Chapter Text
The sound of keys landing in the ceramic bowl jolts Jason up out of the tense, concentrated fugue he has settled into while re-playing Until Dawn in the living room.
“Shit!” he gasps, heart racing as he completely fumbles a pivotal quick-time event in-game that sees his fleeing character nearly meet a grisly, untimely end.
Exhaling a strong breath, he blinks his somewhat tired eyes and puts aside the controller while the game remains paused. (God knows his nerves are too shot, now, to successfully finish the chase scene.)
His heart is still slowing back to its usual rate when the unhurried clomping of Vaas’ thick-soled hiking boots draws closer after having briefly paused outside the entryway of the kitchen. With a grin, Jason tips his head back on the couch and watches as distracted-looking boyfriend strolls through the doorway that connects the kitchen to the living room.
The Rook native’s eyes dart over one of the pieces of mail in his hands before his eyebrows wrinkle, momentarily, in confusion. Straightening the scant pile of mail, Vaas’s eyes meet Jason’s as he comes to a stop at the back of the garishly brightly-coloured settee.
“Hello, Cariño,” he murmurs, lovingly, leaning down to press a brief, upside-down kiss to Jason’s upturned lips before moving to lean on the back of the couch to the younger man’s left. “Going by the evidence in the dishrack, I see you made a valiant effort to ‘whip something up’ when you got home, huh? I’m getting hints of… burnt milk… or cream? Maybe some notes of scorched pasta, too?”
With a put-upon sigh at the age-old ‘what did you burn today?’ routine, Jason turns an unimpressed stare to Vaas, who pays him back by promptly dropping three envelopes onto his lap with a shit-eating grin. In spite of himself, the younger of the two can scarcely mask the way his lips want to twitch up into a smile at his hyper-gregarious partner’s antics, eventually elaborating on the ill-fated meal as he regathers the haphazardly dropped envelopes.
“It was supposed to be mac and cheese. I, uh, kept the stove on high to cook everything faster, but… yeah. Total loss, so I just had some leftovers from dinner last night. Still a bunch left in the fridge if you want some, too.”
Looking pleasantly surprised that Jason had managed to remove nearly all evidence (save for the scent and the blackened cookware) of the burned meal without incident, Vaas makes an intrigued 'ah' as Jason addresses the newest issue at hand.
“And what the hell’s with the old mail? Thought I picked it up, like yesterday.”
Chuckling, Vaas leans forward and snatches two of the three pieces of post, tapping Jason in the chest with them, briefly.
“Yes, you did,” he replies. “But clearly, you didn’t look at it.”
Getting a bit irate, now, Jason takes a hold of both envelopes and feels Vaas push off the back of the couch to clomp back into the kitchen.
“Hey,” he calls, absently, while moving his controller to the coffee table. “Shoes! I just swept in there yesterday.”
A rubber sole squeaks on the linoleum floor.
“… oops. Keep forgetting we’re doing that, now.”
Footfalls retreat to the discrete mat behind the front door and return with the distinct mutedness of socked feet. Then, while the domestic white noise of the fridge door opening and closing washes over him, the American expat squints at the two pieces of mail, noticing nothing amiss.
One looks like a generic spam mailer. The other is from the slightly fancier hospital (the one closer to the resorts and tourist traps), likely containing a bill for his recent visit, when a panicking tandem skydiver had bruised his ribs while flailing around.
Jason frowns, feeling another tick of irritation cross his mind: what exactly is he supposed to be seeing, here? If this is just Vaas trolling him, again, he’s going to be incredibly pissed; his patience has dwindled after being ordered to take 2 weeks off from any strenuous aerial activity by the doctor at the hospital.
The microwave’s door slams shut, and then a series of beeps precedes its loud, gritty hum as his boyfriend reheats his dinner in the kitchen.
Meanwhile, the two letters still just look like every other letter he’s ever received.
His moodiness is increasing exponentially.
“I—… is this some really fucking weird prank? Because these look perfectly fine! I mean, I should probably check the invoice from the hospital, in case insurance didn’t pay for everything, after all. Fucking Hoyt’s bare minimum health insurance options...”
Muttering to himself about the company head’s shoddy ‘efforts’ at providing health coverage for his employees, Jason begins ripping open the hospital invoice along the envelope’s short side.
Absorbed as he is with his task, he doesn’t register Vaas’ arm reaching over his shoulder until his work is forcibly stopped.
“Jason. Mi amor,” Vaas says in a quiet, overly patient tone. “Por Dios: lea. You Brody’s were well off, but not enough to bribe your college for those two degrees.”
[(Por Dios: lea – For God’s sake: read.)]
Still not following, and a bit ticked at the one-liner about his secondary education, he shoots an exasperated look at his boyfriend before frustratedly looking back down.
“I am reading, you dick. Don’t think that backhanded compli-… oh.”
Chuckling, Vaas hands the envelope back over to Jason, who has finally caught up with the program, eyes riveted on the lower left corner of the plain piece of stationary.
“Oh,” he says, again, not entirely on purpose as the microwave goes off somewhere in the distance.
His fingers smooth over the rounded, paper borders to the little cellophane rectangle that shows his mailing info on the letterhead underneath. Printed in plain, black typeface, just above their bungalow’s address are the words ‘Jason Montenegro’.
There are several sarcastic, snippy comments he could make, but for some reason, none of them quite make it from his brain to his mouth. Instead, his attention is hyper-focused on the relatively minor clerical mistake spelled out on the off-white copy paper in his hands.
As he reads and rereads the two familiar groups of letters set in this novel configuration, something swoops in his stomach and he almost expects it to end up in a nauseous feeling like he hasn’t felt since his very first time skydiving, nearly a decade ago. Instead, it swiftly blossoms into an achingly warm, wistful feeling of delighted surprise that he wrestles to keep from manifesting as one of his ‘cute, dopey’ smiles, as Vaas refers to them.
Speaking of Vaas, Jason realizes that he completely lost the thread of whatever he’d been about to say, earlier, right in the middle of a sentence. Blinking rapidly for a millisecond, he straightens up and tries to recall just what the hell he’d been getting worked up about earlier.
'Earlier' being the somewhat hazy time before he’d been ambushed by the thought of (or, more accurately, the desire) of taking his partner’s last name in a legally binding way.
“How— uh…. how’d they mix up my name like that? Pretty sure I was admitted and not you, so did they just… maybe it’s because the house is in your name or something?”
The words are coming out of his mouth, distracted though he may sound, but his mind is spinning even faster, now.
Because of course he’s thought about marriage, even in a previous relationship: for a moment, before he’d switched minors and spent that summer getting all his piloting, skydiving, and instructing licenses, his mother had started dropping hints about him and Lisa, much to his trepidation.
He'd tried to imagine a future— any future with her, and... well, it hadn’t even been half a year after that when they’d broken up.
In any case, he has mused about marrying Vaas, specifically (and happily), but this whole hospital invoice… ‘incident’ is throwing the whole timeline of events he’d half-imagined completely out of whack; they were supposed to have an anniversary, have some stupid-hot sex (as usual), and then when his sometimes difficult-to-pin-down partner was suitably mellowed out, Jason would bring up how he’s been kind of fantasizing about them wearing matching rings one day soon.
Hell, he knows Vaas loves him and that he loves Vaas, but conveying that he’s pretty sure he’s actually ready, mentally and emotionally, for that next, highest level of commitment has seemed like an impossible thing to just jump into out of nowhere.
And whoops, Vaas has started talking while he’d been having a minor mental crisis, not even leaving the kitchen to do so— his voice occasionally muffled by a cabinet or the fridge door while he looks for utensils and seasoning and who-knows-what-else.
“…Jason, because you were higher than the planes you jump out of all week when you were admitted. By the time I got there— and you’re welcome for reminding you to switch your emergency contact to me instead of your older brother who lives 50 time-zones away, in a different fucking hemisphere— they weren’t letting anyone but immediate family back to see you.
“Shit, I was worried as fuck, of course, so I just said we’re married. Pretty sure I told them to hyphenate the name, though, so that’s disrespectful.”
At the phrase ‘…said we’re married’, the younger of the two, again, grapples with a host of varying thoughts, and ends up feeling bewildered, anxious, grateful, impressed, annoyed, and (again) wistful at the same time.
The annoyance is easiest to express.
“Wait, you did what? What if you’d been caught? Hell, what if this messes up me trying to pay down the rest of this balance because the name on my card doesn’t match the name on the account? I’m already clearly not from this island— what if this gets me deported or someth-”
“Jason! Mira, none of that is going to happen! It was just a hospital visit and you didn’t even stay overnight. I’ve been to that hospital— their administrative staff is sub-par at best, so no-one’s even gonna find out. Even the insurance side will fix itself, once they run your birth date and match it to your full name."
[(Mira – Look, )]
With a groan, Jason finally turns around fully in his seat, kneeling on the overstuffed couch cushion to face backwards toward his boyfriend, who is still leaning against the doorway to the kitchen, holding onto a still-steaming tupperware container of last night’s spinach and beef penne. In spite of the warm, delicious-smelling meal, though, he looks tense— almost cagey— especially when Jason dives right back into where he'd left off a minute earlier.
“Isn’t this insurance fraud? What the fuck, Vaas? I mean… this is my first time really having my own health insurance, but don’t we have to fix this, somehow, before it blows up in our faces? And won’t this do something to my credit score? I don’t really know what that is, but this can’t be good for it, right? Shit. Oh, man.”
At this point, any initial elation and intrigue have tumbled into the abyss and left behind their shadows: worry and confusion. (Later on, Jason will attribute much of the current rollercoaster of emotions giving him whiplash to having played a horror game that notoriously puts him on edge for a few hours afterward.)
Presently, however, he is exasperated enough that he sits back down on his heels and crosses his arms on the back of the couch before dropping his head onto them.
“Well,” Vaas serenely says with an affected air of calm, “There’s always actually changing your name, if you’re too much of a pussy to just call and tell them they made a simple clerical error with your name, hm?”
The clacking of a fork on the plastic container in the Rook native’s hands as he unhurriedly begins eating his long-awaited dinner prompts Jason to raise his face from his arms to level him with a miffed glare.
And look, he knows he’s overreacting, alright? But Vaas doesn’t have to just rub in being logical to antagonize him, like usual: he’s had too long of a week and a half with restricted activity thanks to his freshly-healed ribs to keep himself from getting pissy, right now.
“Fine, Montenegro— you got me: I don’t wanna have to call if I don’t have to. Remember how half those military guys at South’s World War II history attractions got their visas yanked because of some misprint on their applications? Yeah.”
Rolling his eyes, he huffs out a breath and runs a hand through his hair, quite likely leaving some to stand on end as he continues.
“What do you want me to do— go to the municipal building and pay the fee to file for a name change? That place is a nightmare for any non-citizens. Only way for me to ‘fix my name’, is if you actually marry me, asshole, so thanks for the advice.”
During Jason’s little rant, Vaas’ expression had gotten more and more stormy, before eventually morphing into a familiar mien of almost malicious faux-patience. (With how often he’s seen it made during their arguments, Jason’s pretty sure Vaas does it because he knows it annoys the living shit out him.)
And then the brewing tempest behind expressive, jade-green eyes clears up as suddenly as one of the ephemeral, passing rain systems the islands are known for.
Placing his bowl down on the countertop beneath the cabinet full of glassware that Jason’s head had banged into the very first time they kissed, Vaas simply cocks his head a little to one side, assessingly, and utters one, perplexing word.
“…okay.”
Taken aback, Jason’s comeback sort of dies on his tongue at the placid, deliberately light tone— a tone he's slow to recall as the one his boyfriend uses just before delivering the killing blow in a debate or disagreement. But how exactly is Vaas planning to come out on top in this instance?
“I— ‘okay’? ‘Okay’… what?” he asks, cautiously, utterly lost again.
The only answer he receives is the sound of Vaas’ bland protein powders’ containers being moved around in a cupboard next to the pantry. The older man doesn’t clarify what he’d meant or what he’s doing, instead pocketing something from some undoubtedly hard-to-reach spot that Jason would clearly have no reason to go digging in.
Jason’s brows are furrowed as he watches his lover then backtrack to his earlier position just behind the couch, kneel down, and then pull out a small, wooden box detailed with intricate carvings in the style of the Rakyat’s artwork.
Everything about this is majorly tripping his 'chaotic Vaas' sense, and he’s uneasy about whatever the hell is going on.
“I swear to God, Vaas, if you’re trying to get me to do ecstasy on a weeknight, again, I will—”
Vaas pops open the top lid of the box and reveals something far wilder than any drug the younger man could have possibly imagined. Immediately, the poleaxed Californian has to work hard to focus on anything other than the glinting silvery band nestled in green velvet, because there are words being spoken to him and hopeful, intense eyes meeting his.
“Jason Anthony Brody, eres el amor de mi vida. Quiero ser tuyo por siempre, si tu serás mio. Will you marry me, you absolutely beautiful moron?”
[(…eres el amor de mi vida. Quiero ser tuyo por siempre, si tu serás mio. - ….you are the love of my life. I want to be yours, forever, if you’ll be mine.)]
Absently, as his heart pounds and his vision continues to swim for a second for how blindsided he is, the middle Brody sibling quickly concludes that this is not a prank— not with a look that unintentionally vulnerable on his boyfriend’s face, anyway. Even in their most intimate, honest moments, it takes a lot for Vaas to really let himself be seen or to open himself up to potential hurt, especially considering his history with the Rakyat side of his family.
The eerie, ambient pause menu music for the video game behind him is inaudible due to the blood rushing in his ears, and all he can focus on, again, is the glint of the thin, silvery band in its tiny bed of soft, dark fabric.
In an abrupt snap, his higher faculties return to him, and without pausing to overthink or allow himself to fall back into his earlier spiral of thoughts, Jason fully re-engages.
His wide eyes search Vaas’ and he manages to gasp out a thready “I— what? Where did you… of fucking course I will, you asshole!”
And God, why are his eyes watering and why is his voice choked up?
The vulnerable hope and rare hint of apprehension behind Vaas’ still-intimidating stare completely vanish and he stands back up to properly slip the slim, platinum band onto his new fiancé's ring finger.
Oh, right— it’s the happiness, Jason figures, not even trying to hide what must be an earsplitting version of his usual dopey, love-induced smile.
“Fuck, Jason,” Vaas says, sporting a rare, unabashedly boyish grin while standing up to admire the ring on his partner’s hand. “Thank you. Could have gone wrong, what with it being a month before when I actually meant to propose, but… wow. Wow.”
Elated, and blushing like he hasn’t since he can remember, Jason laughs and returns Vaas’ earlier sentiment, cheeks subtly dried from any never-to-be-mentioned stray tears, eyes still glittering with effusive joy.
“Yeah, yeah. I love you too, you crazy person. Now c’mere— I’m a bit too tired to consummate anything, but I would like a few minutes on the couch with my boyf— with my fiancé.”
“What a coincidence,” his future spouse replies, slyly. “So would I, future Mr. Montenegro-Brody.”
Pocketing the empty box he’d built from scratch and carved over the last 2 or so months during his free time, Vaas pulls Jason in for a sweet, intensely heated kiss using his hands to frame a habitually stubbled jaw and cheeks for leverage.
Leaning out of the embrace for a quick second, he replies, belatedly with "That's Brody-Montenegro and you know it."
Then, with a mischievous smirk, Jason pulls a laughing Vaas over the back of the couch and half onto his lap with a grunt that’s quickly swallowed up by the pair of lips angling to steal all of his air again.
Holy fuck— he’s engaged. And fuck— he’s gonna have to help plan a wedding, but also, all of those things can wait until after they both make it off of the living room couch, probably.
(God Hoyt’s gonna be so pissed about all the new paperwork, he just knows it.)
*
(And yes, they do go to the courthouse to actually make good on Vaas' word. Thankfully, marriage-based name changes go through pretty quickly, too, not that anyone at the hospital ever actually caught on in the first place)