Work Text:
It’s a hot summer day shortly after finals. Jim, Scotty, Hikaru, and Pavel have decided to spend the balmy Saturday afternoon being blessedly inactive. They’ve slept in, they’ve barely moved from being sprawled out in front of a Twilight Zone marathon, and they’re currently in the process of plowing through several containers of Thai take-out, when it happens.
The fire alarm goes off and they all jump, Jim more than the others. “Shit,” he curses, making sure to grab his phone from the table as he makes to go to the door.
Pavel tugs at his ankle from his spot on the floor. “Jim, relax,” he says calmly, looking only slightly flustered. “You have not checked your email?”
Jim looks at him quizzically.
“It is a test,” Pavel says, taking his puzzled look for a ‘no’.
Hikaru nods in affirmation, checking the clock on the wall. “3pm Saturday. Pike sent out the email saying they’re gonna be testing the alarms in all of the apartments today.”
“Oh,” Jim answers simply, slouching back down into the couch. Scotty has already resumed the exact same pose. The alarm blares on and Jim lets it drift to annoying background noise as he continues in his lazing about.
But, it keeps going. In fact, it goes on and on…and on. Nearly half an hour passes and their relaxing afternoon is starting to become the complete opposite. Jim picks up his phone and shoots Gaila, who lives a few doors down, a text asking if hers is still going. It’s not. In fact, she says, the test was only supposed to last five minutes at most.
The four of them are engineering students. If they wouldn’t lose their safety deposit by hacking into the wall to shut the damn thing off themselves, they’d have it fixed in no time, Jim is sure. However, even if he could, the thought of actually doing work at the moment makes his summer hazed brain hurt. So, to save them a few inevitably singed fingers and a whole mess of trouble, he calls their landlord, Chris Pike. Chris is polite enough and tells him that the overall monitoring system does, indeed, show that their alarm is malfunctioning. He’s got someone on the way as they speak.
Jim relays the information and receives a few grunts in return. He reaches forward and snatches the last bit of pad se ew, polishing it off just as the doorbell rings. It’s a faint buzz over the beeping of the alarm. “Who’s gonna get it?” Scotty mumbles.
Four pointer fingers fly to four noses. Jim’s gets there last. He huffs as Pavel shrugs, “You are closest anyway.”
Jim flips him off and stumbles over to the door.
He instantly regrets a whole list full of things.
He regrets not brushing his hair or teeth this morning. He regrets the fact that he hasn’t changed out of his PJ’s, PJ’s that consist of an old lacrosse camp T-shirt that’s currently sporting two coffee stains and a bit of noodle, and a pair of X-Men boxers. He regrets the fact that the first thing he says is a disbelieving: 'My dear god.'
But he can’t really be at fault, because beyond their apartment door is god’s gift to Jim…god’s gift to all of mankind.
He’s a bit taller than Jim, brunette, just the right side of scruffy, deep hazel eyes, and he’s got shoulders that (Jim’s fairly certain) are built for Jim to put his legs over. And in the few seconds it takes Jim to register that the man has spoken, Jim’s already imagined everything from rough sex right there against the door, to marriage.
“What?” he says bluntly.
The man looks at him like he’s got blue skin. “I said, I’m here to fix your alarm?”
“OH!” Jim says too loud. “Yeah? Yeah, sure you are. Uh, it’s here, through here. The panel’s in the kitchen.”
“Thanks, I’m Leonard by the way,” the man says. He’s got a smoke and whiskey voice. Jim’s fucking gone.
He turns in a daze to his three roommates who are looking at him with expressions that are part ‘holy shit, Jim we absolutely agree with you, that man is an Adonis’ and, ‘oh yeah, we are going to tease you RELENTLESSLY for this’.
“If you don’t get his number, I’m personally going to give you a wedgie every time you pine over him bemoaning the fact that you didn’t,” Hikaru whispers frankly.
Jim’s about to argue, but Scotty gets up and shoves him roughly towards the kitchen. Jim manages to grab a pair of his gym shorts from his bag near the couch, stumbling into them before brushing his shirt off and running a hand quickly through his hair. He clears his throat and rounds the kitchen door, eyes falling immediately on the man tapping away at his little electronic meter.
“So, been fixing alarms long?” he asks, leaning against the door frame and immediately thinking of at least 100 other things that would have sounded much better. Behind him, he hears skin smack skin (most likely a palm to a forehead) and a disbelieving curse in Russian.
“Uh,” Leonard says. He turns and definitely gives Jim an appraising look. Jim’s torn between puffing up with pride and falling over. “About a year or so, helping me pay my way through med school.”
Sweet merciful heavens. Jim’s suddenly very glad that he didn’t meet this guy in the hospital. Noodles on his shirt is one thing, but there’d be no hiding a spike on a heart rate monitor.
“Studying to be an old saw bones then?” Jim swears he’s smoother than this, but instead he just plows on. “I gotta say though, your kit doesn’t really inspire confidence.” He points at the tool box the man has with him, there’s a skull and cross bones sticker on it.
Leonard follows the direction of Jim’s finger. “Oh, yeah,” his face grows red and Jim, impossibly, grows more smitten. “Long story, inside joke kinda thing.”
Jim nods a bit as the alarm finally stops blaring. The silence is almost deafening, in the living room a cheer goes up. The rest of his roommates file in to the doorway offering up various incarnations of thanks.
“Not a problem,” Leonard says, shutting up his stickered case. Just as he’s about to reach for his pocket, which Jim hopes to god contains a business card with his personal number on it, he stops. “Oh, while I’m here, I can check the date on your fire extinguisher. Make sure that’s alright too.”
“Thanks!” Pavel says brightly.
But Jim goes cold. He can almost feel the blood run from his face as his eyes widen. “Oh no,” he whispers.
Hikaru gives him a look but Jim just laughs nervously, “It's funny that you mentioned inside jokes, because you see we have this game where we—“
“You didn’t!” Scotty hisses. Hikaru and Pavel’s eyes fly open as well.
Within seconds, the fire extinguisher is off the wall and Leonard’s making a confused face as he feels around the back of the canister. Then (Jim’s powerless to stop him) he peels away a cartoonish looking laminated dick, complete with drawn on veins and pubic hair…
The product of a drunken night, Pavel had drawn the dick for some reason or another, Scotty pushing him to make it more and more vulgar. Jim’s never heard the phrase ‘The pubes need to be more wiry,’ before or since. One thing lead to another, and they ended up making a game of hiding it around the house for others to find. It started off as a joke, but now they have a point system, officially written on the apartment white board. Loser at the end of the month buys the beer and food for their next pizza and movie night.
It never strikes Jim that it’s a really fucking weird thing to do, until this exact moment. This exact moment where he’s looking at the most handsome man he’s ever seen holding a vividly pink laminated dick in his hands. He looks blankly at them.
They stare blankly back.
“You’ve uh…you’ve got a dick on your fire extinguisher,” Leonard says as simply as someone pointing out the weather.
Scotty goes beet red, the veins in his neck bulging as he tries not to laugh, he looks like he might actually explode. Hikaru’s face is doing a wickedly fast dance through emotions like he’s not sure whether to laugh or sink through the floor. And poor Pavel is looking at Jim with the sort of pity you give a puppy who’s trying incredibly hard to jump onto the sofa but, no matter what, he just can’t make it.
“Yeah there is!” Jim says, again, too loudly. “It’s a game, you see, we uh, we hide th-the the uh, dick and then when you find it you uh…you win! And you found it! You win! You get a point!” Jim’s practically hysterical at this point. Scotty has jumped straight past laughter and is leaning against the wall, chest heaving quietly. Jim’s not sure if he’s laughing or crying.
But Jim isn’t anything, if not a trooper. So he walks over to the white board, picks up a blue marker and in a fit of hysteria induced memory loss, he writes ‘BONES – I’ beneath Scotty’s name.
“Now, it’s your turn to hide it,” Jim says turning back to Leonard and seriously beginning to wonder when his life became such a nightmare.
A few feet away. Leonard calmly replaces the extinguisher, signs his initials on the chart near the can, pulls out a business card and scribbles on it…all in complete, nearly eerie, silence. It seems like an eternity, but is probably only 30 seconds.
“I think I’ll pass,” Leonard says stiffly, sticking the business card to the tape on the back of the paper phallus. “I also think you might need an anatomy lesson,” he mumbles giving the dick another look before handing it to Jim. “The veins are nice though,” he says, eyes clearly sparkling with suppressed laughter.
Jim wants the floor to open and throw him into the pits of hell where he belongs. Either that or he wants to kiss Leonard. Everything is incredibly confusing.
“Thanks,” he mumbles back.
Leonard exhales one breath that sounds dangerously close to a laugh, before saying: “You guys have a nice day now,” and showing himself out.
As soon as the door clicks shut. Hikaru manages to strangle out, “He just complimented your veiny dick.”
“PAVEL DREW IT!” Jim indignantly shrieks before they’re all overcome with helpless laughter, the kind which finds them all laying down on the floor practically sobbing with the force of it. It goes on for ages. Eventually, when they’ve all reached the point of that sort of drunken feeling that comes from coming down off a good laugh, Jim throws his arm over his eyes and groans around the residual giggles.
“I cannot believe that just happened.”
Scotty, from somewhere near Jim’s knee, heaves out a long sigh. “I don’t think anything will ever be as funny as that. Holy hell, Jim…”
Wiggling his leg, Jim nudges some part of Scotty. “I’m so glad my misery amuses you.”
“Always,” Scotty says, voice filled with a grin that Jim can’t see but knows is there.
“When you make me best man at your wedding, I am telling this story,” Hikaru says and Pavel starts giggling all over again.
“Jumping the gun a little bit there,” Jim mumbles. But he’s warmed by the feeling, he’s not gonna lie.
“Pffft,” Hikaru says, sounding vaguely like he’s deflating. “With a story like this, it’s basically fate. Rom-com writers dream of stuff like this.”
“Of Paper Dicks and Romance,” Pavel whispers dramatically around a snort of laughter, and just like that they’re all off again.
Jim eventually has the presence of mind to look at the card stuck to the dick that’s still in his hand. The back of the card is facing outwards and scribbled on it in messy handwriting, perfect for that of a future doctor, is written: ‘My cell’ followed by ten digits.
Jim pockets it, his heart beating out a rhythm that’s not even close to normal. He doesn’t immediately decide to share that the company’s logo and info weren’t the only things he got. The teasing he’ll get from that alone deserves to wait.
--
Later that evening, Jim’s lying in bed staring at the new contact he created in his phone and debating on what he should say…or type. Because he is definitely not letting this opportunity go to waste.
Eventually he settles on: so i feel compelled to apologize profusely for today
He chews on his lip and agonizes for the six minutes it takes to receive a response.
Bones: Is this the grandma whose dog chewed on my shoe, or the guy with the paper dick?
Jim actually laughs out loud at his phone. Of course the walking dream has a sense of humor, Jim never stood a chance.
1. if i was the grandma i’d be shocked at such language. and do you often give your number to little old ladies? 2. sorry about ur shoe. Jim stops for a moment, contemplating just how far he should go with this. But decides, to hell with it, he’s in this deep already and adds: 3. my dick is anything but paper
He forces himself not to add a winking face.
This time the response comes rather quickly.
Bones:Only the really cute old ladies. And it was hard for me to tell, all I got a view of was Wolverine’s 100% cotton face.
Jim laughs again. i totally had the decency to throw on gym shorts. are you always this witty?
Bones: Only to guys with paper dicks.
I’m flattered.
They go back and forth for a while, and Jim’s honestly enjoying himself, when he’s not overwhelmed with the fact that, holy shit, this is actually happening. Eventually, he’s gotten enough of a feel for where this is heading that he feels bold enough to ask:
as a dr, would you feel qualified to give me that anatomy lesson you suggested? just for the purpose of drawing better dicks for our competition of course
There’s a pause in the response time again and Jim’s heart is in his throat until his phone buzzes.
Bones: Just for that, huh?
well i wouldn’t say no to other reasons too
Bones: I wouldn’t exactly mind myself.
Jim couldn’t stop his loud ‘whoop!’ of triumph if he tried.
In another 10 minutes, Jim has solidified a date for himself Friday night…and he’s damn glad he hid that dick on the fire extinguisher.