Work Text:
2001
It’s Chop’s birthday. Of course Finn’s going to be there.
It wasn’t like she hadn’t expected Finn to be there, and she knew what she was getting into with Chop whooping “Is it Raemundo?” when they saw each other at the shop, him with only shaving cream and chocolates in his trolley. But then she actually sees Finn. He’s talking to Izzy, but he looks in her direction at the exact moment he should, like a really bad movie, and so they’re now seeing each other. And all Rae can think is, Oh, god, he went down on me. Several times. I am looking at Finn, and he went down on me like mad, and he is still looking at her.
Finn’s head lifts with his gaze still level, and Izzy, confused, looks around for her too. Finn smiles. Rae, surprisingly unhesitant considering that he went down on her, smiles back.
She’s just gotten there, still a bit crowded almost at the door to whoever’s house this is, so they aren’t going to talk right in the next five seconds, which is five seconds she has to decide how to feel about this. It wasn’t like she hadn’t expected to see Finn these whole two weeks she was spending with her mum. She knew vaguely he was still kicking around Lincolnshire at least some of the time, from the way Archie was capable of updating her in passing.
In these five seconds (maybe it’s more, it feels like five seconds), Rae does several important things: she gets a drink put in her hand (bless the meds she’s taking now, even though she technically still shouldn’t), and decides that she should feel all right about this, because they left things off all right, and Finn is coming over. Izzy does not float over with him.
Would that have been better? Would it have been worse? Oh, god.
“You know, Chop didn’t tell me he’d gotten you here,” is how he greets her over the music, warm like the hug he is not giving her.
“Oh, yeah. Kidnapped me,” she says, almost blurting. It is the funniest thing that came to her mind.
Finn smiles. Really, he hadn’t stopped. “Impressive. You’re still at Hull, yeah?”
“Yeah,” she says. “Don’t have too much longer to go, though.”
“Cool,” he says. Then, “Chop still can’t drive.”
“Not still?” Rae says.
“Yeah! Well, he did, then there was an incident. So it must’ve been, what, a train? Two? Two trains, he held you hostage—”
Rae hits him on the shoulder. Finn ducks his head. “19-2000” is playing, but not loud enough that she can’t hear anything. She hasn’t even seen Chop yet.
“It’s been a bit,” he says.
“Has,” she says. A really long bit. When neither of them immediately say anything else, it doesn’t feel too weird.
“You’ve been doing music writing?”
Rae sort-of-shrugs. “Not really yet, I guess,” she says. It’s strange to not feel examined when someone asks her about her career prospects. Career prospects, Christ.
Finn nods. “You’ve to fix NME.”
Rae grins. “I’ve only had an internship.”
“Yeah? And how was that?”
She’s answered this question in a lot of very palatable ways, most notably to her mum, who was quite proud of her. “Rubbish,” she says. “They called me in at all hours, I mean, all hours, every one of them, and I only did bits of editing that they didn’t want to do. Got a stipend and all, but it came out to minus shit.”
He’s grinning, too. “Well,” he says. “I was in a band.”
Rae’s brows shoot all the way up. “Were you?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Started it, actually. Then stopped it. I don’t think there’s a place for knowing only the three chords after Kurt Cobain.”
Rae laughs. “Good thing he kicked it, then.” But, off his look, she also has to say, “All right, I’m mad, I get to be all blasé!”
For just a second, it’s like he’s forgotten how he’s meant to react when she says things like that, but then he grins, too. He’s never been that much of an idiot, so.
“Since when d’you say things like ‘blasé’?” he says.
“What, don’t you know any fancy words with accent marks?”
Finn pretends to think really hard, making a face like he’s maybe poking at a sore tooth with his tongue, then he says, “Fiancée?”
Rae laughs too hard, and like he was summoned up by someone being cheerful, Chop suddenly shouts “Raemundo!” from the other end of the room—she can’t even tell how he’s seen her—and cuts a trail, followed by Archie. This ends any capital-C Conversation with Finn, and Rae finds that she regrets this, and it’s maybe hard to figure out the way that she does. That’s probably all right, though. It’s Chop’s birthday, anyway.
Towards the end of the night, she and Archie still haven’t talked much even though they’re both there, which is surprising even though they talk constantly. For a few years running he’s been the first person she’ll give a new mobile number to, after her mum, and her mum usually chipped in a bit to pay for the mobile. But they don’t talk as much in person, since Archie’d fucked off all the way to London for a bit, the bastard. Not that she’d been surprised.
But he finds her toward the end of the night sitting on the staircase. Her limbs were feeling too heavy, not in that she was thinking about them being too big, but in that she was getting close to being pissed. The party’d been winding down, the mood of the music switching to everyone-is-going-home-or-taking-someone-home; there’s a bit of Mazzy Star.
“How’s Mitchell?” she whispers to him, just after he sits down next to her.
Talking about Mitchell still makes Archie’s face light up, even after a solid night of drinking. The whole gang know now, of course they were probably always going to if they kept being the gang, but not everyone in Lincolnshire does and she knows he likes it that way.
“You’ve still got to meet him,” he says, answering the subject rather than the question. “You’ll love him. He’ll love you. Neither of you are off the hook about it, you know.”
“I know I’ll like him if he loves you. Means he hasn’t got bad taste, has he? At least in people.” Rae’s smiling, mostly to herself. “So yeah, he should like me as well.”
Archie grins, putting his head on her shoulder. “He’ll love you,” he says again. She thinks he might fall asleep, so it’s time to get a move on back to a house Rae’s been in before, probably.
“I didn’t know if you wanted everyone to know you were here,” Archie says, suddenly. “I mean, I’d have told Chop, you’d have already been invited. It’s weird he saw you.”
“You know it’s not weird. Everyone knew I was coming for a visit before I’d even talked to my mum about it.”
Archie laughs like a drunk, probably because he is. “Glad you did come for a bit, though,” he says. “And I’m glad I did too, now.”
“Don’t be such a mush, loverboy,” she says, and he laughs again when she tries to shove him away.
Other people have gotten the same idea about leaving when she hoists Archie up off the stairs with her; contrary to what she was thinking, though, he can still walk, mostly. Outside of someone else’s house with the summer night turned all annoyingly balmy, he kisses her on the cheek and calls out something about when he’ll phone her and them doing something while they’re both at home. She waves him off, and he stumbles through the garden to catch up with Izzy, who has since they were teenagers become the one who thinks of calling a cab. Good Izzy.
The door to the house is still open behind her, and music is still spilling out. Rae wraps her arms around herself even though it isn’t cold, and she could wonder if the person who threw it, presumably for Chop (maybe not even for Chop, maybe he only meant that it was a party and also his birthday), has mates to help them clean up. She hopes they do.
Finn appears at the door while she’s still looking into the house, alone and holding his jacket now instead of wearing it, and Rae turns away too quickly like she’d somehow made him appear. She still hears gravel crunching behind her and then, of course, him asking: “Rae?”
“Well, I’m not anyone else, am I?”
Finn laughs, stopping next to her. His sleeves are short and high on his forearms (she’s seen him naked). “Have a good time?” he says.
Rae looks at him sidelong, then smiles. “Yeah,” she says. “Did you?”
“Yeah,” he says. There’s another lapse of words, and when she looks at him again, it’s just on the cusp of him getting ready to say what it is he’s going to say.
“Are you... like, all right, are you seeing any—”
This combination of words is so surprising and so unsurprising that she blurts, “No.”
For a moment, they look at each other, and Rae is mortified with herself in a way that has recently become satisfyingly rare. He hadn’t even finished the sentence. Rae ducks her head.
It takes a second, but she can hear that he’s smiling when he says, “Well, I was just asking if you were seeing that gnome. See, the one just—” He points at the thing on the lawn, and for the record, his hand isn’t steady.
“You prick,” she says, and she smacks his hand down, but the smile that it turns out she's returning feels like it’s sparking out from under her skin.
1998
When she gets the letter from uni, she thinks it’s bizarre to see someone that happy for her who isn’t her mum, but then she actually has to go to uni, and she thinks it’s bizarre to see someone that sad for her to go who isn’t her mum.
So there’s an awful conversation that it feels surreal to be having with an actual boy, even after all this time, including that time they almost broke up because they’d gotten in a fight about something stupid but didn’t, and the other time they almost broke up because they’d gotten in another fight (also stupid) but they didn’t. Rae reminds herself that it’s not at all surreal since he loves her and she’s brilliant.
And then there’s his dad actually being out of town for one weekend, which isn’t quite the last weekend because of course it wouldn’t work out like that, but it’s close enough. Finn’s bed is cramped with the both of them, if they’re not on top of each other.
“So,” he says on that Sunday that’s not really the last, lying next to her and not at all under the blanket. “What now?”
Rae considers the ceiling, then she turns her head to look at him. He is already looking at her.
“‘Bye,” she says. “I guess.”