Work Text:
Alcohol does weird things to a person’s brain. Pope knows this from experience, but also from his 7th grade Health textbook. Half the people in 7th grade Health slept or doodled through the period, but Pope takes his health and his GPA seriously. He got an A in that class. So he knows: alcohol impairs your decision making faculties first, and then fine motor skills.
“Whoo!” Sarah screams. “Finish him off, Heyward!”
Pope sweeps the leg and JJ goes tumbling to the ground. There’s only a second to claim victory before the momentum catches up and Pope goes tumbling after him.
They’re stuck together in this pile of arms and legs so Pope feels it when JJ takes in a long breath. The skin of his bicep is hot to the touch, and Pope’s must be too because he feels warm and prickly all over.
Fuck. Suddenly he needs air.
He rolls off JJ sideways and uses the ground to push himself up on shaky legs.
“I need some air,” he announces, and starts off towards the water.
He hears a few voices behind him but he focuses on not tripping over his feet, walks until he finds somewhere familiar to sit. If Kiara wants to follow him, she can.
Earlier in the night when he still had his arm around JJ in the hot tub, he caught Kiara giving him that look she has sometimes, that considering look.
Sometimes when she gives him that look he can feel it, like this itch on the back of his neck. Right then it was like two itches, Kiara’s dark eyes and JJ right there giggling and huffing beer-breath laughter into Pope’s face, his stomach tugging him in two directions.
Pope’s glad their friends are back. Things were weird with John B and Sarah gone.
Part of it was the thing with Kiara. Eventually John B’s going to ask him what’s going on there, but the truth is, Pope doesn’t know. She acts like she wants him half the time. He keeps trying to figure out the pattern (when she’ll let him touch her and when she won’t, what he said before she smiled that one time) but he’s Pope, so most of the time he just keeps his hands to himself.
JJ never keeps his hands to himself.
There’s always a hand on Pope’s shoulder, mouth on his cheek, arm around his waist. JJ touches people easily, Pope doesn’t have that gene. One thing he learned about him and Kiara is, they’re touchier with each other when they’re high.
Not that they’ve touched each other all night. Somehow, Pope ended up sticking himself by JJ’s side and hadn’t left it until the warm feeling in his belly and the urge to reach out and touch and keep touching had got too much.
A few beers and he’s all about the human contact, pushing his face into people’s necks.
He hears the sound of someone crunching foliage behind him.
It’s not Kiara. It’s JJ. Giving him a crooked grin.
“Hey Spock.” And when did JJ watch Star Trek? “They sent me to check on you.”
“I’m fine.”
He is fine. He can see the calm water and the stars and feel the night air on his face and all that shit.
JJ nods, tilting his head like he’s considering Pope’s likelihood to throw up on the shitty deck chairs he dragged out to the water then he pauses, hit by a stroke of genius, and says, “Wanna see my tattoo?”
Before Pope he can say anything JJ’s sitting down and swinging his leg onto the space between them and his foot is closer to Pope’s face than anyone’s foot should ever be. But right there, barely visible by the light of the moon is a stick and poke tattoo. It says, in JJ’s carefully messy handwriting, P4L.
Pope stares with his mouth open. “I really don't think that's sanitary.”
“I washed it! I followed the instructions on the kit.”
He’s not sure what to say to that. “Did it hurt?’
“Nothing I can’t handle.” JJ flashes his teeth, bravado up to its usual level, and then turns serious just as quickly. “It was for John B’s memory. I did it after the funeral. I guess it’s a good luck tattoo since he doesn’t need us honoring his memory anymore.”
Pope thinks about the look on JJ’s face when they found out John B and Sarah were alive. It did feel like good luck. Enough good luck for a lifetime.
He rubs JJ’s shitty stick-n-poke like a Genie’s lamp. (There he goes with the touching again.)
“Maybe it’ll give us three wishes,” he says, and JJ giggles like it’s the funniest joke he’s heard that night.
Earlier, when Pope was close to JJ’s chest, he could feel his heartbeat. His heartbeart, the air pushing itself in and out of his lungs. It was all so close and so quiet, way quieter than anything else about JJ. But loud too, like one of those meditation exercises where they tell you to shut your brain off and notice the little noises of nature, the birds chirping and the wind in the bushes that are always going on under everything else. Pope knows about those meditation exercises because his Mom listens to tapes on Sundays.
He felt like he’d rediscovered the miracle of life listening to someone else’s pulse and he was the only one around that hot tub that knew about it.
He’s thinking about that when he drops JJ’s ankle and pushes face first into the space between them for the second time that night. Decision making faculties, they’re the first thing to go.
Sober Pope doesn’t kiss his friends. Sober Pope especially doesn’t kiss JJ. But that’s what he’s doing right now. He’s fisting the front of JJ’s tank top and fixing their mouths together.
JJ’s mouth is surprisingly soft. Soft and dry but warm. It might be the contrast of the night air but JJ feels like a space heater. He freezes for just a second before he’s kissing back. Warm and safe and Pope’s eyes fall closed against the night and it lasts until JJ pulls away.
“Shit,” comes out of Pope’s mouth.
“Are you drunk?” JJ says. His eyes are open. His voice sounds a little different than normal, like he’s had all the breath knocked out of him, like Pope swept the leg again and left him in the dirt. Pope shakes his head.
“I just needed a little air.” And it’s true, he’s not really drunk. Just buzzed, half off those shotgunned beers and half off human contact. His stomach feels all liquid and butterflies.
JJ nods and brings a hand up to Pope’s shoulder. “Kiara gonna kick my ass over this?”
“She’s not my girlfriend.” Also true. If she was his girlfriend, she’d be sitting on this deck chair with him right now.
“Okay,” JJ says. He gives Pope a long, assessing look. Pope feels that itch on his neck.
“Cus I really want–“
“Do it.” Pope says.
JJ does.
(It’s a little while before they get back to the party.)