Work Text:
The first time it happened, no one thought much about it. His excuse was airtight, after all—everyone knew how overly emotional Michael got when it came to these things.
Geoff walked into the office that morning to find Michael, apparently inconsolable, already at his desk. There was a paused YouTube video up. Michael’s eyes were red and puffy and, as Geoff stood by in stunned silence, two more fat tears rolled down his freckled cheeks.
“Um…” Geoff began, quite articulately. A crying Millie, he could handle. But a crying Michael…? “Dude, are… uh, are you okay?”
“No.”
“… Oh. Um. Do you want… uh, d’you wanna talk about it?”
“No.”
“… You sure, man? Because you kinda look like sh—“
Michael suddenly whirled around to fully face Geoff, and the older man froze like a deer in headlights. The Army had trained him to deal with a great many things, but a manic gamer with well-documented anger issues wasn’t really one of them.
“It’s not like Twilight Sparkle fucking meant to do it, Geoff! She didn’t know the spell would fuck everything up, Christ! She just wanted to know what it did! But now all their… their fucking cutie marks are messed up and all those Ponyville assholes are pissed at them and it’s all just so fucking bad. And the fucking song, Geoff. They don’t understand why nothing is working for them and it’s all just… Fuck!” Michael whirled back around, punching his desk in frustration, and Geoff took a moment to piece together what had just been yelled at him. Ponyville? Twilight Sparkle? What was—oh.
Oh.
“You’re crying over My Little Pony.” Geoff’s voice was caught somewhere between incredulity and amusement, making Michael’s eyes narrow.
“Do you even understand how serious this shit is, Geoff?” the redhead asked, his voice dangerously calm. Before Geoff could even think of a reply, Michael was shouting again. “Fluttershy can’t plan parties, Geoffrey, she suffers from severe social anxiety!! She is fucking crying, you asshole, how can you see a crying Fluttershy and not lose your shit? Do you even have a heart?!”
Now, Geoff had a daughter and a wife. He knew when to wave the metaphorical white flag and admit defeat—and, being the smart man he was, that was exactly what he did. Raising his hands in the universal symbol of surrender, the older man slowly walked to his desk and sat down, trying to make himself as unassuming as possible. “No, no, I get it. That’s… that’s terrible, man. I hope everything works out all right for everybody?”
“Goddamn right you do.”
And that was that. It didn’t explain, exactly, why Michael kept sneaking glances over at Gavin for the rest of the day, his eyes just as sorrowful as they had been that morning, sure. It also didn’t explain why the “Mavin Feels” (as Ray so gleefully called them) were so pronounced during each of their recordings. But Geoff would be damned before he went through that trauma again.
The second time was harder to explain away, for all parties involved. It was Ray, this time, who was unfortunate enough to walk into the nearly-empty office only to find Michael’s eyes red-rimmed.
Unlike Geoff, Ray walked right over to the redhead’s desk, reaching it in just enough time to catch the barest glimpse of a window being minimized, leaving a PlayStation emulator up; the rom running looked like Final Fantasy VII.
As a matter of fact, it was—Sephiroth was still poised behind the prone body of Aerith, her body slumped forward, sprawled on the ground in the closest approximation to a tragic murder that technology had allowed at the time. Ray wasn’t going to lie, even he got a little choked up.
“Damn, man, this part is the worst. You alright?”
Michael sniffled. “Damn Sephiroth to the deepest, darkest pools of the Lifestream. I fucking hate this part.”
Ray nodded. He reached forward, and before Michael could stop him, had taken a step closer, leaning over the older man’s shoulder to click on the window he’d minimized, asking, “What were you reading?”
Faster than Ray ever thought Michael could move, the redhead slapped the ‘command’ and ‘w’ keys, effectively closing the browser. When Ray turned to give him a suspicious look, Michael’s eyes remained resolutely forward. “Walkthrough,” was the response he gave, his voice holding a note of challenge. The brunet gave him a long, hard look, but Michael just began playing again, muttering curses under his breath.
Finally Ray sighed and returned to his desk, deciding that the pain of trying to get Michael to ‘fess up wasn’t worth it. For a while after, the mystery continued to bother him, though—he’d seen that site somewhere, he knew it, but where…?
It clicked when he finished editing their most recent VS video and opened up his own browser to his new favorite website.
The brunet smirked and turned to Michael. “The Boy with the Wheat Colored Hair?” he asked. Michael choked on his Mountain Dew. That was all the confirmation the other man needed and he his smirk turned smug as he spun himself to face his screen again. “Yeah, that one got me, too.”
Gavin, who couldn’t stand being left out of the loop where Team Lads was concerned, piped up, “What are you two going on about, then?”
Michael’s eyes narrowed at Ray in record time, and with a placating gesture, the brunet put on his headphones and went back to reading.
“Nothing, you nosy asshole,” Michael snapped. Gavin pouted, rolling his chair over to the redhead.
“Mi-cool…”
A chorus of ‘Mi-coooool’s chorused through the room as Michael growled, “Fuck off, Gavin, I’m trying to do real work here.”
Gavin pouted but rolled his chair away, grumbling inaudibly.
This time, it wasn’t just Geoff that caught those sly, longing glances—however, there to add to the ex-soldier’s annoyance were Ray’s knowing smiles and really, he was just so fucking done with being out of the loop.
“Quit dicking around and get back to work. This shit isn’t going to edit itself,” Geoff grumped, scowling at the Lads. They all sensed their boss’s bad mood and quickly buckled down, working double time in order to finish even after the bad mood faded and several delightfully mystery-free days passed.
(There was one odd instance where Michael abruptly burst into motion, throwing half of his desk’s contents at Ray while the younger man just laughed and held up his arms in weak defense. Gavin investigated and managed to call out that the cause was an e-mail titled “Book Club” that just had a lot of links, but Michael bodily tackled Gavin to the other side of the room before the Brit could click on any.)
So time marched on and Michael’s occasional erratic behavior was written off as PMS (Pissy Michael Syndrome—Ryan came up with that one and seemed quite proud of it). Ray continued to send the redhead links to fanfiction, Geoff continued to wonder what the fuck those annoying, conspiratorial looks were about, and Gavin continued to remain delightfully oblivious to it all.
And if reading all these stories about the two of them happy, in love, fluffing it the fuck up, only perpetuated Michael’s little crush, turning it into something bigger and harder to ignore as he imagined himself in fictional-Michael’s shoes… Well, at least that was still a secret.
It was 7:30 am on a Saturday when Michael was roused by a text.
Gonna use your computer to speed up some rendering, mate. Hope you remembered to close your porn. Michael had to squint for a rather embarrassingly long time at the screen before he realized both who it was from and how the fuck Gavin was going to use the computer in his living room if his door was locked.
The office, right.
He sent back a reply that may or may not have been English and nodded back off.
About ten minutes later, he sat bolt upright, abruptly wide awake. He’d been the last to leave last night. Ray had sent him his first smut fic before he’d left—he’d been resolutely avoiding them, but the brunet had insisted. The evidence of what he’d done while reading was gone, but the fic was still pulled up on his monitor.
“Fuckfuckfuck,” Michael chanted as he threw himself out of bed and into real pants. He only lived five minutes from the office, but those five minutes were the longest of his life, and when he finally flung himself into the AH office, he was panting like he’d just run a marathon.
Gavin’s computer was rendering away but his own computer’s screen was dark, the monitor still asleep—hopefully as it had been since last night. The gamer quickly shook his mouse… and promptly felt his stomach drop as it opened straight to the fic, skipping his login screen.
“Shhhhit,” he hissed just as a throat cleared behind him. Michael froze, his whole body going rigid. Lie, his mind whispered. Tell him that Ray sent it as a stupid prank, that you opened it without knowing what it was. Lie, asshole. Michael turned around.
Gavin stood in the doorway with a cup of coffee in his hands, nervously shuffling as he stared at the floor. He was blushing.
Fuck.
“You read it.” It was a statement, not a question, and Michael swore aloud this time as the Brit nodded. His mind was setting off warning bells, telling him to just leave, get the fuck out, but his feet wouldn’t move. Instead, his stupid mouth decided to open, his dumbass brain rattling off excuses, “Look, I didn’t… it was… I mean, it’s not what it—“
“D’you read that stuff often?” Gavin interrupted, his embarrassed look slowly fading, turning into something a bit more contemplative as he walked to his desk and set his coffee down.
“I… what?” Michael’s brain scrambled, caught between denial and the mortifying truth.
“Like… those lists, that Ray keeps sending you. Are those all, er, that stuff? What’s it called—fanfiction?” Gavin leveled a surprisingly calm look at him, though his cheeks were still a rather alluring shade of pink.
Not the time, shit for brains. Focus.
That look was making Michael feel like he was caught up in the most fucked interrogation in history. The redhead’s face felt hot, his world spinning a bit as the rush of blood to his head made him dizzy. His mind was screaming at him to deny deny deny, goddamnit, but in his panic, the truth tumbled out instead. “Yes.”
If Gavin was surprised by his honesty, he didn’t show it. Instead, the blond just nodded and pushed his coffee off to the side, fiddling with the handle for a moment before stepping closer to the older man. Michael swallowed audibly and took a step back, stopping only when his thighs hit his desk.
Gavin paid Michael’s panicked look no mind. “And… and you’ve been reading this stuff for a while now?”
Goddamnit, it was so distracting when Gavin licked his lips like that.
“Yeah.” The Jersey gamer’s voice dropped a bit, got a little husky as the younger man moved closer still, close enough now that the smell Gavin’s cologne was making him a bit lightheaded.
The blond hummed and reached up to pluck at Michael’s diamond necklace. “Seems a bit unrealistic, if you ask me.”
Michael’s stomach dropped, the arousal that came with their proximity souring in his gut. Shit, he was reading into this all wrong, wasn’t he? Gavin wasn’t flirting, the asshole just had no sense of personal space—the fingers on his necklace were fidgeting, not pulling him closer, fuck—
Except that Gavin was pulling him closer, leaning in just enough to ghost his lips over Michael’s before he pulled away and said, “I mean, these desks have way too much expensive equipment on them to properly shag. We’d spend the whole time making sure nothing fell. And I can’t really say with any certainty that they’d support our combined weight, either, we’d probably end up in a pile on the floor with all of it sort of piled on top of us. But… well, we can’t go back to your place quite yet, these videos really do need to render and then get uploaded. However, I’ve been thinking, and there is a significantly sturdier table in the kitchen.”
Michael’s brain flat lined. All processes stopped as he struggled to comprehend what Gavin had just said. “I… w-wait, what?”
Gavin gave him a smug little grin (and whoa that did things), but carried on as if suggesting a quickie on the kitchen table was completely commonplace. “The couches could do, I suppose, if you’d rather that. I mean, they are closer. Seems a bit cramped, though, I rather like to spread out.”
“You… Whoa, hold on, wait just one goddamned minute. You’re actually down to fuck? Here? In the office? With me? What the hell, Gav, I didn’t even know you liked du—“
“Michael.” The tone of the Brit’s voice made the redhead pause. Gavin was leveling another uncharacteristic look at him, this one quite serious. “The way I see it, this can go one of two ways right now. First way is: you fuck me ragged over that table, we spend some time ironing out the finer details of all this while the damned videos load, and I return the favor of shagging you senseless later. Or we could—“
Michael didn’t even wait to hear option two. He grabbed Gavin’s hand and pulled him out of the cramped Achievement Hunter office, dragging the all-too-willing Brit towards the kitchen.
Gavin grinned, his free hand already finding its way to Michael’s ass. “That’s my boy.”