Chapter 1: that bouncer was so hot but, honestly, that's not an exuse to be fucking rude (literally)
Chapter Text
By the time the final camera’s are shut off from filming Week Eight’s results and Rose has exchanged her gauzy blue dress for jeans and a hoodie, it’s going on eleven o’clock. She’s slouched at the vanity, scrolling through Instagram, when out of the corner of her eye, she sees Giovanni’s hand wiggle through a crack in the door to mess with the lights – a “Deaf knock,” just for her. In the mirror, Rose catches his eye, still feeling soft and impossibly happy from their Couple’s Choice, and, honestly, she’s too buzzed to bother hiding the pure joy Giovanni’s smile brings her.
“Drinks?” he signs to her. “ I’ll buy you something stupid.”
Rose leans back in her chair, like a troublemaker child in primary school, and grins wickedly at their reflections. Fancy cocktails, she signs, smile widening at his entirely performative groan.
So he beckons to her and Rose gets up, slinging her “dance bag” over one shoulder and follows him out into the hallway.
“Rose,” he says, tapping her so she looks at him. “I’m so proud of you. The first dance idea, I’m so glad you hated it and we turned it into this, because now it’s perfect.” It’s a rare moment of sincerity dropped into their relationship, which is so often centered around sarcasm and ridiculous jokes, but it fits. This has, after all, been an unusually sentimental week.
Rose smiles back at him and nudges one hand into his. “Thank you,” she says, quiet, but comfortable. That’s the thing with Giovanni– she’s safe with him, and him with her and the way they can relax together has snuck up on Rose so completely, she’s almost embarrassed at having taken so long to notice. Before starting the show, even during all the negotiations and drawing up contracts and shit, it had hardly occured to Rose that she’d have a partner , let alone that they’d be more than passingly relevant to her so-called Strictly Journey . For so many years of her career, Rose had done things by herself—no agent, working references, or adequate Deaf-awareness training in the industry to propel her as she swam uphill, depending on a Facebook group to find auditions. And there still are struggles, of course, because holding an umbrella doesn’t evaporate all rain, but working with Giovanni and having him by her side, supporting her, always, is so fucking nice , such a breath of calm, fresh air, Rose feels like she’s flying, and almost can’t believe she made it so long before.
He tugs on her hand, just once, and she looks up. “No more thinking,” Gio says. “As your youthful, handsome teacher, I order you to take the night off and get drunk.”
“With my teacher? You’re going to jail.”
Rose wakes up tangled in a giant, soft blanket, still wearing all of her clothes from the night before, as well as her jacket, boots, hat, and a pair of mittens she’s never seen in her life. Her hearing aids are nowhere to be found, which is worrying, definitely a pressing concern, which she will definitely be getting to, but first, God, her head hurts so bad, and there’s fresh, morning sunlight streaming into the room, blinding her in it’s glory.
Which is…odd…because her bedroom window faces west.
Rose stumbles as she pushes herself upright half awake and still feeling around desperately for a pillow, her hearing aids, the end of the fucking mattress. She’s just managed to sit up and actually, properly open her eyes against the sunlight when she feels a fast, frantic tapping on her left shoulder. Rose turns and almost falls all over again when she finds Giovanni not six centimeters away.
“What are you doing?” she signs, frowning.
Gio just shakes his head, faster and faster, lips pressed into a tight line.
“What?” Rose signs again.
Finally, he seems to take a proper breath and looks her in the eyes. “We have a problem,” he says, and then signs it. “Problem. Big problem.” He frowns even deeper. “Big, small problem.”
“Are you high?” Rose speaks, this time, and aims as loud as she can. She can tell that whatever volume she’s landed on is…a bit much, at least judging by Giovanni’s pained wince.
“Shut up,” he signs. For the first time since waking up, she looks at him, really looks and it’s mildly alarming.
“You look terrible,” she signs. He rolls his eyes.
“Focus! Big, small problem!” For a moment, he hesitates then points at something over Rose’s shoulder. She turns, because of course she does, and—
“Is that your fucking lamp?”
The lamp in question is… huge, practically mountainous.
Rose turns back to Gio, who’s still and saucer-eyed. Slowly, he nods.
Well then.
Shit.
Chapter 2: "what promoter are you with?" as if i even need a fucking promoter to get into this club (no, like, literally, you don't deserve that)
Summary:
additional consulting required
Notes:
this chapter's a bit longer and being posted on the same day! hope you enjoy :D
title is once again from "best friend's ass"
(See the end of the chapter for more notes.)
Chapter Text
“—and then you pinch the little ball so that it rolls up on itself—” Giovanni half-signs, half-mimes as they trek up the uneven softness of his mattress.
“Sounds disgusting.”
“ Shut up, you’re disrespecting Italy— I-T-A—my house— ”
Rose interrupts him, laughing. I-T-A-L-Y, she spells, then shows Giovanni the BSL sign for it. Italy, a kind of squashed C-shape made with one hand and wiggled in a downward line at eye-level.
“Italy,” he repeats. “You’re disrespecting Italy and Italian food and my culture—”
“Yesterday, you made fun of me for eating beans on toast.”
Gio frowns, doubling down on his mock-serious expression. “Different. That’s gross. ”
“You’re describing little balls of dough!” Rose exclaims out loud. “All mushy.”
“Fuck you, it’s delicious Italian pasta.”
“I don’t think it’s delicious.”
“That’s it, I’m taking you out to dinner at a proper Italian restaurant. Good pasta.”
“Bad pasta. Wet bread.”
“You’re wet bread.”
“We’re the size of wet bread.”
Their good-natured argument falls to the side as they stop walking, almost having neared the pillows at the head of the mattress, the gravity of their situation finally starting to sink in through their exhaustion and hangovers. Rose and Giovanni are three inches tall, stranded, alone in Gio’s apartment on his bed with no idea how any of this could’ve happened.
Rose reaches out to tap him. “How big do you think one of the pastas would be to us right now?”
Gio shifts on one leg and glides his hands inwards and out, frowning. After some deliberation, he nods to Rose and holds out his hands. The space in between them is large enough to fit her head and it gives her the strangest feeling looking at him. Isolation, yet also safety.
“I don’t have my hearing aids,” she signs to him after a moment of staring at his hands.
Giovanni quirks an eyebrow. “I know, I’m signing with you.”
She shakes her head. “We’re tiny and I can’t hear at all and there’s nobody else. We’re alone.” I’m alone, she means. I’m alone except for you, and I don’t know what this will mean for our friendship, because what if I like you too much?
“We’ll call Luba.” Gio signs, determined. “We’ll fix this.”
In retrospect, this might, slightly, potentially be Giovanni’s fault. Then again—hypnotism is bullshit , a mockery of paranormal science. There’s no reason whatsoever that he should’ve assumed—
Rose pokes him, impatiently. They’re on his nightstand now, a white IKEA thing he bought back when he first moved to England, staring down at his (thankfully charging) cell phone. “Help me lift,” Rose signs. “We’ll use it as a bridge and then call next to your pillow.”
Giovanni looks back at the harrowing crevice between his bed and the nightstand, which the two of them had lept over in varying surges of terror (Gio) and adrenaline (Rose). She definitely has a point: his phone cord is long enough that they could keep it plugged in and charging while they drag it onto the mattress, and having a bridge to get back on there themselves is just practical. He nods and makes his way to the “top” of the phone.
Leaning down and digging his fingers into the case, though, he stumbles on something. In confusion, Giovanni looks down to see the curved edge of Rose’s right hearing aid, lying haphazard and comfortable next to his phone on his bedside table, like it belongs there. Not far from it is her left one, askew in much the same manner and he’s about to point it out to Rose when it occurs to him, on top of everything else, that he’d known which hearing aid he’d bumped into immediately , even upside down and unlabeled, just because the right one’s plastic is slightly more opaque, and the left one has a little scratch on the over-ear bit.
Oh god. He’d memorized her hearing aids.
Rose’s frustrated grunt pries Giovanni out of his thoughts and he crouches down, finally, to help her lift the cell phone.
She looks up at the movement and gives him a little half smile—she’s stressed, Giovanni can see, and all he wants is to take her mind off of things. So, he grins at her and mouths “One, two, three,” and then together they haul it up and start to stagger towards the edge of the nightstand.
Rose stops him just as he’s about to step back into the abyss between the table and his bed and he edges around to holding one of the longer sides so that they can push it across the gap together, screen down, and settle it into a own makeshift bridge.
“Good?” he asks her. It’s a little wobbly, and the end of the phone balanced on the mattress is at least an inch higher up than the nightstand, making an unpleasant slope. Rose only looks at it with determined eyes and nods. “You first.”
Giovanni looks at her, incredulous. “Me? If I die, who calls for help?”
“I still don’t understand why you think anyone we know can fix this.” Rose frowns. “Also, I can still operate FaceTime with my hearing aids off, I’m not incapable.”
She looks a little annoyed, actually, and definitely stressed, when Giovanni studies her. He feels immediately guilty for antagonizing her and shuffles closer to bump their shoulders together.
“I know, sorry. Was thinking of my passcode.”
Rose stares back at him a moment, and then smile quirks, amused. “Your passcode is my birthday.”
Giovanni can feel his cheeks colour. It hadn’t been her birthday for very long and, really, frequently changing his password was smart! He was being security-conscious! There was truly nothing whatsoever about this that could be construed as anything less than logical and platonic. Rather than brush it off or deny it, Gio nudges Rose again and motions to the phone. “ You said me first?”
For a moment, Rose’s smirk deepens, and he notices the red on her own cheeks, but she blinks out of it fast, nodding. “Yes, I’ll hold it steady for you to climb, then you pull me up.”
Giovanni regrets his smooth silver phonecase the second he sees Rose knelt in front of it, digging her fingers into the sides and biting her lip in concentration. Despite, or perhaps because of her bedraggled hair, day-old makeup, and dirty white XOXO hoodie, she looks lovely, devestatingly beautiful, like a medieval queen, a fantasy dreamt by Lord Byron, a—
“Hurry up, stupid,” Rose signs impatiently. “I’m hungry.”
Well then. Giovanni shuffles over to the base of his cell phone and leans over Rose to grip the edges, his crotch awkwardly close to the back of her head and legs hovering nervously at her sides. He can hear her shuffling around beneath him and there’s a terrifying moment where he can feel the phone slide just a tiny bit closer to him before grabs hold of the corner again. She seems to hesitate, then ever-so-lightly taps her head against the inside of his leg, nearly making him jump out of his skin.
Finally, though, he wrenches himself forward and over her—using every ab he’s ever had and possibly some additional future ones as well—and begins his terrifying, slippery crawl over the abyss towards his mattress. The moment his hand connects with soft fabric, he grabs and pulls, scrambling the rest of the way up until he’s collapsed on his back, staring up at the ceiling.
Once he’s caught his breath, Giovanni turns to look at Rose and sees her standing at the base of their bridge with crossed arms and raised eyebrows. “You’re not very brave,” she signs, giving him a teasing smile.
He rolls his eyes. “There’s a reason I do the lifting. Come here.”
With far less fear than Giovanni thinks appropriate for the situation, Rose plants her feet directly at the base of the phone and stretches out as far as she can towards him. Giovanni reaches down to grab her hands where they grasp at the air, noticing that she’s put her entire body weight into the phone, and meets her eyes to mouth one, two, three—
And then Rose jumps, pushing off at the same time he hauls her towards him.
It’s shockingly intimate, moreso than when he lifts her during rehearsals or on stage. There’s no music or cameras or people, just Rose and Giovanni in a ridiculous, terrifying situation, staring each other down as she trusts him with her body and he pulls her to safety.
Finally, she’s halfway up and starts digging her bare feet into the slick surface of the phonecase, pushing into him and grabbing until they’re free, yet still fully intertwined and lying still on the mattress.
Their legs are tangled together and Rose’s face is warm and sweaty where it’s curled into Giovanni’s neck. The weight of her on top of him is so satisfying, feels so right and good that he can hardly find it within himself to move at all, only wanting to hold her close and stay there forever. But then she moves, hand skittering down his side until she finds the mattress to push herself up and start to extract herself.
Like a gentleman, Giovanni waits until she’s fully off of him before getting up himself. They stand, looking at each other and the cell phone still leaning against his mattress. Even to him, the room is very, very quiet.
Rose taps his arm. “What now?”
“Giovanni? Non mi chiami mai la domenica, stai bene?”
Luba misses the first of their FaceTime requests, but picks up on the second and greets him in worried Italian. Evidently, she’s still in bed.
“Ciao, Luba, buongiourno. C’è— c’è un piccolo problema.”
Rose turns to him from out of frame and repeats one of the signs from before— Italy?
“How can you tell?” he asks her, fascinated.
Rose taps her own mouth before pointing to his. “It moves differently. I can’t understand you at all.”
“Are you with Rose?” Luba calls from the other side of the screen. They’ve propped his phone up on it’s side against a pillow and Giovanni sits cross-legged at the camera while Rose paces nearby. There’s an unreadable expression on Luba’s face when he looks back at her—amused, cautious, and something like genuine delight. He waves to get Rose’s attention before answering in spoken English and BSL. “Yes, Rose is here.”
Luba squints at the screen, bringing it closer to her face. “...In your bedroom? Rose, did he kidnap you?”
Rose flops down at Gio’s side while he speaks and signs back to Luba. “Her hearing aids are off, she can’t hear anything you say.”
“IT’S A TRAGEDY, LUBA, I’LL NEVER BE NORMAL AGAIN,” Rose yells, laughing when Luba startles and nearly drops the phone onto her face.
“One minute,” she signs to the camera, and then there’s a flurry of movement as Luba’s phone is propped up on her nightstand, leaving her sitting cross-legged on the bed with both hands free. “Now tell me, what’s wrong?”
Now that someone is actually there, ready to help, or at least talk to them, though, Giovanni’s mind feels completely blank. How on earth could they ever explain this? He looks at Rose, and finds her looking right back. Then, out of the corner of his eye, he notices Luba waving, and they turn.
“It’s okay, you don’t have to say it,” she signs. “It’s very normal to feel scared. This is a big step in your relationship.”
Giovanni feels himself frowning in confusion. Is he not understanding correctly? Is Luba signing the wrong thing?
“What?” he asks, and glances back to Rose, who seems just as baffled.
Luba continues. “I’ll be honest, I don’t know why your talking to *me* about this, and I’d really have preferred to sleep longer, but I can understand needing help to discuss your feelings for each other—”
At the same moment, both Rose and Giovanni jump up, frantically gesturing for Luba to stop . Out of the corner of his eye, Giovanni almost thinks he sees Rose sign “Not now,” but it’s far too quick and fluid for him to be certain, and he turns back to the screen where Luba is staring them down with narrowed eyes.
“Did you two not—” and then she uses a sign that Giovanni’s never seen before: two fists with the pinky and forefingers sticking out, faced towards each other, and moving slightly up and down so that the protruding fingers of the two hands bump into and jostle each other with every pass. Out the corner of his eye, he sees Rose’s face immediately bloom a beautiful, flustered red, and he quickly looks away. Luba continues, “Is that not what’s happening here?”
“No,” says Rose. “Nothing like that, just—”
“If it’s not that, why are you in his bed on a Sunday morning? And why—” Luba stops, frowning deeply, and leans far forward to squint at the screen, “Wait, where are you? Why does everything look so weird?”
“We’re tiny,” Rose signs in a frantic rush. “We stayed out late last night and then we woke this morning in Gio’s bed and we’re tiny.”
For a moment, Luba just stares at them in what he’s pretty sure is vague, existential horror. “Are you on ketamine?” she finally asks them, finger-spelling the name of the drug.
Rose stands up. “Look how tiny I am! We’re calling on the phone and it looks like a huge TV screen.”
“Come over here,” Gio pleads. “We need help.” In Italian, he adds, “Hai ancora una chiave?”
Luba nods onscreen. “The key is somewhere here, give me an hour.”
Notes:
https://www.signbsl.com/sign/italy
waterbottle_stickers on Chapter 1 Fri 19 Jul 2024 04:13PM UTC
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A_Hundred_Jewels on Chapter 1 Tue 23 Jul 2024 09:34AM UTC
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midnight0088 on Chapter 1 Sat 27 Jul 2024 09:14AM UTC
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A_Hundred_Jewels on Chapter 1 Sat 27 Jul 2024 08:42PM UTC
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waterbottle_stickers on Chapter 2 Fri 19 Jul 2024 04:16PM UTC
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A_Hundred_Jewels on Chapter 2 Tue 23 Jul 2024 09:33AM UTC
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