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Before Beano was Beano, he was Ryan.
He still is Ryan, mind you, but nowadays he goes by Beano or Heinz almost exclusively. Every now and again someone will call him Ryan and it itches him, like an ill fitting jumper made from scratchy wool. The only people that it feels right from is his family, naturally, or his friends from back in Derry.
He thinks it could be because Ryan and Heinz are two separate people now. He can probably draw the line perfectly at where his life splits in two, where he splits in two.
There’s before Jakey Davies, and after Jakey Davies.
He was reborn the day he met Jakey, baptised in his light, his humour, his beauty. If Jakey is his God, Heinz is his committed worshiper, would kneel there at his feet and kiss the holy skin there, would lay down his life for Jakey.
He would spend the rest of his life standing at Jakey’s side and it would be a life well lived.
Now, he’s aware that this probably isn’t the healthiest way to feel about his best friend. He could probably do with some distance between them if he’s being completely honest with himself but he’d rather eat his own hands than live without his boy.
It’s always been this way too, from the very first time they spoke on a fucking discord call of all things. This was right at the start of everything, before the Bov Boys were actually the Bov Boys yet, before Ryan was Beano - He had been Heinz for a while already, but not Beano, not yet, not before Jakey.
He remembers it like it was hours ago, the way Jakey looked in the little square, pixilated and laughing at something Ginge had said. It wasn’t what it is now, back then, but that’s when it started - the seed had been planted, right there in the chambers of his heart.
He was beautiful then, witty and hilarious in a way that brought Heinz to tears. He’s only gotten more beautiful with time, has brought Heinz to tears many more times since then, in more ways than he will ever know.
The roots had sprouted when they’d met in person for the first time, seeing Jakey in the flesh almost bowled him over. He’d felt the seed crack open, roots spreading deep into each artery, reaching far into his lungs, his blood, his brain, reworking and rewiring the intricacies of his body, soul and mind.
It was like being face to face with a gift from the Gods, a miracle straight from Olympus, ambrosia personified - Heinz wanted to gorge himself on the nectar, lick it from the ivory skin, taste it from his tongue, crack it open and crawl inside Jakey’s ribcage and live off the essence of his life.
He didn’t say any of that out loud, of course, his career with the lads would be over before it had even begun. He thought it, though, over and over, in a hundred different ways.
He did say some things, though, more than he should have. It’s like he couldn’t control his mouth around Jakey.
He’d grown up in Ireland, obviously, he’d had to be cautious about who he tried it on with, the blokes, that is. He’s always been a flirt, it’s how he communicates, he loves it. He can charm and talk his way out of anything, and in to, if he’s lucky. He’s a hit with the lasses, always has been, but with lads he has to be a bit more cautious. He can make jokes, sure, test the waters but if wants to actually try, he’s got to do his research first - has he heard anything about them being with other lads? Have his friends? If the answer is no, better to not try his luck.
With Jakey, though, it was like he couldn’t stop the stream of flirty comments, the euphemisms, the too-honest-too-much compliments. He’s honestly still surprised Jakey never had him done for sexual harassment for those first few weeks, he was unrelenting.
Jakey’s a good lad, took it in his stride more than Heinz could have expected, laughed it off, played into it, carried the bit himself. These straight Manchester blokes are very open minded.
They’d just clicked after that, like two puzzle pieces. Like they’d been in each other's lives for years.
Jakey was the first one to call him Beano, and after that, Beano he was.
It didn’t take long for the seed to blossom after that.
If Beano loved Jakey less he might describe the blossoms as an invasive species, green ivy tangling up in his nervous system, wisteria filling his lungs, baby’s breath seeping into his bloodstream, lilly of the valley growing in the wrinkles of his brain.
But he loves Jakey, so much so that he thinks, sometimes, late at night and melancholy, that he was given life simply for the purpose that no matter what, there would be someone alive to love and adore Jakey Davies.
Over the course of a year, the blossoms grew and grew into something beautiful and ever so slightly painful. The distance between them eased the ache, even when he moved in with Ginge, they didn’t spend all that much time together aside from shoots and irl streams.
And then, The Bov House.
Truthfully, he didn’t really think about the whole thing properly, just kind of got excited about it straight away and then stayed excited until the day they all moved in.
He’d known this would be the end goal since he agreed to join the group, it was the original plan, even, to be a streaming house. So he knew exactly what he was getting into but that was before Jakey.
After Jakey, everything has been different.
The crash back to reality almost killed him.
It was fun the first night, he was happy beyond words. They spent the night streaming, and laughing, and running from room to room and climbing all over each other and exploring every inch of their new home.
And then the morning came, and Beano got to see Jakey flushed from sleep, soft and pink and sipping on a brew and uncharacteristically quiet from the early hour. He was beautiful, incandescent, the nectar of the gods. And Beano had the crushing realisation that this was going to be his view for the foreseeable future - Jakey in every state; sleepy in the morning, sleepy in the evening, loud and happy in the afternoons, sick and tired, angry and spitting, and they were all going to be as beautiful as the last.
He’s fucked, basically.
The next few weeks are spent living in each other's pockets, all the lads. He learns more about them than he’s ever known, each and every little habit they have - like the way once Chazza ends his steam for the day you won’t be able to get a word out of him for the rest of the night, the way Tays can spend upwards of an hour in the mirror fixing his hair in the morning, the way Ginge needs a fair bit of alone time or he’ll start cussing them all out at the slightest provocation.
And Jakey. Every single piece of Jakey he learns about is treasured, he tucks them inside his ribcage, up against the beating of his weary heart where he can keep them warm and safe. It’s the greatest honour of his life, to know Jakey down to the marrow of his bones, the way he thinks, the way he feels, what it means when he goes quiet, or when he gets too loud, when he smiles in that way where it doesn’t quite meet his tired eyes, the way he laughs with his entire body.
He spends the time heartbroken and so unbelievably happy.
The change comes one random Tuesday in, as is expected, the kitchen. The day was unassuming, he woke up late and spent the day doing fuck all until everyone seemed to unanimously agree to congregate around the kitchen table with cups of tea and coffee and ramblings.
It came on the back of one of Tay's stories, he’s got a habit of telling a story and then going on 14 little tangents, it’s one of Beano’s favourite things about him, could listen to him talk for hours - which is usually how long it takes for him to get through a story, bless him.
“Heth wants us to go on a double date, Jake” Tays grins, “me, you, Heather and Ellie.”
“Oi” Chazza turns from where he’s standing at the kettle, “why not me and Katie?”
“If I had to sit across from you at Nando’s I’d loose my fucking appetite, you fat, ‘anging freak of nature” Ginge sneers where he’s bundled up in his dressing gown at the end of the table, then takes a delicate sip from his mug with a contented sigh.
“I’ll say it, Ginge is a twat” Chaz pouts, turning back just as the kettle clicks off and picks it up.
Heinz snickers into his tea, flicking his eyes up to Jakey across the table, catching him smirking into his own mug.
“Come on, Jake” Tays laughs, Chaz flopping down into the seat next to him with his tea, “Do you wanna?”
“Uh,” Jakey blinks, “me and Ellie actually split a few weeks ago, mate” He says with a shrug.
A few things happen at once, after those words leave Jakey’s pretty mouth. Chazza, who was mid tentative sip, inhales a lung full of hot tea and then chokes out it across the table. Ginge turns his head so fast there’s a cracking sound, loud enough to echo through the kitchen. Tays puts his mug down so hard the bottom of his mug chips and the piece skirts across the table to rest in front of Jakey.
Beano’s brain bluescreens, not a single coherent thought is had for a good few seconds.
“You what?” Ginge chokes out, gaping.
“Yeah, it was mutual, you know” he shrugs, fiddling with the piece of Tay's mug.
“Are you alright?” Beano asks quietly. Chazza, who’s still choking, makes a noise not unlike a squeaky dog toy from next to Tays, who twats him between the shoulder blades.
Jakey meets his eyes, they're bright and beautiful, as always. “Yeah, like I said, it was mutual,” he chews on his lip, thinking, “we’ve been living on borrowed time for awhile, I think”
Beano blinks and across the table, Ginge’s eyes flash, narrowing the way they always do when he’s caught something the rest of them haven’t. Chaz has graduated from choking and is now rubbing at his chest with pained whimpers.
“What?” Jakey asks, squirming under Ginge’s sharp look. Beano and Tay's glance between them nervously, Beano sips his tea.
“You’ve got your eye on someone else.” Ginge says plainly.
“What?” Jakey squeaks, jumping in his chair. Tays gasps, grinning.
“You what?” Chazza finally chokes out.
“You fucking have as well, look at him!” Tays laughs, pointing across the table at Jakey, who’s going steadily more and more pink.
Beano swallows around the lump in his throat, takes another sip of his tea.
“Who is it?” Ginge asks, eyes narrow and searching.
Beano makes the silly, silly mistake of being curious, flicks his eyes up to Jakey just in time to watch him turn that lovely shade of pink that flushes across the apples of his cheeks and the tips of his ears.
For a split second, Jakey’s eyes flick toward him and he turns impossibly pinker when they make eye contact, looking away with wide, panicked eyes.
Oh.
There’s no way that—
“No one!” Comes Jakey's strained voice, strangled with panic, his eyes flick to Beano again for one sweet second.
Oh.
“Oh!” Ginge laughs, nodding his head and picking his tea back up, “best of luck to you, Jake.”
Jakey splutters, shaking his head and all pink and pretty and flustered as Ginge giggles into his mug, smirking.
“What?” Tays laughs, “Who is it?”
“Come on!” Chaz grins, “let us in on it! We can be wingmen, right, Beano?”
Beano jolts, finally pulling his eyes away from pretty, pretty Jakey as Ginge cackles.
“Yeah, right, Beano?” Ginge smirks.
“Uh-“ Beano stutters, he can feel his own cheeks flushing, Jakey makes a strangled sound somewhere to the left of him, “yeah.” He swallows thickly, pushing himself up from the table messily and stumbling back to the kettle. He needs another tea, to calm his nerves, you know.
The conversation devolves from there, Jakey flees at some point under the guise of needing to stream but everyone knows it’s to avoid the questioning of Chaz and Tays who make a point of chasing him up the stairs laughing. The slam of Jakey’s bedroom door makes him jump slightly, it’s followed by the knocking and cackling of Dumb and Dumber. Beano exhales shakily, long fingers clenching over the edge of the marble countertop.
“Best of luck to you too, Ryan” Ginge smiles, coming up behind him quietly to place his empty mug in the sink, patting him on the shoulder. “I think you’re going to need it, my Irish friend.”
Ginge’s soft laughter follows him out the door and Beano bends under the weight until his forehead touches the cool marble.
He laughs breathlessly; For all his posturing as the Huzzman, all his flirting, all his confidence, he’s not quite sure where to go from here. He’s never known what to do with himself when it comes to Jakey.
He pours the hot water into his mug, steeps the teabag, adds a splash of milk and retires up to his room. When he gets to the landing Chaz and Tays are still there banging on Jakey’s door and laughing like hyenas, they try to get him to join in as he slips past them.
There’s a screech of “do not fucking get Beano involved—“ from behind the door and it makes him laugh as he closes his own door. The chaos still reigns on the other side of it but he crosses to the bit of wall that he and Jakey share and knocks a short pattern on it.
It takes a moment but the knocks are returned back to him, he smiles and gets into bed.
He does not sleep much that unassuming Tuesday night.
The next few days are… strange, to say the least. Jakey is seemingly a constant shade of pretty pink when he’s around Beano, a giggly mess when he’s caught off guard, avoiding Beano’s hungry eyes, Ginge’s smirking ones, and Tays and Chazza’s teasing eyes.
They have back to back shoots which go interestingly. Heinz takes every opportunity to be a little shit, he will admit. In his defence, Jakey shouldn’t look so cute if he didn’t want to be pulled into his lap, flirted with unrelentingly and groped at.
Sounds a bit sex offender-y but he’s weak in the face of his boy, fucking sue him.
He thinks Tays and Chaz are still clueless, but Ginge is a fiend - constantly smirking, winking at Beano, making sly little comments here and there that make Jakey splutter and squirm.
There’s little pockets of sweetness in with the perverted stuff, though, like last night when the two of them curled up in the cinema room and watched a Spider-man movie, sharing a blanket and a bag of mini eggs and choking on the unspoken. Like when Jakey drives them to and from shoots, just the two of them and the music Beano doesn’t know the proper lyrics to. Like when Jakey wanders into whatever room Beano is in just to be there, and vice versa.
There’s something beautiful growing, like a flower sprouting between concrete slabs, like roots cracking sidewalks, growing upwards and despite everything, blossoming and turning towards the sun rays peaking through between skyscrapers. It makes Beano feel as if he’s going to vibrate out of his skin, like he himself is the blossom that’s opening under the kiss of Jakey’s sunshine. He feels blessed.
It takes them a few days to get there, it takes Beano a few days to get there, he means, but a week after the Kitchen Revelation, on another unassuming Tuesday, Beano asks Jakey on a date.
He’s probably a bit too nonchalant with it, but he fears that if it acted any less causal he might have dropped to his knees and started begging for a chance. Instead he pokes his head around Jakey’s doorframe, watches him curled up in his gaming chair and fiddling with something on his desktop, and just asks.
“Do you want to go on a date tonight?” He’d asked.
Jakey had spun around on his chair, eyes wide and mouth in the shape of a soft, shocked ‘o’ “uh-“ he’d stuttered, blinking, “what?”
It made Heinz smile, soft and fond “do you want to go on a date tonight?” He’d repeated, “with me?”
Jakey had just blinked at him, cheeks going a steady pink before nodding wordlessly. Beano thought it had been wordless, the sound of his heart pounding had been deafening.
“Sound, I'll come get you at 7?”
Jakey had just nodded again, smiling a little bit this time, eyes bright and beautiful and cheeks pink. Beano imagined he looked a similar way.
He did in fact, come collect Jakey at his bedroom door at 7 on the dot, clean shaven and styled and looking sharp with a bouquet of Waitrose best. Jakey had opened the door glowing, looking like the miracle he is, pink and beautiful and dressed in actual pants that weren’t shorts or sweatpants.
Ginge had stood at the door with glittering eyes and a twitching frown and told each of them to have the other home by 11pm at the latest to which Beano called him daddy and Jakey had made that snorting laugh he only does when he’s particularly tickled.
Jakey drove because Beano is a chud who doesn’t have his license, they hold hands on the console, Beano near enough pisses himself when Constellations comes on the radio. It’s easy, as it always is in the presence of his walking miracle.
They eat at a little independent restaurant in the centre and Beano cradles Jakey’s hand in his over the table, eating with his left hand seems like the easiest thing in the world when he gets to run his thumb over those gentle knuckles. They dip into NQ64 and play old two player games until they’re screaming at each other with smiles on their faces before Beano pulls them onto the Dance Dance Revolution platform where they spend the next hour in perfect synchronicity.
Before they leave, he pulls a sharpie from his pocket and signs their names on one of the tables amongst the other doodles and confessions of love. Jakey adds the heart between their names, and Beano feels his chest fill with so much adoration that he might burst.
Ryan
♡
Jake
He kisses Jakey against the brick wall outside the bar, smiling into his mouth when Jakey whines against his lips. He kisses him again against his car in the car park, deep and hot, licking into that pretty mouth and grabbing at that soft waist.
He spends the drive pressing his lips to the back of Jakey’s hand, whispering every little thought that pops into his mind into the soft skin. Jakey whispers back, tells him of all the times he’d laid awake at night wanting him, all the times he’d wanted the bit to be real.
Jakey tells him about why he and Ellie split and how - the way he’d crawled into bed next to her one night and apologised to her, that he didn’t realise until it was too late. Told him how she’d seen the end coming the day he and Jakey had met and he’d come home to her flushed pink and talking about Heinz nonstop. They had been living on borrowed time for a while, she’d said. It makes the sick, jealous animal in his chest curl up, sated and satisfied.
He kisses Jakey again against the front door, lifts him up and wraps those thighs around his waist, feels him moan against his lips. They stumble upstairs wrapped up in each other, slick tongues sliding together, lips bitten and red, he has Jakey against his own bedroom door and then his bed soon after.
The night is spent wrapped up and glowing. He’d licked the sweet ambrosia from the ivory skin, sucked it from his tongue and found that it seeped from Jakey like sweat, each bead tasted is Elysium for him, heady and thick like honey. He wanted to live there in the space between those thighs - if he has his way, he will spend his lifetime here.
When the morning comes, he kisses along his lover’s shoulders, tastes the sleep clinging to his skin. He kisses Jakey awake, pulls him from the sweet escape of sleep like Orpheus collecting Eurydice from the Underworld, holds him close as those eyes flutter open and brighten under his adoring gaze.
They spend the morning slow and sleepy and trading kisses and stories of their months of pining. It’s beyond perfection, Beano thinks, vaguely, that he could die here and be completely satisfied with what he’s accomplished.
When they meander downstairs to the kitchen, naturally, it seems everyone has had the same idea. Jakey cradles his cuppa and Beano cradles Jakey, Ginge is bundled up in his dressing gown again and smirks into his mug but ultimately leaves them be, because he’s the fucking best. Tays and Chazza on the other hand, tease them mercilessly.
He vows to keep this for as long as he possibly can, leave claw marks in each moment that passes.
Before Beano was Beano, he was Ryan. Now he’s Jakey’s, maybe he had been since the beginning.