Onyx looks down at his legs as though considering them for the first time. It’s… it’s a good question. He spends a lot of time in his handful of favorite jeans. He mostly just sleeps in boxers. Having to travel around a lot meant that a large wardrobe was not feasible.

“I… guess I never really noticed,” he admitted, one brow quirking up in irritation because, of course, now that Andres had pointed it out, he wasn’t going to stop noticing. Like a sound that wouldn’t go away. Or being nose blind to a smell.

The robbers hold one of the characters at gunpoint while the main one hides. Through dialogue, you can hear the main character’s friend relenting to giving his valuables.

For all that the word dick coming out of Andres’ mouth threw him he did a really good job of not showing it, hiding it under another swig of beer while his brain conjured up images of him actually being pantsless with Andres--

He settle the bottle down a little harder than intended. Frowned at it, shifted it slightly in apology.

“I don’t… really do that,” he said, eyes flicking back up to the screen. “The… lounging at home part. I don’t own sweatpants. Just jeans.”

The main character was hiding behind a shelf as his friend was refusing to give up his wedding ring. You could hear the pleading in his voice and then the sound of a gunshot. There’s a slow-mo silence that follows with glass breaking, crying, and a montage of police.

“I did go through a leather pants phase, briefly,” Onyx said, which was both a joke and the truth. Maybe all this domesticity was connecting him back to his sense of humor.

andres buenaventura

☉

Perhaps Andres spent a lot of his time shifting and changing clothes. Outside, the school, his gym, dinner dates, lounging. He did laundry more often than most just because of his schedule and juggling the different dress codes for them. Maybe that's why he cared. Still, he doesn't stop extending the offer. "Well, like I said, you can borrow something of mine. If you want." he said again. [break][break]

Andres looked back to the movie, feeling sorry for the guys. But that's the safest option right? Especially with a gun involved. Whether or not it was loaded for sure. He sipped his juice pouch idly before looking back at his friend?? companion? "You're always out and about?" he asked, tilting his head at Onyx in mild surprise. He seemed like an introvert lately. Back as kids...well people change. But even Andres got tired of going out. He liked this kind of thing too. Regardless of homoerotic undertones. He made a note to buy Onyx sweatpants for Christmas. If they survived and civilization as they knew it didn't cease to exist. [break][break]

It's hard not to mourn the friend, and his commitment to his own wedding band. He didn't know what he would've done in that situation either. Though, chances were they would've been murdered regardless, ring or not. But even so the gunshot made him jump a little and frown. He'd been hoping they'd live a little longer. His response is delayed as the scene played out before he let out a sudden laugh, at the mental image of Onyx in leather pants. [break][break]

"No way-" he turned, eyes glinting with curiosity at the Rocket. "Wait- leather pants and the leather jacket?" he asked. "You go through a T-Bird phase?"

[break][break]

+ onyx straub [break][break]

[attr="class","pokeclass"]

He’s still looking down at his legs, but this time he’s trying to remember what sweatpants feel like. He had worn them, before, and pajama pants and basketball shorts and all those fun things that belonged in his old life.

Before he answered, he let his head tip to the side, trying to imagine what would hide the evidence better in the inevitability he popped a boner during the next few hours of his evening. Unfortunately, this route of decision-making brought his eyes back to Andres’ waist which, despite his overall size being larger than Onyx, was somehow still impossibly slim. What the fuck, man. What the fuck.

“I don’t really have… this,” he said, gesturing broadly at the space around. “I mostly bounce in and out of hotels. I travel a lot. Don’t stay in one place very often.”

The movie speeds through the funeral montage and fades to black. It opens again with the group of friends, sans the dead one, striking out into the wilderness. Beautiful drone shots of landscape show mountains, and a dark, foreboding forest. There’s a trail sign that relays something to the tune of EXPERIENCED HIKERS ONLY in Swedish, as one man helpfully points out.

Onyx can’t help but laugh at himself. “It was… certainly a phase,” he says, snorting, looking down the couch at Andres as a smile curls up over his face. “They are not practical. Hard to get into. Harder to clean. And they tend to squeak if your thighs rub together at all, which they should in a normal human being.” For the briefest of seconds his eyes drop to Andres’ thighs, then back up again.

“I’ll try a pair of sweatpants.”

On the TV, the men set up a campsite.

andres buenaventura

☉

"Oh...I guess if you're always traveling it's hard to stand still already." he said. He still didn't have a clue as to what Onyx went about. He's quiet for a bit as the movie goes through the weird emotional foundation between the protagonists before settling into maybe the real story. "You can always come lounge here then. Just text me." Andres offered with ease, plucking a piece of chocolate off his shirt and unwrapping the little kiss. [break][break]

The foreshadowing does it's job. It ups the tension, Andres can feel his anxiety spiking just a tad as they move through. He liked exercise, but he'd never been an outdoorsy kind of guy. Gym challenges were one thing. Outside of that? Cities were his preferred haunts. "You'd think they'd be easier to clean though...like fluids would just trail and slip off the leather." He nodded along, chewing thgouthfully as he watched the weird shots of the forest on tv. [break][break]

"You got it~" Andres replied slowly looking back at his companion before sitting up. He lets the candy fall off him onto the sofa and set down his juice pouch. He disappeared into Chuchi's room, where he found her nesting in her little dog bed under stolen blankets, preparing herself for the worst. The walls were thin after all. He snagged more than enough for Onyx. Fuzzy, fall themed socks, some slides, a large crewneck, oversized even for Andres, and most importantly: the sweats. He dumped it all on the Rocket, unceremoniously before scopping up the lost bits of candy he'd left in his wake and setting up again. He forgets to give Onyx the courtesy of using his room to change. [break][break]

His attention is on the TV again. "Cozy time. Cozy time." he chants, albeit childishly at Onyx before focusing on what he might've missed.

[break][break]

+ onyx straub [break][break]

[attr="class","pokeclass"]

Andres doesn’t seem to understand that Onyx doesn’t do… this. He doesn’t do chill. He doesn’t do relaxed. He comes off of one job and onto the next, maaaaybe takes a coke break in between. He doesn’t sit on the couch and watch TV and he doesn’t have days where he just… bums around in sweats.

Sure seems nice, though.

His eyes pan from the TV again and watch Andres unwrap the foil-lined chocolate.

“I don’t have your phone number,” he says, eyes narrowed in suspicion.

He’s walking a tightrope over a canyon. Part of him-- the part he thought he took out back and promptly put out of its rabid misery-- is deliriously hopeful that Andres has given him an open invite for social contact. It’s bunny hops and heart-skips. The other part of him suspects… well, he doesn’t know what, but he certainly suspects.

The men in the movie gather around a campfire and raise a toast to their dead friend, explaining how they’re out there to carry out his final, dying wish. They make a little shrine on a rock, light some candles, and pass around a flask, from which they all drink.

“In theory, sure. But they stain. They smell. And you can’t wash them like regular pants. Ruins the shine.” Onyx gives an incredulous snort as he’s here trading laundry secrets with his childhood nemesis. What a world.

Andres is up and gone in a beat and the men on the TV pass the flask to the friend who had been sitting in the liquor store-- the one who’d made them go in, in the first place-- and hid while his friend was murdered. He raises the flask skyward.

To Rob, he says, upending the flask and pouring out the remaining booze to the memory of his friend.

The poignant moment is interrupted by Andres dumping a metric fuck-ton of different patterns and fabrics onto him. He startles, folding forward with an oof, lulled into a false sense of security and pitched back to action by the sudden spike of his fight or flight. But it’s just Andres being a dingus, and he slowly starts to relax out of the arch he’s folded up in.

“This is… a lot,” he says, helpfully, after a few moments of holding the stuff in his arms. He nudges some to the side, looking curiously at what all had been dropped in his lap, letting his heart-rate regulate.

“Where’s the bathroom?”

andres buenaventura

☉

He settled in once more, eyes on the TV as he once again tried to catch up with the bits and details he was missing. He figured if it was important enough, Onyx would tell him. And it's just the starting 20 minutes, they should be fine. He could still hear some of the scenes as he'd moved around. "Give me your phone, I'll write it in." he said all too casually. He doesn't look back, head canted towards the screen. "I can actually clean up if you let me know before you show up." he added wit ha laugh, making it clear he didn't care when the guy came just that he told him. He liked seeing him after all. [break][break]

Andres made a face at the mention of leather pants, wondering how exactly the maintenance functioned. "Ewww...noted." he slides further into his end of the couch, feet extending forward the center as he watched the movie. He doesn't know how to feel about the coward, but then again he shouldn't be harsh. He was one himself after all. He can't help but feel though, that the guy that survived was going to die. [break][break]

"Yeah, well, it's comfy." Andres insisted, finally looking over at Onyx and giving him an easy grin. "Chuchi's room." he said, his grin growing a little wider at the misfortune of it all. "You can just change over there, I won't look." he added pointing with his chin. He turned his eyes back to the TV letting the little lie settle for a moment or two before piping up again, "Or check the door next to the front door. Not a closet." he added, snorting as he gave Onyx a little bit of a run around.

[break][break]

+ onyx straub [break][break]

[attr="class","pokeclass"]

Onyx’s heart does a stupid thing and he once more has to grab that feeling, wrestle it to the ground, and take it around back to put a bullet in it. But it’s getting harder and harder to do, each time.

He wrestles his phone from his pants pocket and tosses it down the couch to Andres, pushing up to stand and depositing the collection of comfy things on the couch in the process. As he stood, Andres… expanded, legs stretching down the length of the couch and Onyx had to turn and look away to avoid being reminded of just how big the guy was, now.

He was about to drop his pants in the middle of the living room and he really could not afford a boner now.

“Tch, yeah, like I can go in there. She hates me.”

Divesting the sweatpants from the Comfy Clothes Pile, he stepped around the back of the couch, figuring it was a lot of effort to actually go and hide when, for the moment, he had nothing to do so. It wasn’t like he was taking all of his clothes off, and, again, his brain could not go there at this precise moment.

The snaps on his jeans came free and they slid off his hips and to the floor, revealing a modest pair of black boxer-briefs, because boxers were too loose and briefs were too tight. He kept his eyes focused on the TV-- not on Andres, on the TV-- as he slipped into the sweatpants, letting them rest on his hipbones and having to catch them when they slid down a bit. He took his jacket off, too, and untucked his t-shirt.

Though the process couldn’t have taken more than 30 seconds-- and he’d manage to get through it with only baring his legs and the tiniest bit of happy trail, for a brief moment-- it still all felt entirely alien to him. It took every fibre in his body to continue with the motions and not stop to ruminate on how everything felt, as it had been so long since he’d felt… comfort.

Something dangerously close to an emotion spiked within him and he had to powerbomb it back through the floor.

As he sits down again, the men on the TV are breaking camp and heading out, as ominous storm clouds roll in, and thunder can be heard.

It’s so incredibly… domestic. Simplistic. And yet utterly foreign. And he can’t stop himself from touching his legs, touching the fabric, though he tries to do it sneakily. And then he realizes that he’s literally wearing Andres’ pants and quickly snatches part of the blanket to throw nonchalantly over his legs and lap, because he is a man of great resolve, but it can only last so long.

One of the men suffers an injury and goes down. The rest gather around him in concern.

andres buenaventura
local man feels things for the first time in 10 years.

☉

He reached over to grab the phone before he knocked it off the couch, finally tearing his eyes off the movie long enough to focus on something else. He's quick to make himself a new contact, inputting his number and name ( Andres 🐶 ), before turning to hand it over to his guest. "She's….sassy." he said with a laugh, eyes catching jsut a bit of his companion in the light of the TV. [break][break]

He doesn't mean to look, only meaning to tease. They were both guys after all. Nothing weird about changing in front of your boy. Nothing at all. Even with all this in mind, he immediately looked away, embarrassed. He had stared. A little. And while the tuft of a happy trail jump started his weak heart, a spider web of scars elicited more questions than he knew what to do with. But it's better not to ask, he thinks. That would invite Onyx to ask for his and he did not want to tell him the few he carried were Onyx's own doing. [break][break]

So he just rested the cellphone on the couch cushion and stared back at the TV. He tries not to look over too quickly, staring at the ominous change of scenery and the sudden precarious situation the men on the screen found themselves in. Timing it perfectly, Andres nudged Onyx's knee with his toe, now looking at him expectantly. "Well?" He asked, smiling as he propped his cheek on his palm. "Better right?" Maybe if he kept talking he would stop thinking about the scars, and the well defined- everything.


[break][break]

+ onyx straub [break][break]

[attr="class","pokeclass"]

He snatches up his phone without revealing too much of his lap from under the blanket, raising one eyebrow at the dog emoji and rolling his eyes at the same time. “Sassy is an understatement,” he says, referring once again to Chuchi, the demon living in the other room.

The men powwow around their injured friend, one of them throwing out a shortcut through the forest as a quicker way back to civilization. As though that could go wrong.

Andres times his toe-tap with the dramatic music on the screen but Onyx has been through scarier things than this on a normal afternoon. He doesn’t jump, merely diverts his eyes from the screen. He twists his knee, flexing the kneecap and giving an almost imperceptible bump back.

“It’s… yeah. It is better, for this.” This being sitting on a couch watching a movie, something he hadn’t done in a thousand years. And it’s easy how the admission comes without feeling argumentative, without having to be a knock-down drawn-out battle of wills, of stubbornness.

“Thanks.”

The men go into the forest.

andres buenaventura
local man feels things for the first time in 10 years.

☉

Andres snorts over his partner. Chuchi was far better at holding a grudge than he ever would. Or, maybe she'd jsut learned it from him somehow. But Andres didn't hold grudges. Not that he knew of. Chuchi just had a sense for things. [break][break]

As the men stray further and further from the trial he wondered if that was really worth a risk. After all, hadn't this all happened BECAUSE they'd started straying. Better to stay the course and just pep talk their poor friend through it. They'd probably encounter others at some point if they stayed the main course right? Then again, its a horror movie. Logic doesn't matter. [break][break]

"Told you. Jeans are not it." he said, debating whether or not to poke back. He's glad for the low light of his living room. The glow of the TV is hopefully not enough to reveal the small surge of pride at being thanks by the guy for once. How rare. He's on a streak for sure. Perhaps its this little bit of positive reinforcement, imagined as it may be that pushes him to offer more to someone he had been so afraid of before. Still a little afraid of now, if he was being honest. Acknowledged, he casually rested his feet on Onyx's thigh, stretching out his legs further and sinking deeper into the couch as he made his way to full cozy.

[break][break]

+ onyx straub [break][break]

[attr="class","pokeclass"]

Into the woods they go, they go, hoisting their injured companion between them. it’s dark and foreboding and Onyx, having seen the movie before, knows the first really creepy parts are coming up.

He considers warning Andres but then the man snuggles down further into the blankets and Onyx feels something jostle his thigh. He freezes, stops breathing. One hand lifts off his lap, hovers in the air.

The men argue about something. There’s a crescendo of music. The camera whirls and reveals a dismembered Sawsbuck, strung up in the trees, organs spread from branch to branch.

Onyx chooses that moment to set his hand firmly atop Andres’ shin.

andres buenaventura
local man feels things for the first time in 10 years.

☉

Onyx doesn't respond and Andres is more than comfortable to fall into the silence that followed. Using his guest's leg as a foot rest, Andres tugged a bit of the blanked to cover his chest and turned his attention to the movie. Whatever reaction or possible annoyance Onyx may have had, he doesn't notice too engrossed. [break][break]

He's glad they haven't just resorted to abandoning their friend, but this is a horror movie. He felt like that sort of decision would come up soon enough. He's intent now, as the move atmosphere changed. His eyebrows furrowed together in focus before the sight of the dismembered Sawsbuck strikes the TV. Andres can't help back the yelp as he felt Onyx's hand on his leg, his heels immediately go to hook in deeper into Onyx's inner thigh. He sat up slightly, hovering at an angle before trying to play it off. "Cramp- awfuck- cramp-" he blurted out, twitching on a side for a moment as he tried to relax against the side of the sofa. Something about looking up at the horrors just added to the experience.

[break][break]

+ onyx straub [break][break]

[attr="class","pokeclass"]

Onyx suffered for his hubris as the rounds of Andres’ ankles dig into his inner thigh, in a punchy sort of feeling that would almost feel like a massage if it wasn’t so sudden. He bends over, collapsing on that left hip joint, with a yelp that turns into a laugh.

“I guess I deserve that,” he said, snickering, unfurling and stretching long on Andres’ sofa, making up his mind to do that sort of thing at every possible moment.

The men on the TV-- forgotten for the moment-- discuss the weird, dismembered Sawsbuck and some strange symbols they’ve found carved into the trees.

“Cramp, huh?” he asks, totally unbelieving, finding the top of Andres’ leg again and guiding the limbs back down to his lap. “Which leg?”

Thunder peals on the darkened television screen. A horrible storm forces the hikers to seek shelter. They discover a seemingly abandoned cabin, break the locked door, and hide inside.

andres buenaventura
local man feels things for the first time in 10 years.

☉