Repose

who: oli and jude
what: brotherly catch-ups and shock therapy
warnings: idk, sads?

The Jude who scraped himself out of bedsheets that morning and untwined himself from the uncomfortable bedfellows that were half the Dickensian canon was scrapegrace fashion and freshly clean from the shower that worked in short and intolerant bursts of hot water interspersed with cold. Somebody ought to doctor to it, but somebody did not reside under the roof of the house within the woods and Jude was poor electrician and imagined himself to be terrible plumber, if you please. Half-scalded and half frozen, he helped himself to tea, the hiss of the kettle on the stove something Pavlovian of a morning, summoning as it did the slumbering Oliver from above.

And did Jude rack himself with guilt this morning, in between wiping down sticky surfaces by rote and assembling bare essentials of a breakfast? Of course he did, plans constructed on the arbitrary and in conversation were not well-thought-through but something something shake it loose, and he'd heard Sam's complaint and looked for the echo in Oliver's own temperment. The art store had been soaring love affair, much tempestuousness and unalike antiques. Jude's own reached around antiques nicely, please and thank you, but the bar suited his own mood presently given irritability could be taken out on clean-up end of the night.

"Hello, sunshine," the moment he heard his brother's tread. "I've got a magical mystery tour planned, and I won't hear scrap of argument."

I don't remember this town being so lively last I was here.