Work Text:
Hassel is much too old for parties like this. No self-respecting adult drinks until the crack of dawn unless he’s a rock star or drowning his demons, and Hassel has left both of those specters well behind him.
Maybe, maybe, if his schedule was otherwise unoccupied, he might consider a carefully curated mixer with a like-minded crowd, or a pub crawl on open mic night for old time’s sake. But this is simply not that world! He has five lesson hours with his piano students first thing in the morning, then an afternoon shift for his temp gig at the E4 where he must give the best possible impression, and his graduate adviser is expecting another dozen pages of his thesis by midnight, and Brassius knows this. He knows all of this, because no one else asks Hassel about the monotonies of his daily life with quite the same gusto. Or any particular gusto at all.
Unfortunately, there are three miserable facts working against him tonight. First, Brassius believes in the immortality of the artiste, so he’ll be throwing soirées for another eighteen decades if he has his way. Second, Brassius also believes that the best way to drown one’s sorrows after heartbreak is to literally drown them, like a cactus washed out to sea.
And third, with perfect, inimitable timing, Brassius has just broken up with Muse Number Fifty-Three.
(Not that Hassel’s counting.)
It’s been this way almost as long as they’ve known each other. Brassius bounces from partner to partner, searching for an impossible Something, and then the moment his interest sours he carves them out of his life completely. The atelier wood chipper gets some tasty canvases to transmute into fertilizer, Brassius gets his artist friends to throw a party so he can clear his head, and Hassel gets an invitation to his own personal hell.
A lap full of drunken Brassius.
No, pardon the lapse of diction: it is inadequate to imply Brassius merely fills him, meekly, like water in a bowl.
Brassius climbs him. He drapes. He designs. He plays with Hassel’s hair and twists it into a frond to fan himself. He burrows his clever fingers into the furrows of Hassel’s jackets to find lost pens and taste the ink. He giggles nonsense about Rodin and Monet with his nose pressed against the skin of Hassel’s throat, then summons his neighbor to inspect the precise geometry of a scar under Hassel’s chin. He is a jittery ball of all the reasons his partners love him and leave him, and Hassel’s heart aches to see it again, and again, and again.
That isn’t to say that Hassel wants to turn down these invitations. He wants nothing more than to support Brassius through such times of turmoil, just as he has always done and will always do.
And frankly, Brassius needs a firm hand when he’s drunk. Without a minder he drinks too deep and flits on out the door to find trouble. It’s easier in the winter when a simple Flamethrower can make quick work of whatever erotic snowman he’s sculpted on the neighbor’s lawn. In the summer, the heat drives him to drunken feats of parkour in his quest for a cooling breeze above the skyline.
It’s far better for him to be here, sprawled in Hassel’s lap, cackling wildly at a friend’s joke.
Hassel smiles and nods at the raucous laughter. Something about the modular holes dug by a Fidough named Bauhaus. The room is filled with Brassius’s friends, and Hassel always feels somehow two steps behind. There are always new faces, new names that have been around forever. They’re kind to Hassel, but he’s too…stiff, he supposes. Even back in the day when he’d go on stage to scream the world away, he never quite fit with the other musicians and groupies afterward. Too reserved. Too boorish. It surprised no one when he embarked on a teaching degree; he was too much individually and too little in a crowd, and at least now he’ll have an assigned audience, rather than a captive one.
These are good people! Don’t misunderstand. They have seen Brassius through thick and, well, most of the thin, and most importantly they all share a baseline knowledge of art history and philosophy. That gives Hassel something to work with! He might not know the finer points of modern fashion, but he can debate the friction between absurdism and postmodernism into the dawn.
Just.
Not so well with Brassius wriggling directly onto his dick.
It’s Hassel’s fault. He should’ve anticipated this, should’ve—tucked better, or invested in a fashion cup, or worn his pokeballs directly over his crotch in a warning statement.
The moment Hassel shifts to try and make space, Brassius whines loud enough to cut through the room’s friendly chatter. He throws himself against Hassel’s chest and growls something about body heat. Alcohol always gives him the shivers. There’s something in that, truly, because Hassel has seen him shake with wild temperature fluctuations when he’s truly ill, but this—
“Keep me warm?” Brassius pouts, mouth pressed against Hassel’s neck, and thank the divine drakes that he’s far too drunk to feel the riotous twitch of Hassel’s dick at that.
This is fine. Hassel is nothing if not responsible, bordering on repressed, as Brassius has accused him of more than once! This is the nature of the job, because it’s why Brassius trusts him and invites him. It’s better that it’s Hassel instead of whoever Brassie’s next partner will be, who might not treat him right.
“So,” someone says as they collapse into the armchair next to Hassel’s. They reach out and give Brassius a friendly scritch at his scalp, which definitely does not send Hassel’s heart seizing in a brutal paroxysm of unfounded jealousy, then lean back with a contemplative frown.
Hassel takes a deep breath in through his nose and tries to fish up their name from his memory. Stardance In The…Somethinglands? That can’t be right.
“What was your bet?” they ask.
“Pardon?”
Dance sloshes a neon blue martini glass with six lime slices towards Brassius, who is trying to balance a pillow on his toes while he leans back over the armrest and chugs a thankfully virgin punch. “We’ve been taking bets. The one before last only made it two months before Brass kicked him to the curb. Were you camp Six Weeks or were you a Longhauler this time?”
Hell, he’s not going to discuss Brassius’s love life while the man in question is in earshot, let alone throwing a very miserable party in Hassel’s pants. He coughs to cover his surprise, but can’t do a damn thing about the blush spreading across his cheekbones.
“…A man who lives to surprise is a bad bet.”
“Diplomatic! Or is that your idealism showing?” Dance laughs so loudly that it draws the attention of half the room.
Thankfully the new crowd tends towards distraction, and by the time Hassel finishes a mournful sip of his single cider, they’re passing around a phone and cackling over pictures of someone’s new Hoppip named Jackson Frolic.
It’s hard to determine if he is more or less disappointed by Brassius’s latest partner and their brief track run. It’s like having to decide if it is better or worse that Brassius now only has one cheek of his arse pinning Hassel down against his thigh. All of the blood in Hassel’s body cannot possibly have rushed into his cock, though it sure feels that way, like the thrum of his pulse would be audible the moment the chatter dimmed, or that Brassius would feel Hassel’s panicked heartbeat even through his stupor if he had another five pounds of flesh instead of gaunt bone—is it better or worse that he’s still underweight!
The real disappointment is in all the drafts sacrificed to the wood chipper, lost chapters in the book of Brassius…though frankly he does better work when not distracted by ephemeral romance, so the loss is minimal.
Brassius is simply pruning his life’s work of all the weeds. It’s fine.
“How can you possibly defend the gym league system when you call yourself a transcendentalist?”
Hassel’s ears perk up at the righteous indignation across the room. He has thoughts about that! Big thoughts! Safer thoughts than whatever is going on with his libido at this precise moment!
He sets his drink on a side table and gingerly, tenderly, slips his hands under Brassius’s sweaty armpits. All he has to do is get his friend upright for two seconds, so that Hassel can scurry away and join the conversation and possibly grab a handful of napkins to shove into his pants to sop up some inconvenient biological liquid. Dark jeans are a lifesaver.
But his hands are sweaty, too, and Brassius wriggles, and slips, and dark jeans are not a lifesaver when they are as particularly tight as Brassius’s, tight enough to frame his perfect ass, tight enough for the seam to make a perfect furrow for Hassel’s treasonous dragon to strain upon, against, into.
He bites through his lip instead of letting out a single noise.
“Brass used Headbutt.” Laughter rushes around them from a great distance, and someone hands Hassel a glass of water to slosh away the blood in his mouth while they tease Brassius for his chaotic flailing.
Hassel’s free hand remains frozen on Brassius’s waist like he’ll die if he moves another inch, or be brutally mocked by a full troupe of aesthetes, or spill in his jeans on his drunk best friend, which is categorically worse.
But all the ruckus has roused Brassius from his drowsy dreaming and flipped a switch in his brain, like the ones for Mania and Despair and Fixation and Joy, except this is the one that’s just. Twitchy. The one that makes him start climbing Hassel like a jungle gym in public. He twists (fuck, fuck!) to throw his arms around Hassel’s neck and check on his wound from a startling closeness, thumb pressing thoughtfully into the swollen plush of Hassel’s lip, then loudly proclaims it super effective. A moment of incomprehensible contorting later, and Brassius has his head up on the armrest, torso nestled snug in the bowl of Hassel’s lap. He yawns like a Sprigatito and effortlessly stretches one leg up and over Hassel’s shoulder.
If Hassel turned his head, it would be leg for days. Good thing he’s frozen stiffer than a glacier at the moment and can’t possibly look! Yes, ice, that’s the trick—he pours the freezing dregs of his glass into his mouth and crunches. Envisions the frigid peaks of Glaseado and how his cock can go die a traitor’s death in its embrace if it doesn’t behave.
(Brassius is a good many inches shorter than Hassel. How are his legs so long?)
Another glass appears at Hassel’s side, like he’s the one with temperature problems now, sweating himself halfway to dehydration as he blunts his teeth on ice. Everyone keeps offering him drinks—not forcefully! Politely, with great concern for his well-being as Brassius’s chair and ride home if nothing else. Someone’s got to be lucid enough to yell if the cops show up.
Not that they’re doing anything illegal, this time. They’re not young anymore.
Or. Well. Everyone else. Because Hassel is…beneath the burn of mortification and desire, it feels wrong. Tears well in his eyes as the feeling finally comes into crystal clear focus. He tries to shift again, and his hand brushes the bare skin of Brassie’s stomach where his shirt has ridden up.
Brassius lifts his head. With his woozy, glassy and adoring eyes, he rasps, “Hass?”
It’s that name in that pitch that leaves Hassel shaking, poised on tiptoe on the edge of disaster, and he can’t. Won’t. He had a job and he’s failed it, but he can still—he’s still the ride home.
Hassel doesn’t remember what excuse he gives. One moment they’re in that accursed chair, and the next Hassel is pouring Brassius into a cab. Someone gave them water for the road, so Hassel occupies himself making Brassius take a sip every three minutes instead of succumbing to the pressure behind his eyes, let alone the fading pressure elsewhere. The sweetness of affection in his veins has fermented into a rotten scream of desire, and he will have a good long cry about his own moral failings as soon as Brassius is safe at home.
By the time they get to Brassius’s flat, the man’s legs don’t work, so Hassel tips the cab to go on without him and scoops Brassius into his arms. The floorboards are thankfully free of much clutter this time. The only real tripping hazards are Breloom and Dolliv swarming him for Ups when his arms are already full.
Hassel drops Brassius into bed and crouches to remove his shoes. He won’t want to be tucked in; he’ll be burning hot at this time of night and throw off all the sheets anyway. A little fussing and then Hassel will be right on his way. Maybe he’ll walk home. He doesn’t deserve the easy road tonight.
A groan rises from the bed just as he turns to leave.
“Fucking hell, Hass.”
He pauses immediately. “Your headache?” Brassius shouldn’t take his migraine medication with alcohol, but it’s always better if he takes them before he passes out so that the ache passes by the time he wakes up… How much water has he had? Three glasses of—no, but they always pour it strong, so the ratio might not—Hassel pulls out his phone for the calculator.
But laughter skewers him through before he can derive a safe answer. Brassius presses the heels of his palms into his eye sockets, laughing and laughing with the most hideous bitterness Hassel has heard in near on fifteen years. He kneels at the foot of the bed in desperation before he even knows what he’s doing.
When Brassius peels his hands away from his face, it’s to gaze at Hassel like he’s a foreign language, which is terribly unfair when Brassius is the perfectly indecipherable one. His voice is all gravel and pain. “There’s really no world where you’d have me, is there.”
It isn’t a question. Hassel still nearly answers it with one. A kernel of fury burns in his gut, and when he stands he tucks his tensed claws against his hips. “There’s no world where you deserve to be had like this,” he snarls. How many times have they had this conversation? How many times has he reminded Brassius of how many bastards won’t accept no, how he’s got to keep himself safe, no matter how many miles he wants to be from lucid?
“Can’t I pretend sometimes?” Brassius mumbles. He sounds a million miles away, period, and Hassel is so frazzled and worried that he manages to plan half a lecture before the words finally connect.
Where you’d have me.
Hold on. Hold everything.
Did Brassius just admit to angling for Hassel’s animal attentions? For years?!
It’s too much. Hassel rubs away the first spill of hot tears, frantically trying to clear away a decade of emotional undergrowth that Brassius has now unceremoniously set on fire, and croaks out, “You’re drunk, Brassie.”
“…Braver.”
“What?”
“I’m braver,” he slurs, frowning at the ceiling. “And if I ask ‘n you say no, I won’t have to remember. You thinking less of me.”
Hassel kisses him.
It’s wrong, but it would be worse to let those words stand, to let even this muddy-headed half-glass of Brassie believe for even a moment that Hassel could ever think less than the entire world of him. Hassel kisses him, and gets him two glasses of water for the nightstand, and kisses him, and also wants to throttle him, just a little, so he tucks Brassius in under the covers so he can be the one sweating for once.
“Be brave tomorrow.” Hassel presses his lips to Brassius’s forehead like he can imprint the words more clearly that way. “You don’t even have to confess. Be brave enough to ask if I remember tonight, and I’ll be the brave one from there. I promise.”
Brassius’s forehead furrows beneath Hassel’s kisses, and his eyes swim with starlight. “You’re the bravest person I know.”
It isn’t true, but it still makes Hassel cry.
“Sleep.” Brassius snakes out a hand towards Hassel’s belt, and Hassel swats it away.
“Absolutely not.” He tucks the blanket in tighter. It is gratifying to think that drunk Brassius might only be like this with Hassel, not everyone, but the targeted intimations are far more than he can deal with at the moment. He still needs to sit under a frigid waterfall for a week or two, as well as impress upon Brassius that wanton drunken tomfoolery is not a healthy way of dealing with big emotions.
Brassius gives a petulant little grunt but nods off soon enough, all the lines of his face easing out in slumber.
And Hassel is…well, not too old to sit in his crush’s bedroom staring at his sleeping face for an hour, apparently. But it’s a loved and lovely face. He has to practice not bursting into tears at the sight of it, if they’re going to be something other than best friends. He has to practice breathing instead of suffocating on all the love in his chest.
He has to, maybe, slip a hand into his jeans and remember Brassius tucked in against him, writhing before a crowd with his legs spread over Hassel’s shoulders, desperate and on display, for him, on purpose.
As if he’ll ever forget it.