notsincere (notsincere) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2014-10-21 18:40:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, cinderella's prince, hans westergaard |
Who: Prince Hans and Prince Tom
When: After this conversation
Where: Tom’s place
What: Making Pancakes
Rating/Warnings: Low/None (some foul language)
Status: Complete
Tom wasn’t used to having feelings. He wasn’t Ted Bundy, or anything, but he didn’t have deep longings for people. The things he felt in his dreams were longings the likes of which he’d never known in his waking life. And the hardest part about that was that the girl that spurred these longings in his dreams was Cindy. He thought? Maybe he knew. She felt like the same person. Though, in the Real World they were really just friends. Really. She was probably the only woman in his life that he wasn’t trying to sleep with. She was a good friend. That was all.
So, having these weird, lingering feelings from the dreams was confusing. Not to mention he was a little disappointed that he was some prancing, singing prince in his dreams, and not something exciting like he’d hoped. There were superheros and werewolves and here he was… a prince with a flimsy sword and a song. Ugh.
Tom made pancakes. Lots of them. He was planning on stuffing himself with pancakes, over-loading with carbs, and then passing out in front of the television. But talking with Hans would be good. Tom was ready to talk.
For Hans, it sounded like Tom could use a shot of something strong with those pancakes. He brought some whiskey, and he’d make coffee - the good kind, the spiked kind. Maybe they both could use it. Though Hans couldn’t imagine that Tom’s dreams were that boring - something else was obviously going on, but he’d get to the bottom of things. Probably after some of that zingy coffee.
He made his way up to Tom’s front door and knocked, the bottle in his other hand. “Open up, it’s me,” he called helpfully. “I’ve got booze.” Hopefully his friend hadn’t eaten so many pancakes he went into a food coma without Hans.
The kitchen was next to the foyer, so it only took a moment for Tom to come over and pull open the door. He’d been flipping flapjacks. Seriously, one of his best recipes. Tom was practically an expert at cooking all the different breakfast foods. After all, he could impress a woman all night long, but leaving them with a full tummy in the morning was icing on the cake. Kept ‘em wanting more. Right?
“You’re officially my best friend,” Tom said, grinning at the sight of Hans with the whiskey. “Come on in. Make yourself at home.” He turned to lead the way into the kitchen. “Glasses are in here,” he added, motioning toward the cupboard with the drinkware in it.
“Officially, am I?” Hans offered up one of his patented smirks, but there was more behind it - because Tom probably was his best friend, and the opposite. Now they were both having whackadoo dreams, though Hans was sort of at an awkward point in his. Obviously he wasn’t going to actually kill Elsa, which meant the heroes had to still save the day and shove the evil prince off a cliff or whatever happened. Not looking forward to it, and he didn’t necessarily enjoy tormenting Elsa in those dreams either - not after he’d been friendly with her here, and she was one of the few who decided to give him a chance.
He found coffee mugs in the cupboard, pulling them down. And began brewing them both enough to drink, with Tom’s fancy kitchen equipment. Hans had a decent coffee maker too, an expensive one - it was one thing not to fuck around with, the caffeine production. “So, your dreams? Care to elaborate?”
"Officially," Tom repeated. His attention was back on the pancakes now, though. He didn't want to burn their 10pm breakfast-for-midnight-snack meal. There was a stack keeping warm in the oven, ready whenever Hans was for eating. And Tom only kept the real maple syrup. The good stuff. From a maple tree, not from corn.
"Yeah, uh..." Tom had just poured some batter into the pan, and was waiting for the little bubbles to pop around the edges. "I'm a prince. It's really quite boring." He sighed. Those stupid dreams. The stupid feelings that were so confusing.
Hans lifted his eyebrows, opening the bottle of whiskey. Maybe he’d just take a nip from it as a beginning to their boozy late-night pancake adventure. “You’re a prince too?” Not that he was surprised, but he just didn’t believe that was all there was to it. “Okay, so...what else?” he asked. “Are you plotting to overthrow someone else’s kingdom?” Because that would just be too much of a coincidence. Surely there was something else at play here.
Ah, coffee. It was bubbling and brewing, and it smelled strong. Nice and robust. He poured enough into each mug, adding a little brown sugar. And then of course the whiskey.
If only. Poor Tom had to leave Hans alone in the villain department. Well, for the most part. There was always the chance that he would turn into something unsettling later--he had it inside of him. The wandering eye, the lust for... well. He sighed and flipped the pancake over.
As Tom spoke, he prepared the next pancake. It was a lot of standing and watching, with a tiny splash of pouring and flipping mixed in. Easy. "Yes. My father's throwing a three day festival for the kingdom, and invited all the eligible women for a cattle call. He wants to marry me off. So far I've been through the first night, met the girl of my dreams, and then she took off and I chased after her into the woods near the village." See? Boring. Tom was very disappointed in his dreams.
Okay, this story sounded familiar. Not because of network and dream bullshit that had been discussed, like he vaguely remembered seeing it somewhere, but because it was a story every person heard at least once or twice or a hundred times in their youth, unless you were living under a rock. “Sounds like a Cinderella thing,” Hans remarked, stirring the contents of the mugs, spoon clinking against the ceramic. “Is that...oh, wow. Are you Prince Charming?”
How completely fitting for someone like Tom. Skirt-chasing, womanizing, love ‘em and leave ‘em Tom. The puzzle pieces were beginning to click into place, but Hans still didn’t understand why his friend seemed so upset about it. “...is it terrible? I mean, is the story changed drastically or something?”
"Yeah, it's pretty much the Cinderella story. Just, the ball is a festival, and it's three days instead of one." Tom said, then shrugged a shoulder. He'd made the connection before, but having Hans say it affirmed that which he'd suspected and dreaded. His expression turned dark and he glared down at the pancake he was making. "...yeah, I suppose that makes me Prince Charming." He sighed, shoving the plastic spatula under the pancake to flip it.
"No. It's not terrible. It's just... I was hoping for more. And I hate these... feelings." He shouldn't be feeling things for Cindy. And he was pretty sure that was Cindy in the dreams. Pretty sure. "...for someone I know."
Hans sipped his coffee, leaving the second mug for Tom for when the pancakes were on actual plates. They looked and smelled good; he felt like he was getting the star one night stand treatment! Except...no. Not even. “Well, they just started, give it some time to be more,” he pointed out. “For the story to unfold.”
As for the feelings, that really wasn’t Hans’s expertise either. He had only recently started to even acknowledge that he was capable of the whole spectrum. Rather than simply a blank slate. “Sometimes the dream feelings do cross over,” he admitted. “But...you kind of have to learn to separate them. It takes practice.”
The pancakes were transferred to actual plates just a moment later. The last one finished, the pan put straight into the sink to be washed later. This was one of Tom's favorite meals to feed to the one-night-stands, the friends-with-benefits. But he had to be careful, because they were so good he was in danger of turning a one-night-stand into a stalker--if only for the pancakes. There was plenty of butter and syrup, plenty of jam and Nutella. Anything Hans could want to dress his flapjacks was ready to go on the counter.
"Right. You're right." Maybe the story would get more complicated or become something different. Maybe he'd be more than just a pretty face and a crown. "How do you deal with seeing the people from your Dreams? It's just Anna, isn't it?" See? Tom paid attention. He remembered her name.
“And Elsa,” Hans said, taking the plate with the not-quite-midnight snack on it. After he added a bit of syrup, but not too much - he didn’t have a very big sweet tooth, not like Anna did. “She’s Anna’s sister and she’s here too. I thought it would be more awkward than it was, but she was willing to give me a chance straight out of the gate.” Which was surprising. He’d have expected the Queen to come after his head, but she seemed happy here. Content, what with her engagement and all. Probably wanting to live her life in the present and not focus so much on the past.
Of course, and Tom already knew how he dealt with seeing Anna. But really, you couldn’t go by them. He’d actually not recommend doing that. “Everyone’s different,” he continued. “But I think ultimately you just can’t get hung up on it. Not when we’re here now, in...whatever this is. A second chance.”
Tom nodded. He had a lot of things to think about, apparently, and he wasn't great at thinking. He was good at cooking. And drinking. He took his pancakes and coffee to the table and sat. "I think I want to pretend they don't exist." It would be so much easier that way.
Hans followed suit, settling down with excessive carbs on a plate. “That might work,” he chuckled, not wanting to dash Tom’s hopes right away. “At least for a little while. But eventually you’ll have to face them.” Unless Prince Charming was secretly eating the babies in the whole kingdom too, Hans couldn’t imagine that it’d be all that traumatizing - complicated, probably, what with feelings that were sticky to navigate through but he wouldn’t have to worry about carrying the burdens that some did. And Hans wouldn’t have wanted that for a friend of his anyway; it was a hell of a lot to live with.
“I bet you weren’t expecting the dream feelings to carry over too,” he said, sipping on his coffee. No wonder Tom was all discombobulated.
“Eventually.” Tom said, then stuffed a forkful of pancakes into his mouth. He chewed, almost grumpily. He wasn’t planning on facing these Dreams anytime soon. Suppress. That was his plan. And he wasn’t going to admit to Cindy any time soon that he thought she might be the girl from his Dreams. Talk about an awkward conversation.
“No. Definitely not.” Tom reached for his coffee and gulped again. “...Do they carry over for you, too?”
It wouldn’t work, Hans knew that, but he wasn’t going to try to tell Tom what to do. The warnings had already been given and he’d see soon enough, what happened when you tried to ignore such a big damn thorn in your side. “Depends...” Hans thought about it some more. “Some things do, others don’t. At the core of it, I suppose I’m the same person. But the circumstances are different.”
He hadn’t loved Anna in the dreams, but now it was the opposite. Maybe things could have gone one way before, and they hadn’t. It was just considered a ‘do over’ in their time these days, or at least he was going to think of it as such. And take advantage of it.
“You’ll be fine,” he added, wanting to be reassuring. Because he knew how much he hated it when he began to dream. “Best thing you can do is have people to bitch at about it, I’ve found.”
“Well, then.” Tom lifted his coffee cup and clinked it against Hans’. “Cheers to bitching about the Dreams.” He was thankful to have Hans around. Hans had a level head on his shoulders, and Tom needed a reminder of reality. Hans was good for that. Hans was a good friend. Damn. Hans was Tom’s best friend now, wasn’t he? Funny how these things sneak up on a person.