I wanna cut to the feeling

[mph]

Who: Tommy Shepherd and David Alleyne
What: The first time they kiss, it's around midnight in a paris nightclub.
Rating: NC-17 possibly, or R. We shall see.

Sneaking into nightclubs and crowded bars is easy when you're a speedster. Tommy's been doing it since he was 14. It's a lot harder to do with a plus one. It's not impossible, they've done it plenty of times in the last few months of being close, but sometimes it's a Tuesday, in the middle of the day, and you've somehow managed to convince your very studious and very busy best friend to go out dancing, and that was not something to waste.

It's how Tommy ended up, after a brief interlude to change (and asking David to trust him with his most charming smile) bridal carrying David across the Atlantic to where it wasn't the middle of the day, and the Parisian party was just getting started.

Parisians are funny. They're flirty, they're handsy, they love an American accent and then love to shit talk you in French when they think you can't understand what they're saying. To be fair Tommy couldn't the first few times, but he's quick study, and it helped him determine who was worth hanging with and who wasn't. Another thing about Parisians is that they always assume you and whomever you're with are a couple, while also simultaneously continuing to flirt like that's no obstacle.

It's weird at first, when he's showing off by ordering them both drinks in heavily accented but pretty good French, when the bartender, and another patron both just assume David and him are together. It sets his stomach into knots, so he downs his double shot before he even hands David his drink. He doesn't need to drink to want to dance, so he pulls David onto the dance floor like he always does. He's fallen into a pattern, and he doesn't even realize it: drink, dance with some girls, encourage David to dance with anyone and not just by himself, more drinks, maybe dance with a guy too, more drinks, get progressively closer until it's just the two of them dancing, or hanging out by the bar to take a breather, just enjoying each other's company and talking.

It takes a lot to get Tommy drunk, and it doesn't last for long, but this time it's a pretty good buzz. He's three hours, five goldshlaggers and three tequilas in. He's a little sloppy. Sloppy enough to lean into David and really, really just dance with him, close together in the sardine can of a night club, without a care in the world except the base and the totally meaningless ear to mouth chatter between them. Sloppy enough to lean back against some guy who just crowded him and grind, all while talking up David right in front of him like David's the person this french rando wants to hook up with. He's having a great time.

Comments

[helpdesk_hero]

The problem with going to France to party with Tommy is the same problem that David realized a while ago with that perfect 20/20 hindsight. Okay, maybe that and the way some of his old school friends just gave him a look after he followed Tommy down the hill from that hillside. But David wasn't the sort to push things, especially after how he'd been hurt before. And friendship with Tommy was just so fucking good.

If there was a way to be addicted to friendship, David had definitely found it. Found it in the way that Tommy makes him laugh, in the way the guy has pushed and pulled him out of his shell. Hell, when Tommy'd found out that David had lost his job over leaving to help Tommy the guy had even helped him search online for new work. Which had been well and good until his parents had found out about him losing his job, and his apartment, and his father got into twisting his arm about finally going to college and...

Well, the truth of the matter was that he needed a day off of being an overachiever as much as he wanted time with Tommy, so here he was. Smiling through Tommy's horrible French accent, casually and hopefully charmingly cutting off attempts to flirt with him by strangers, and mostly just watching. Tommy is just alive, electric, vital in a way that is so damn captivating that it gets David every last time.

There's just something about the speedster that is magnetic. And given David knows how he is about people, he knows just what it is.

So he sips his drinks (no way he wanted to get drunk), lets himself be pulled into friend dancing with Tommy, and then retreating from the dance floor when Tommy's occupied. Or at least finding a corner to enjoy the music and dancing alone. Because fuck, that flair of jealousy in his gut any time Tommy gets close to a girl (or a guy) is absolutely unbecoming of him. Which is not what he wants to do. He can't be that asshole. Not again.

But it's nice. The way the 'night' is going. The moments he gets where he's the only thing Tommy is paying attention to. It's almost like something, and maybe there's a buzz in his head going on, the edges of fuzzy warmth in his gut, but he likes to think he has it under control.

He does not have it under control. That much is obvious when his hands grip at Tommy's hips to pull him closer, to pull him just a bit further away from the french rando guy. Can't help the hint of sharpness to his eyes or the curl of his lips as he raises his voice to be heard over the music by the rando.

The first time David's spoken French in front of Tommy all night, because he'd been happy to keep to English. It's flawless, the accent sounds flawless enough for him to be mistaken for a Parisian as well, and his words are sweetly sharp too. Possessive without being possessive.

"So sorry, I know how much space is at a premium some nights. Forgive us for crowding you."

[mph]

Of all the things that Tommy expects (and he doesn't expect a whole lot; it's much less effort to just roll with the punches than build up expectations), he does not expect David's hands to grip his hips and pull him back into the miniscule, sardine-space of the dance floor.

What had he been hoping would happen when he started shouting over the music to that guy behind him about David, anyway? If asked under pressure, he might say that he hoped to be David's wingman. Really, there must have been some glimmer of an idea that if this guy ended up propositioning one of them, he'd proposition both of them, and then Tommy could get around this anxiety of his attraction to David via a precarious threesome?

Really Really, it was neither of those things. It's just that he can't stop telling people how great David is, because he's got a stupid crush that he refuses to fess up to, even to himself, and Tommy Shepherd is nothing if not a smooth avoider of uncomfortable feelings. But the thing is, he's having a fun tonight, and he's had just enough shots to (for the time being) care a little bit less about his own avoidant attachment style. So when David pulls him closer and tells the innocent Parisian flirt off in perfect French, it sets off something something wild in his stomach. Attraction? Arousal? Excitement? Delight? Definitely a combination of the four, thanks. So he just raises his eyebrows at the guy behind him with a shrug, a voiceless "guess not, buddy", before turning his attention completely back to David.

He doesn't remove David's hands from his hips or pull away. In fact, he scoots even closer in the sardine-can of the nightclub dance-floor, leaning in to David's ear to shout-speak into it over the French techno.

"Alright, alright, you've got me, I'm all yours. Of course you speak French, were you just going to let me go on like that all night?"

[helpdesk_hero]

The stranger moves away with his own shrug and David... well, he can work with that. At least work with it enough to try and keep the growling beast in his chest down. Clearly he'd had too much to drink and probably needed to stop for the night. Day. Whatever. Timezones are really beyond the limits of his brain right now. Probably. Maybe. Okay, not at all, but fuck it he wants to pretend they are. He's day drunk (buzzed) in a club in Paris with one of his closest friends, he's allowed to be like this.

At least with Tommy this close he doesn't have to shout nearly as much to be heard when he leans in to speak into the guy's ear. Especially since he knows that his voice can cut through some of the bass in the music going on.

"Four different dialects, including Quebecois which French people will deny is actually proper French. Languages were literally the first thing my powers pinged onto at school."

Past tense. He doesn't even need to work to keep them sharp because when he picked them up it was always with a native born speaker's fluency. Needless to say language classes were never put on his schedule at Xavier's. Other things he might need to retain away from people whose knowledge he was copying, but the theory had been that he'd have the languages he needed when he was around people who spoke them.

"And you seemed to be having fun taking the lead on talking. Didn't want to ruin that."

[mph]

"Quebecois, huh? You ever meet Northstar and Aurora?"

Even though Tommy does just naturally take the lead on talking, it's not that he doesn't want to be receptive to other people. It's more than other people take too long, and he doesn't have the patience. Somehow, he's finding that he does have the patience for David. He just wants to hear about him and the people he knows, and what goes on in that genius head of his.

(This stupid fucking crush is cramping his style.)

He could have a whole conversation with him, close enough to look like they're making out in the middle of this dance floor, with his chin perched on David's shoulder and his temple against David's cheek, and with David's hands still on his hips.

They haven't left his hips, that's nice. He likes that a lot.

[helpdesk_hero]

"Not Aurora, but Northstar was a teacher at Xavier's and a team leader for a time."

Before... No. No David doesn't want to go there. He just doesn't want to touch on the trauma of that night.

"He was caring, and the defacto head of the school's queer support group. A lot less out mutants at that point after all, and Jean-Paul never apologized for who he was. Though his taste in men is questionable. And then Jean-Paul was on Utopia with us. Pretty driven guy."

Yes, David does know of the man's former crushes. Yes, he judges Jean-Paul for them. But that was a while ago, and since then Jean-Paul met Kyle, and David thought it was adorable how hard Jean-Paul tried to impress him when his boyfriend visited.

"You have a nerdy thing about other speedsters?"