, muttering, “Come on, Satan. Come on. You’ve got this.”

Constance cradles her jaw. They both lean in.

Crack.

Oh, fuck.

In one moment, the St. Cassian Chamber Choir is waiting with bated breaths for their two lesbian friends to kiss. In the next, they are taking a spectacular fall from the—in retrospect—quite flimsy branches of a jack pine, down, down, down to the grass below, culminating in the most unappetizing pretzel of limbs known to man.

Aching in several unfortunate places, groaning, Noel glances up.

And Ocean screeches.

 

* * *

 

“You knew?”

Constance shrugs, one hand hugging Ocean’s. “Well, yeah. For the most part.”

Mischa starts spluttering, hands gesticulating in huge circles. “But,” he booms, “how you see us?”

Constance stares at the lot of them like they’ve all grown a collective sixteen heads. “Just how inconspicuous did you think hiding behind Mr. Lambert was?”

He stops gesticulating.

“I thought we lost you when we got to the playground, though,” she says, and suddenly looks a little sheepish, free hand playing through her sheet music. “Or else, I wouldn’t have, um…”

She catches Ocean’s eye for the briefest of seconds. They both turn tomato-red, swiveling away.

“Yes,” Ocean coughs, suddenly particularly interested in her copy of “Hallelujah.” “Some people just don’t seem to understand the concept of ‘personal space’!”

“Oh please,” Noel groans. “You stuck a hand directly between Penny and Ricky’s lips, once.”

“That was for the good of the Choir. It was disrupting rehearsal.”

“You disrupt my life.”

“Hey!”

Penny speaks before that conversation can spiral into a verbally abusive match of ping-pong. “Well, shit—”

“Language, Penny.”

“—shoot. Sorry, guys. We didn’t mean to, like…”

“Ruin your moment,” finishes Ricky.

Constance waves a breezy hand. “No sweat,” she says. “We, um…” She glances back to “Hallelujah” again. “We figured it out,” is what she settles on, fighting the smallest of smiles.

Ocean clears her throat, louder this time. “And anyway,” she says, quickly, “whose idea was all of—that?”

Penny, Ricky, and Mischa all turn. Ocean and Constance follow their eyes.

And land on Noel.

Ocean squints, hard.

This is not good. “Well,” it’s Noel’s turn to start fumbling, now, “see, I care about Constance. I had to make sure you weren’t going to damage her. Psychologically.”

She squints harder. “Right.”

Aforementioned Constance is starting to look highly amused, one hip popped. “So nice of you to care,” she says. “About me and only me. Obviously.”

“Obviously,” he chuffs out. “Why the hell else would I have gone? I don’t have, like, money on your relationship.”

“Not anymore,” chips in Ricky.

“Yeah,” Penny whistles, innocently. “You pulling your hair out and muttering ‘Kiss her, kiss her, you can do it, devilspawn’ was pretty nonchalant.”

Ocean goes red in the face for what might be several distinct reasons. “You did not call me a—” She stops short. “You thought I could do it?”

It’s suddenly very warm in here. And the oxygen levels must be low. On account of the faulty A/C in the building. “I, I didn’t say any of that sappy shit,” Noel stammers, in a way that’s not even convincing to his own ears. “What, you’re gonna believe her? I swear to God, I couldn’t care less about wherever you put your fat mouth. Just so you know.”

For a split second, something like deep, deep gratitude crosses Ocean’s face.

One more later, it’s replaced by sheer indignation. “My mouth?” She jabs a finger much too close to his facial region, and he peels it away with a sneer. “You’d better watch yours, Gruber, or I’ll have it washed out with Baja Blast.”

“You wicked hag!”

It goes on like this for a while, until Constance and Mischa, respectively, have to haul them back by the shoulders and count backwards from ten.

They get back to rehearsal—eventually.

But Noel will catch the Devil’s eye, mid-Hallelujah, and it won’t be so filled with venom as it tends to be. It’s halfhearted, the animosity she throws at him for the rest of the day.

And he swears to God, in the last look she gives him as everyone is bidding their see you tomorrows, Noel hears one more thank you.

Notes:

Is this a loose interpretation of this prompt? Yes. Did I do it anyway? Absolutely. I conceived this in two days during breaks at work and half-awake before bed, so I apologize if it's not my best prose or humor!

On a random note, I don't tend to swear in my life, both for personal reasons and because I work and volunteer with kids, so writing characters who I know WOULD swear like sailors is pretty funny to me. I'm looking at you St. Cassian Chamber Choir minus Ocean.

I hope you enjoyed this one, thank you ALWAYS for reading, take care and see you tomorrow!💖

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