#also fair warning this is un betaed so all spelling and grammatical errors are all my fault apologies in advance

[kapplebougher]

We Can Stay Here

1.6k | Matteo/David | fluff fluff fluff 

Happy birthday, Allie (@evakuality) !!! I’m so so so very thankful to have you as such a wonderful and kind friend. I owe so much of the favorite parts of my fandom experience to you! I’m reaallly not sure what this is (???), it’s not very much, it’s probably got a billion grammar/spelling errors, and you honestly deserve wayy more, but I hope this little fic helps you feel warm and happy today, and helps you get through this week <3 

David is somehow the quietest and the loudest when he draws.

He’s quiet in that he doesn’t say a word. All Matteo can actually hear from where he’s lying on the other side of the bed are the muted strokes of a pen across the paper, the rustle of the page when David shifts his hand.

Matteo isn’t even looking at him, currently distracted by the game he’s playing on his phone. But he knows what he’d see if he looked up. He knows it by heart now.

He’d see David’s look of concentration: his set eyebrows and slow blinks and the smallest twist to the corner of his lips. The way his other hand fiddles with the corner of the page as he draws. The way he looks so focused on the world he is creating, like the pictures he drew spoke back to him. He is thinking so loudly that Matteo can all but hear his thoughts.

Matteo already knows what he’d see if he looked up. He looks up anyways.

David is curled up against Matteo’s pillows propped against the wall, his sketch journal propped up on one knee. His other leg stretches out across the bed, one socked foot meeting Matteo’s own socked foot halfway. He is enveloped in a sweater of Matteo’s, David’s own sweater currently drying over Matteo’s desk chair due to an encounter with rain on their way home.

Matteo closes out of his game, not bothering to finish the level. It’s Saturday night so the flat is quiet, his roommates all out and busy with their own various commitments. Technically Matteo has a commitment of his own - the boys were all going to a party tonight, something on the other side of town and at some fancy house. Jonas had messaged him the address earlier, encouraging him to come and promising a great night. If Matteo and David were planning on going, then they would probably have to leave soon.

Matteo uses his big toe to draw a line down the underside of David’s foot, then pokes him at the arch.

David’s lips curve into a smile before he looks up. “Hi.”

“Hi.” Matteo shifts onto his elbow to view David at an easier angle. “What are you drawing?”

David raises an eyebrow. “You can probably guess.”

Matteo holds his gaze as he thinks. He thinks back on the day they’d just spent together. The walk they’d taken that had veered way off course and through the woods, where they stumbled upon an abandoned car that they poked around in until the rain started up.

Matteo has a hunch of what David’s drawing, but he plays dumb anyway. “You’re drawing...me.”

David blinks, then huffs a laugh in surprise. “Wow,” he says. “You know me so well.”

Matteo grins back at him, giving David’s foot another poke. It’s still raining outside. He can hear the sound, steady and grounding, and he lets it wash over him. He moves his chin off his palm and lays his head down on his arm instead. Goes back to watching David draw. Tries to remember if they cleaned up the kitchen from the pasta they cooked earlier.

David adds a few more strokes to the drawing, and then he flips it over to let Matteo see.

Matteo shifts back onto his elbow and leans forward for a better look. His hunch was right: David’s drawing is of the abandoned car they found.

By now Matteo’s seen hundreds of David’s sketches, but he never fails to be blown away with David’s ability to remember the most distinct details. The chipped rearview mirror. The jagged stick coming out of one of the wheels. The flower growing atop the hood. The scratches on the side of the front door. The fading paint on the hood. It looks just like the car they had seen an hour ago, and yet it is different.

Because the drawing is so distinctly David. It’s in the strokes of the pen, heavy in many places but light in other places. It’s in the detail put into the tiny flower and the way the shading of the wheels makes it look like it’s blending into the darkness of the ground.

“It needs something,” David says, pulling Matteo out of his thoughts. He’s watching Matteo intently, but when Matteo looks to him, David looks back at the drawing. “I don’t know what, though.”

The extent of Matteo’s artistic expertise has only become what it is because of what David tells him, so the safest suggestion he can come up with is, “Make it a collage?”

David laughs, but is nice enough not to reject the unhelpful idea. “Maybe.”

Matteo pulls the drawing a little closer. The pen David used is one of Matteo’s, with jet black ink. Its lines are heavy and purposeful, and the entire drawing stands out starkly against the paper.

“Maybe…” Matteo finds himself saying, “color?”

David looks at him, and then back at the drawing. “Color,” he repeats, as if he were trying the word out.

“If you want,” Matteo adds, because to him the drawing is already perfect. But his words fall on deaf ears, because David is lost thought, staring at his own work. He looks and looks for a few long moments - Matteo wonders if David actually does hear the drawings speak to him - before he suddenly pulls away and leans over the edge of the bed. David drags his jacket from off the ground and digs in the pockets till he produces a small pale blue object. It’s the door handle from the abandoned car. It had broken off when they had been playing around with trying to open one of the car doors earlier, but Matteo hadn’t noticed David pocketing it the piece.

The handle is chipped and rusting on one side, but has still maintained a muted shade of the original pale blue paint that the car once was. David takes the sketch book back and retreats back to the other side of the bed, where he presses the unchipped side of the handle down onto the page.

Matteo puts his head back down and resumes watching David. Idly he remembers the party, but he doesn’t dare interrupt David when he’s concentrating like this.

The sounds of the car handle on the paper are rougher than that of the pen. It sounds like David is scratching at the page rather than drawing, but the strokes are rhythmic and steady. That, the thrumming of the rain falling outside, the pasta filling his stomach, his limbs tired from a day of walking, the rest of the flat quiet, and David’s foot warm against his, are all making his eyes heavy. He would be content to lie here forever.

He’s almost fallen asleep when he feels David shift. Matteo opens his eyes just in time to see David put the car handle down on the bedside table. The side that was once blue is now faded away to show the metal underneath.

“Done?” Matteo asks.

David gives him a questioning smile in return and flips the journal back around in answer.

The car is a shade of light blue now, the only source of color in the drawing. The color bleeds into the dark wheels and disappears, looks lighter at the top as if the sun were hitting it just right, like it looked when they first found the car.

Matteo reaches out to touch it. The page now feels smoother where there’s color.

Matteo can feel David’s eyes on him. But he doesn’t look back up until he’s taken in the entire drawing again. When he meets David’s eyes, he smiles.

“This is really cool,” Matteo says.

Cool feels like an understatement for the kinds of things David is able to create. There are probably a hundred thousand words out there, much better than cool, words that would be more worthy of the drawing (words David would probably be able to call to mind easily) but cool is enough to make David grin at him like Matteo had said all those words anyway.

David shuts the journal and places it on the bedside table beside the car handle piece, then pushes forward onto his knees and falls down onto his stomach to lie next to Matteo. He reaches out with a hand and runs it through Matteo’s hair, pushing it away from his forehead. Matteo’s eyes fall shut automatically. He is warm, David’s hand against his skin is warm, the sound of the rain outside is warm - a minute or so more and he’d be out.

“The boys are all going to a party tonight,” Matteo mumbles, more out of obligation than anything.

David hums. Keeps running his hand through Matteo’s hair. “Okay,” he says. “So are we going?”

Matteo thinks about it. Then he makes a sound halfway between a strangled groan and a grunt. He rolls further into David, who snorts but moves his arm down from Matteo’s hair to pull him in around his shoulders.

“That definitely sounded like a yes,” David says.

“It’s raining,” Matteo points out.

“It is raining,” David confirms. His fingers are drawing shapes into Matteo’s shoulders. David waits a beat, and then says, “You don’t have to go if you don’t want to.”

David waits. He was always good at that.

Matteo thinks about it. The rain keeps falling. David’s fingers keep drawing.

And Matteo doesn’t want to be anywhere else.

“I want to stay here,” Matteo says.

He opens his eyes and catches David’s lips curving into a smile. It’s enough to make him smile back.

“Okay,” David says into the space between their lips. “We’ll stay here.”

David leans in, and Matteo is happy to let his eyes fall shut again.