Work Text:
Peter sits on the thick, plum-colored shag, lazily watching Benjamin pour his soul into his viola piece, as Peter lives in his boyfriend's music. The December light in their Aldeburgh home is failing quickly, pulling the room into warm shadow, and the air hangs rich with the sharp, honeyed scent of saffron from the dinner they have yet to begin. Ben is working out a tricky middle section for a new sonata, the varnish on the viola catching the last pale light as his bow moves. The instrument, a rarely used addition to his composing arsenal, offers a low, resonant, almost vocal quality that holds Peter captive, vibrating sweetly right through the dense wool of the carpet.
When Benjamin finishes, the final, melancholic note dissolving into the room's sudden stillness, he sets down his viola with an almost excessive care and collapses heavily on Peter, resting his head on Peter's chest. It is a long, gratifying sigh of exhaustion and release. Peter’s breathing shifts instantly, accepting the weight and the warmth. Peter automatically begins combing his fingers through Benjamin’s fine, dark, and utterly unruly hair, finding the familiar sharp angles of his scalp as he compliments his artistry.
“My dear man, that line,” Peter breathes, the words muffled slightly into the top of Ben’s head. “It’s devastating. The phrasing—it simply demands to be sung.”
As Peter puts it, with his customary mix of professional humility and private pride, he is but Benjamin’s support and mouthpiece, a vessel to convey the genius to the world. Ben mumbles a content, inarticulate sound against Peter’s ribcage, a sound Peter translates perfectly as I love you and your approval. As they rest and cuddle, settled in the deep, shared comfort of their domestic moment, Peter’s fingers drift—idle, proprietary—down from Ben's damp nape to the starched cotton of Benjamin’s shirt. The fabric is jarringly crisp, an artifact of the day’s household chores performed in an entirely different frame of mind.
It is Crisp. The material is almost unyielding, and the sharp, deliberate fold lines are still visible at the cuffs, where they were pressed earlier. The difference between the shirt's rigorous geometry and the softness of the man inside it is strangely appealing. His thumb, tracing the ridge of the newly-ironed cloth, catches on a loose thread near the hem of the shirt, pulling Peter out of the music and into the mundane realities of laundry.
His stomach drops. The blood runs cold. Peter knows, instantly, before a word is spoken, what this thread means.
"Ben," Peter says, forcing a tone that is too casual, too light for the sudden panic he feels. "You didn't just chuck my plum trousers in with the whites, did you?"
Benjamin, comfortable and distracted, nuzzles deeper into the singer's chest. "You left them balled up in the bathroom for three days," he defends, his voice a sleepy, possessive growl. "Obviously, I—” He freezes.
The words die mid-sentence, the realization of something wrong striking him like a cymbal crash. Peter's heartbeat thrums wild against his cheekbone, a frantic, frantic drumbeat of pure alarm and financial reckoning. Silence descends, thick and heavy, broken only by the distant, muffled sound of a motorcar passing on the road outside. Benjamin tilts his head back slowly, cautiously. Peter’s wide, hazel eyes are staring straight at the ceiling, like he is waiting for the plaster to confess its sins or, perhaps, counting the cobwebs.
“Darling?” Ben asks, the question laced with sudden, awful caution.
"The wireless," Peter groans, dragging a trembling hand down the length of his face. The hand stops just below his chin, held rigid by despair. "The bloody new transistor radio was in the pocket, Ben! The Japanese one!"
Benjamin scrambles upright in a single, horrified lurch, his knees knocking sharply against Peter’s ribs. The composer is already formulating a frantic plan. “Christ!” he gasps, scrambling to his feet. “I’ll... I’ll take it to the repair shop on Denmark Street right now. They’ll open it up and dry it out, surely—”
Peter yanks him back down with one firm, efficient tug by his braces, the elastic straps protesting sharply against the cotton shirt. Benjamin wheezes, all the air momentarily knocked out of him, and he finds himself splayed across Peter’s chest like a dazed starfish, his arms flung wide.
"It’s fried, love. Let it go. The water was probably boiling hot for the sheets." Peter’s already laughing now, a deep, relieving sound of resigned hysteria, his breath ruffling Benjamin's disastrously mussed hair. "Though God knows how you missed the clattering when you put the load in."
Benjamin hides his face in the warm, clean valley of Peter’s neck, burrowing deep to conceal the scorching shame. His ears glow bright plum-pink with embarrassment. "I was thinking about... you," he confesses in a low whisper, "In the laundry. Watching those silly plum trousers spin."
Peter’s hands slide immediately under Benjamin’s starched shirt, finding the warm, pliant skin of his back. "Dirty old man," Peter murmurs, the insult a pure caress.
"Your fault," Ben counters, and he retaliates by biting gently at Peter’s collarbone. "Wearing plum trousers that cling to your... well. I was hardly thinking of counterpoint, was I?"
Peter rolls them sideways without warning, sending the composer tumbling into the shag carpet, and the viola, precariously balanced on the chair, nearly topples. Benjamin yelps, a sharp sound of professional horror mixed with amorous surprise. They laugh into each other’s mouths, the kiss tasting faintly of the Earl Grey tea they’d had earlier and the residual, fleeting frustration of the tenor, until the thick shag rug begins to burn their elbows raw.
Tiny Epilogue
The radio, miraculously, survives. The tiny, expensive circuitry holds out against the bath.
Benjamin repairs it himself in the days that follow, utterly engrossed, bent over the kitchen table with a soldering iron and an exploded schematic, as Peter stands behind him, his arms wrapped tightly around Ben’s waist, whispering delicious filth into his nape. It crackles back to life mid-snog, startling them both with the BBC announcer's cheerful, unctuous voice delivering a weather forecast. They exchange a shared, irreverent glance over the top of the recovered transistor and take the interruption as divine approval.