#he'll be like hahaha men dont like it when im smart it hurts their ego

[sparrow-orion-writes]

🗣👀 for the ask game

🗣 having an argument

With: 👀 forced proximity

Ari and Edward from Neon Glow in Gold Dust!

I’m not going to lie, I am suffering with writer’s block bigger than the sea, so this is not all that good, but I tried my best.

Ari had snapped at him, nothing all that new, he’s a snappy person. But with the sweat forming on his forehead and the way his lungs are closing up, Edward had just had enough. Being trapped in a room will do that to a person.

“Would it kill you to be a little less of an ass? I run around all day making your life easier, I don’t think you even notice!” And, before Ari could cut a word in, he decides to throw in a “-you barely know half the things I do for you, it’s insane that April is nicer to me than you are!”

He almost feels a little bad, because really April is not all that awful as a person. Deranged, yes, but not a bad person.

“I do notice,” Ari replied, back stiff and jaw clenched in the low lighting of their personal hell. “Do you want a handwritten thank-you card with that?”

“Do you even know how smart you would be if you stopped doing...” Edward gestures wildly towards him “...this every five minutes?” He is, of course, loosely referring to Ari’s penchant for sinking in on himself and throwing a pity party instead of actually helping.

“Do you know how smart you would be if you didn’t keep trying to make yourself less intelligent for my benefit?”

He spoke so quietly, through gritted teeth, but the words landed their punch on it’s own. The realisation settles in, sinking his heart down to the pits of his stomach.

“You knew?”

“I had my suspicions.” Ari looks down at his hands, at anywhere but Edward’s face, which has fallen into heartache.

“How long?”

“Does it m-”

“How long, Ari?” His voice aches with it.

“About a year and a half, give or take, I had a feeling but April essentially confirmed it an-”

“And you didn’t tell me? You didn’t think to let me down, o-or anything, you just let me sit here and-”

“I wasn’t trying to, I just couldn’t understand how to approach-”

“In any way!” Edward’s voice reaches a pitch that is embarassingly high, almost cracking in his annoyance “...I could have moved on that long ago?”

Ari doesn’t respond, a flicker of confusion on his face.

It infuriated him for reasons that aren’t really Ari’s fault, Edward will admit, because it hurt in ways that only unrequited love can hurt. He took a step back a moment, feeling the physical force of the other man’s ignorance in the pits of his stomach. As if he hadn’t spent enough of his life feeling unlovable, this is just salt in the wound.

He decides, perhaps wrongly, that he wasn’t having the grief, so he catalyses it into anger and steps up to a man over a foot taller than him with every intention to throw a punch. Or even just shove him a little, but the moment he moves, Ari catches his wrist and holds it gently, easing it by his side.

“I don’t understand,” he mutters “...you can move on?”

Edward blinks up at him. He opens his mouth to speak but honestly the confession that Ari has only ever loved a single person knocks him speechless. All these years that Ari and Neptune had been seperated, Ari’d never even thought of letting go of the heartache. “Did you never try?” He asks, instead.

“No, of course not.”

Ari’s hand burns where it touches his skin. Edward closes his eyes and takes a shaky breath in. It’s so hot in this room, he feels the desperate need for his inhaler, which, stupidly, he’d manage to leave behind the one time he might actually need it.

“I was waiting for you to tell me yourself,” Ari admits “...I didn’t know how to approach it, or how I felt about it and...I still don’t, I thought if I ignore it long enough, he’ll just tell me himself.”

“Okay,” Edward mutters. 

“Okay?”

“Ari, I love you,” he says the words like they’re a burden on him, exhaling them out of his lungs for the first time. When he looks at Ari, he’s poorly concealing his surprise, but honestly Edward is too tired to pry any further into that. “...and now I’m probably going to die in here with you, which is very romantic and all, but not at all what I wanted.”

“You’re not going to die in here,” Ari sighs, reaching up to unbutton his sweat-soaked shirt; Edward tries not to stare, perhaps with very little avail “...two of the most intelligent men in Arcadia are trapped in a locked room, so how do we get out?”

Edward takes a deep breath in, before he nods. “Okay, okay, let me see what I’ve got in my bag.”