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I.
The first time you ever saw him was on your first day of gym class.
Initially, you’d entertained the idea that you’d seen him somewhere before, maybe passing through the halls or in one of your other classes (the school isn’t that big), but nope, you’re pretty sure you’d remember a face like that. You were running late, of course you were, banging through the double doors into the gymnasium and attracting the attention of everyone currently waiting for class to get under way.
Normally, that wouldn’t be enough to fluster you, because you were kind of a nerd, kind of had a speech impediment, kind of had two left feet, kind of got pissed off at anything and everything, kind of just didn’t have your shit together in any discernable fashion. But standing at the outside of the little awkward cluster of students, all of whom you knew to some degree, was one that you didn’t. A new kid, moved here with his parents probably, but you didn’t quite get that far.
He’s standing with his arms crossed over his chest, trying to look more like a cool, confidant lone wolf than a teenager on his first day at a new school, but his slightly hunched shoulders and the defensive, slightly displeased scowl on his face ruins the illusion. He’s wearing gym shorts (nothing worth writing home about), but his legs are pale in an attractive sort of way, like fresh cream with just a splash of strawberry to it. Shapely, if you dare use that word to describe another human being and not the case on a laptop. And instead of covering his torso with some ratty t-shirt like the rest of the boys, he’s wearing a long-sleeved homecoming shirt (probably from his old school) that’s at least a couple sizes too big.
Combined with his artfully styled hair and stylish square glasses, he’s a punch right to the solar plexus that you weren’t expecting in the slightest. He’s fucking adorable, enough so that it almost makes you trip over your barely-tied shoelaces, much to the barely withheld amusement of your classmates. It feels like there’s snakes nesting in your stomach, and you deliberately walk around the cluster of students so that there’s a mass of bodies between you and the new boy.
Your whole face feels warm, and it’s an entirely foreign and slightly alarming sensation. You’re Sollux Captor, record holder for the latest bloomer out of the rest of your friends. The only thing you find attractive is the maxed out hard drives at Best Buy or a nice, high-res image of an old-fashioned computer motherboard. Not people. Definitely not boy people.
Through the spaces between heads, you can see him carding a section of hair out of his face before propping his hand on his hip, making your stomach swoop most uncomfortably. This is either going to be the best class of your high school career, or the worst.
II.
“Hey, can I have a piece?”
You almost fumble the package of gum in your hands, which would be a tragedy, since 5 gum is pricy by your standards and the locker room isn’t exactly the most sanitary place in the world. It’s a fresh pack, and the last thing you want to do is have to throw it out because you can’t hold on to jack shit when Eridan talks to you.
Despite your best intentions, you can’t avoid him. It’s a small class, only seventeen students, and there’s plenty of down time between activities to just sit and try not to watch him. Which sounds creepy as hell, but what else are you supposed to do? Karkat gets to skip out on all but one semester of gym because of band, and your schedule means that all your other friends are taking in a different time slot or already took during the fall. So you and the new kid end up sitting against the folded up bleachers, enough space between you to make talking awkward, but close enough to kind of establish an unspoken bond. Club Loser, current occupancy two, please inquire inside about joining.
A couple times, you’ve thought about trying to talk to him, but he just seems so disinterested in absolutely everything. He’s fairly competent in all the sports you’ve been forced to play, but he always looks bored, like he’s above something as juvenile as gym class. Most of the time he sits and picks at his cuticles, chews on the sides of his fingers, and watches the clusters and cliques of students scattered about on the wood floor.
So you’re utterly unprepared for him to approach you in the locker room, his duffel bag slung over his shoulder, both hands gripping the strap as he looks at you expectantly. “Don’t speak two words to me and you think you can just waltz up and ask me for gum?” you say, bristling a bit, because you tend to just get defensive when you don’t know how to handle a situation.
He scowls, thick eyebrows drawing down behind the frames of his glasses as his fingers tighten about his bag strap just enough for you to notice. “It’s not like I don’t want to,” he huffs, eyes somewhere just below your cheekbones instead of actually meeting your gaze. “You’re kinna intimidating, sitting there and glaring at everyone who even so much as looks in your general direction.”
“I don’t glare,” you snap back, but he just arches one of those eyebrows and looks very unimpressed. “I don’t. You’re the one who sits there and looks like we’re all a bunch of peons trashing your throne room.”
“Oh my god, I just wanted a piece of gum,” he groans, and you practically throw the little foil-wrapped rectangle at him, because even though he’s being kind of whiny, he has a point about the glaring thing, and he still manages to look amazing even when making demands of your person.
He rolls his eyes, unwrapping the shiny blue paper from the thin strip underneath, biting the gum into three little bits as he pushes it between his lips. And right until that moment, you hadn’t realized how pink they were. How full they were. Slightly chapped from the cold weather and the freezing winds raging outside, but all it makes you want to do is moisten them with your tongue.
Wow, what?
Eridan looks at you funny, the same way you’d look at yourself if you could in this situation, but doesn’t say anything as he retreats to one of the bathroom stalls at the back of the locker room to change back into his street clothes. You kind of stand there in front of your gym locker, staring at the open package of gum and trying to figure out why the image of his parted, pink lips and the flash of white teeth lingers so prevalently in your mind.
III.
You smack into someone on your way between chemistry and English, and when you say smack, you mean smack. There is an audible collision, and you grab at the person you just collided with, not out of some sense of chivalry, but because you’re fairly positive you’re going to end up on your ass and hopefully this person can keep you upright as well. There’s a bit of worrisome stumbling, where you’re convinced that it’s ass-meet-carpet for both of you, but somehow you remain on your feet.
“Jesus, Sol, I knew your fine motor controls are garbage, but I thought you might at least be able to make it down the hall without falling on your face.”
Suddenly, you’re all-too aware of the faint scent of cologne and the warmth of his skin bleeding through the material of his cardigan. For all the time you’ve started spending talking to him in class, sniping over basketball passes or trying to trip each other during floor hockey, you’ve never once seen him outside the gym. He’s painfully shy, you’ve learned, and always changes in one of the bathroom stalls, taking his damn sweet time. You’re always in and out of the locker room before him, meaning you’ve never seen him in all his fashionable glory.
And boy, is he fashionable. In a way that you kind of abhor, but it’s just. So fitting to his holier-than-thou attitude, his constant need to impress, his near-manic obsession with perfection and keeping up appearances. You think he cares a little too much about what people think of him, but at least right now, it’s certainly a positive. His skinny jeans are purple (fucking purple) and his grey and dark-grey striped cardigan is layered over a white t-shirt that you can’t make out the design on. He’s wearing an honest to god scarf, a soft-looking black thing with a design that looks suspiciously like tree branches stitched in shining silver thread into the inky fabric.
Holy shit. Holy shit, things were reaching critical capacity.
“Uh.”
He’s looking at you like you’ve grown a second head, and belatedly you realize it’s because you’ve still got a pretty firm grip on his arm, and you release him immediately. “You need to like, go to the clinic or somethin’? You look kinna pale. Well, paler than usual.”
“No, I’m fine,” you say a bit gruffly, adjusting the strap of your backpack and slipping around him, trying not to inhale the scent of his shampoo as you do so. “Sorry for almost knocking you over and smearing your brains all over the wall.”
His nose scrunches as he wrinkles it in disgust. “You damn well better be sorry, I need my brain right where it is between my ears. Can’t do me much good adding some, admittedly much needed, color to the hallway.”
You’re starting to get the idea that you’re just lucky enough to be exclusively, unfortunately attracted to Eridan Ampora, and you really ought to stop having conniptions over it.
IV.
You learn a lot about him during that downtime during class.
He’s from an incredibly wealthy family, old money from a series of rich, Texan landowners, and he owes his lovely (gag) accent to his childhood spent in the south. They moved to the midwest because his mother “simply couldn’t handle the wretched heat any longer” (when he spoke this part, his voice went up about a dozen octaves as he drawled and motioned with an imaginary cigarette in his hand; it was profoundly charming), because while it’s just as capable of getting hot where you live, it lacks the oppressive humidity that he cites as being the absolute worst part about southern living.
Instead of being some spoiled dock child like you’d imagined, spending his days on his daddy’s yacht eating caviar and wearing a sweater vest with Oakleys and an ascot, he grew up on a ranch. A rich people ranch, but he had a horse that he grew up riding and was wrangled into helping with the cattle if something went horribly, out of control wrong (which happened more than you’d think, he said). It was nice, but a little boring, to live away from all the commotion of the animals, but he was enjoying being able to just relax and not have to really worry about what anyone else in his family was getting up to.
He likes music but can’t sing or play, he goes to thrift stores to collect antique rings, he wants to join the swim team next season, and when you see him in the hallway, he’s always got his face buried in some history text or another. There’s more to him than just a pretty face, and while he’s far from perfect (he whines and gets moody and entitled and sucks a fucking dick at communicating why he’s unhappy with people), there’s still something there that draws you in like a moth to flame. Like at the core, under the beautiful wrapping paper and the packing peanuts, there’s something you want to be near.
You also know he’s a painfully good student, so it really catches you off guard to see him sitting in one of the desks as you walk into detention. He looks incredibly uncomfortable, head ducked so his face is half hidden in the thick folds of his scarf, looking at the paper in front of him and not at any of the other kids settling in around him.
“What did you do?” you ask with the biggest shit-eating grin on your face.
He looks absolutely horrified, eyes almost hilariously wide behind his frames. “I’m taking a makeup test,” he hissed. “My teacher had to go home early, an’ the only person who could keep an eye on me was the guy watching detention. I’m not in trouble.”
It shouldn’t make you so gleeful, but he looks so petrified at the idea that you might think him enough of a delinquent to warrant a stay in detention, you really can’t help yourself. “Sure,” you drawl, letting the first vowel linger long and lazy on your tongue. “Whatever helps you sleep at night.”
Clearly, he’s too flustered to even ask what you’re doing there yourself (tardies to your English class, you really just don’t give a fuck), and instead turns back to the scantron and test packet sitting on his desk. Clearly, the time for conversation has passed, so you dig out your homework, crumpled at the bottom of your backpack, and prepare to set to work.
Only to be utterly and completely distracted.
Because he chews on the end of his pencil.
Not in a gross way, just sticking the yellow wood into his maw and chomping down with his back molars. But in a way that has him wrapping his lips around the pink eraser, kneading the rubber with his front teeth before removing it to fill in another bubble. You’ve never, ever been so jealous of a pencil before in your life, and you don’t even know what you’d want him to do with that mouth if his attention was suddenly turned on you.
It just made your cheeks burn, bright red, to think of him teasing any part of your anatomy with his teeth and lips. Particularly your own mouth, though, because for as much of an oral fixation as he has, you’d bet the farm that he’s a fantastic kisser.
He’s looking a little flushed as well as he takes the test back up to the supervising teacher, and you try to think that it’s because of how stuffy the room is, not because he caught you staring.
V.
You’re running laps on the asphalt track outside the gym when the universe decides to take a dump on you.
In the form of gallons and gallons of water.
The weather hadn’t looked great, but the gym was close enough that it was a reasonable risk to take. You’d been with Eridan, him pulling ahead and slowing to a jog so you could catch up, only to repeat the process again a moment or two later. There was an odd sound, coming from the other side of the building, and almost like in a movie, you could see the torrents of rain closing in. The lot of you just stand there, gaping, until it feels like someone dumped a bucket of ice water over your head.
It’s so sudden, so torrential, that the water blinds you, and it’s only the warmth of a hand wrapped around your wrist, tugging urgently, that leads you through the waterfalls of rain and back towards the gym. Your feet pound the asphalt, and you almost trip when things go from firm ground to slippery grass, but Eridan has a firm grip on you, and keeps you from eating mud in that awkward space between the track and the back door.
The door was heavy, and it took both you and Eridan bracing against it to open, but as soon as it opened just a crack, the two of you were slipping in, the metal slamming closed loudly behind you. He’s breathing heavy, just like you, from the panicked sprint across the track, slumped against the door with his eyes closed, lips parted for air, clothes clinging to him like a second skin and his hair plastered in wet ringlets to his skull.
Dear god.
You’re so close that you can feel the chill of his wet skin, see how flushed his face is, the way the wet fabric of his shirt moves with every breath he takes. The bar is digging against your back painfully, but you can’t even begin to focus on it. Can only stamp down the rapidly increasing urge to lean over and cup his face in your hands, brush some of the rainwater away, warm his skin against your own, drink in those frantic breaths with your lips.
He laughs, though, pulling his shirt away from his stomach and letting it fall back into place with a wet-sounding smack. “This fucking sucks,” he says, cheerfully, but with the tone of voice that says he’s very close to just wigging out. “I don’t have a change of underwear with me.”
The thought of him going commando under his slate gray skinny jeans effectively shuts down your brain for the rest of the day, making his bitching much easier to deal with.
+I.
Eridan is not particularly enthused about the end of semester trip out to the lake.
It’s nothing particularly extravagant or fancy, just a relatively small lake with a little nature center and a walking trail and a place to rent boats that a lot of the local teenagers spend their summers sunbathing at (it’s the closest thing you have to a beach, after all). But it’s only a ten minute bus ride from the school, and so for the last day of gym class, all eighteen of you pile into the yellow monstrosities and traipse out to spend an hour or so burning energy at the lake before heading back.
“It’s like, a mosquito breeding ground out here,” he gripes as you lead the way around the walking trail, hands shoved in your hoodie pocket because it’s unseasonably cold for this time of year. “For a kid raised on a farm, I don’t much understand the appeal of doing outdoor activities if you don’t have to.”
“You weren’t raised on a farm, you were raised on a fucking ranch,” you correct, picking your way off the path and down the little trail made by dozens of people taking an alternate route through the shrubbery towards the little wooden building standing just at the edge of the murky water. “Secondly, if you think this is bad, never come here during the legit summer. You’ll be one giant mosquito bite.”
“I appreciate you lookin’ out for my complexion,” he says, walking like a stork after you towards the water. “Where are we going, anyways?”
“We’re at a lake, so we should enjoy being at the lake, by getting close to the lake.”
He looks apalled. “I don’t want to be close to the lake; I’m not tryin’ to court it. Can’t we just admire it from the path? Cause honestly, it’s gorgeous, looks like a Florida swamp or some shit-”
“Holy god, shut up,” you say as you move from grass to gravel and sand, turning to give him the full power of your glare, only to stop because.
The wind has his hair swept, in a kind of disarray that makes your fingers itch, and the sleeves of his cardigan have been pushed up and his scarf is starting to unwind from around his neck. Even though you’ve not been out for long, his face is pink, sunkissed, and as you watch, he unwinds the fabric about his throat, bearing the pale skin that you can only look and drool at within the safety of your gym class.
But there’s no one here now. No teachers, no other students. Just the lake, the ramshackle old boat house, and the boy with the breeze-tousled hair and the big blue eyes and the shitty-charming personality.
He looks mildly perplexed, when you turn around and walk back to him, grasping the flowing fabric of his scarf in your nerveless fingers as you cup his face with the other hand. There’s a spark of something in his eyes (comprehension, desire, disgust, you have no clue) before you lean down and kiss him. The slightly warmer weather has led to softer lips, and they’re full and plump beneath your trembling thin ones, parting easily as you taste the seam of his mouth and eventually the flavor of his tongue. He leans into you, body still a bit stiff and unsure despite the way he tilts his head, lets his eyes flutter closed as he kisses you back, smooth and effortless and leisurely.
“Fuck,” you swear when he shifts away, and there’s alarm written clear on his face. “I’m fucking this up. This wasn’t. This is the wrong order.”
Any panic in his expression is swept away, and there’s a crushingly fond look on his face as he smiles. “Do it in the right order, then.”
Your tongue ties itself in knots, an entire fleet of jets take off in your stomach, and the words you’ve dreamed and said over and over again in your head suddenly feel clumsy and juvenile. But you’re only sixteen. You have no idea what you’re doing. If it matters, then he won’t care about how you say it, so long as you say it.
“Do you wanna go out with me?” you mumble, looking at his throat, the slight swell of his Adam’s apple instead of at his eyes.
“A’course I do,” he says, voice just as soft, only a little bit more composed and smoother sounding. “Only been thinkin’ about it since you oh so elegantly swept me off my feet that time in the hallway-”
The press of your lips cuts him off, and he doesn’t protest at all, just melts against you like the hazy relationship request was what he’d been waiting for, fingers tangling in your hair as he nestles close. And it’s not weird anymore, to feel this fire frothing in your veins, speeding up your heart and shooting to your brain, making it fuzzy. He’s so many things, a thousand pieces to a complex puzzle, attractive and kissable but more, underneath, and when he holds your hand on the bus ride back, it just feels. Right.