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rosileeduckie · 4 years

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You Raise Me Up

Alternatively: Come On Get Higher

Simon’s tall, but he can still appreciate being picked up. Next up for Tickletober, Day 6: kiss!

SFW. Potential warnings: underage drinking. Love, Simon tickle fic.

Word count: 2,094

~*~

The trampoline in Leah’s backyard got significantly more wobbly after a few rounds of passing a celebratory bottle of start-of-summer wine around. As the evening stretched into night and the bottle of spirits grew lighter, so did the spirits of the gaggle of giggling friends grow lighter, their laughter louder and their truths and dares barely understandable.

One of the few dares that had been clearly relayed in the past ten minutes had been an unspoken group dare to see who, if anyone, could do a backflip on the trampoline. The group had already been sitting around the edge of the trampoline and slumping more heavily against the netting as time passed, leaving the middle and bounciest space open for those brave or tipsy enough to face the dare. Nick stood up first, having hilarious trouble doing so for semi-squiffy clumsiness and for the fact that the trampoline center naturally stretched with age and elasticity. His backflip had been more of a belly flop, but it had been a valiant first attempt. It also reinforced the fact that the trampoline had definitely gotten smaller over the years, Simon and Leah could attest, because backflip contests from just two years earlier would have come with a much lower chance of being kicked in the face. Abby rose next, clutching her stomach with a beaming grin when her backflip ended with her flopped on her back. She scooted to reclaim her place beside Nick when Leah passed her turn. That meant it was Bram’s turn. Being the most sober of the group—how he had ended up in that position, no one could say—and one of the two athletes of the friend group, Bram’s backflip managed a debatably full rotation, even if the landing ended on his knees. When the applause petered out, only Simon was left to attempt the dare. There was…an attempt. Well, he stood up. He bent his knees. And then he fell onto his back, mere inches of scooting and once more with his head in Bram’s lap. Nick teased him, but Leah voiced her sarcastic disappointment for not getting to test out her reflexes when Simon’s long legs would have inevitable albeit accidentally come straight for her head. Simon nudged her leg with his heel to make up for it.

Simon zoned out for the next round because, with his head being in easy reach of Bram’s hands, his hair was getting played with, so he was all but asleep. He jerked out of his grinning doze when Leah returned a kick to his calf. “Ow, what?” he said, lifting his head to meet her smirk.

“Your turn to answer the Truth.” Knowing him well enough to know the blank look he replied with indicated he’d definitely zoned out, she said, “What’s something you miss from being a kid?”

Simon blinked thoughtfully. An oddly sentimental question for so late in the night, probably from Nick, who was a notorious nostalgic drunk. He lamented briefly that he’d missed everyone else’s answers, but he brushed the feeling away to focus on his own so the game could continue. “I miss being carried,” he hummed at last, eyes on the stars far above them. “Like, when I was little, my parents or my older sider would just pick me up and carry me around, you know? You get tossed around, you get hauled from place to place like a sack of potatoes, but it was comforting somehow? I don’t know; I always felt safe when someone carried me.” He gave Nick and Leah a fond light kick to either of their legs. “And even when the three of us were little, and we could all still give each other piggyback rides. I miss that. When puberty made me the tall friend, people sort of stopped assuming I’d want piggyback rides or anything like that.” Realizing he’d been rambling, Simon felt his cheeks go pink. He grabbed Bram’s hand from where it had settled in his hair and covered his face with it. “I don’t know.”

“Aw,” Abby grinned.

“You asked, and I’m drinking,” Simon mumbled, peeking out from beneath Bram’s hand only long enough to stick out his tongue indiscriminately. “You’re not allowed to judge me on this.”

Bram lifted his hand from Simon’s face, revealing the taller boy’s pout. “That’s so cute, Si.”

“You’re so cute,” he retorted, features softening back to a smile when Bram’s fingers returned to their fond carding through his hair.

“Do you want a piggyback ride now, Si?”

Simon’s cheeks easily went pink without help on a regular basis—a fact which he regularly insisted was unfair, especially with how often his boyfriend loved to tease him about it—so, after a few swigs of alcohol in combination with Nick’s question, Simon’s face was practically glowing scarlet. “I’m alright. Thank you for asking though,” he said, trying not to look too overtly like he was hiding his face in Bram’s thigh.

“Come on,” said Abby. “You just went off about it; you should get a piggyback ride.”

“What he should do is take his turn,” Leah yawned. She sat up, pointing a finger at him. “And, I swear to God, if you use your dare to get Bram to kiss you again, you’re uninvited from the trampoline for the night.”

“Aw, really?” Simon said with another more theatric pout in her direction.

Bram snickered. “Believe it or not, you don’t even have to dare me. I’m happy to just kiss you whenever.”

Simon turned to look back at Bram, his face, as ever, beaming and in love as he matched his smile. “Aw, really?”

“Okay, I’m stealing it,” Abby said, grabbing the bottle from the boy beside her. “Nick, I dare you to give Simon a piggyback ride.”

Nick was up in a flash, making the just-settled trampoline floor to jostle and make his friends tip in their seats and laugh as he vaulted over Simon’s legs to reach the netting door. “Let’s go, let’s go!” he grinned.

“Really?” Simon said, smiling incredulously as Bram pushed him up from his lap and Leah hopped over to pull on his arms to get him on his feet as well.

Halfway across the yard already and bouncing in place excitedly, Nick called back, smile in his shout, “Move it, Spier!”

~*~

Simon hadn’t expected it to come up again after tipsy trampoline Truth or Dare.

It came up. Fitting.

He couldn’t say if his friends had rallied to make some kind of Operation: Si to the Sky or if they were working solo in their efforts to make him smile about something so silly. What he could say was that his friends were either devious or very sweet, or both, and they were all resolute in their efforts to lift him as much as possible.

Nick’s attempts were consistently unexpected and successful—certainly more so than the night in Leah’s back yard that had started with a clumsy lap around and ended with the two of them toppled into the grass and clutching their stomachs from how hard they were laughing. The first had been when Simon had been over at Nick’s house one Saturday morning. Nick had asked Simon to get whatever cereal he wanted from the pantry while he gathered the bowls and spoons. Simon had his hand on the top shelf, easily within reach, when he felt a pair of arms wrap around his waist before he was lifted just enough inches to avoid smacking his head on the ceiling. They’d been laughing after that, too. Naturally, they’d come to find that Nick lifting Simon made for some shocking and hilarious dramatic exits, so that’s where Nick carried him most outside of just Simon dragging his feet about wanting to go somewhere.

After several ineffective bouts of trying to lift Simon for chicken in the pool, Abby and Leah officially teamed up, a declaration that shouldn’t have made Simon as nervous as it did. Apart, he’d get plenty of warning; Abby would always spread her arms to hug him, only to squish her face against his chest and grunt exaggeratedly as she tried to lift him higher than where his toes could still touch the ground, and Leah would tell him to lift his arms and try the same way, the only difference being that she tipped her head back with effort rather than forward. Together, though, they could easily catch him off guard and raise him up with an arm throne or sandwich-hug. One afternoon, in Abby’s backyard this time, the group had been laying in the grass when their hostess suddenly sat up with a loud proclamation of how much she missed Cabaret rehearsal. Simon had rolled his eyes but smilingly obliged when she drug him and Leah to their feet and begged them to help her with just one dance move. Conveniently involving Simon in the middle so they could lift him by his upper arms. Simon tried not to smile too goofily at how serious his friends were about giving him these silly little happy moments around something he’d confessed about while tipsy.

He couldn’t help the smile that grew when, after putting his arms around Leah and Abby, one grabbed his right bicep and the other grabbed his left to lift him off the ground. It wasn’t just being lifted so easily that his legs could actually swing; it was also the fact that Abby’s hand squeezed too near to his armpit. And a stupidly ticklish Simon Spier, head thrown back with a startled cackle, wriggled in their hold until the three of them were all in a heap on the lawn.

Cheeks flushed red as cherries, Simon had ducked his head in thanks and shyness when Bram offered him a hand to stand. His normally beautiful grin paired with the mischievous glint in his eye had Simon blushing hot enough to fry an egg. “You’re ticklish, Simon?”

Much as his friends’ playful and affectionate lifts warmed Simon’s heart, Bram, as always, had his own way of doing things that made Simon’s heart full on skip a beat. He’d started a movie night by lifting Simon bridal-style to carry him across the threshold, a move that had had Simon blushing into his hands long after the first movie had started; the only thing that could persuade him to come out was Bram’s teasing threat that he’d have all the popcorn eaten if Simon didn’t emerge soon. In the basement of his own house, he’d ask for Simon to help him with a workout—to which Simon had agreed but warned that he would be of no help both for having no idea how to spot and for too easily getting distracted by the muscles in Bram’s arms. Apparently, when Bram had said ‘help,’ he didn’t mean ‘spot,’ but ‘act as a curling weight.’ Before Simon could so much as squeak in protest, Bram had him lifted with one arm supporting his shoulders and the other under his knees. Bram had asked him, too, to count his reps, launching into them with a quick but practiced pace. Simon was almost giggling too hard to count aloud, a task that got significantly more difficult when, somewhere after five reps, Bram had paused in the upswing to lean forward and nudge Simon’s tee up with his cheek enough to plant a raspberry on his stomach with each new lift. Bram mercifully set Simon back on his feet after the counting had long stopped and he was laughing too hard to continue his reps, though nowhere near as loudly as Simon had been cackling.

Simon’s favorite of Bram’s lifts was probably the most obvious one. When they kissed, when Bram lifted Simon to sit with his legs around the shorter boyfriend’s waistline, his back against the cool wall and his hands cupping Bram’s warm cheeks. It would have sounded cheesy for Simon to say that that lift could hardly count considering that, any time he and Bram kissed, he already felt like he was floating. And it did sound cheesy when he said it into Bram’s smiling mouth. So cheesy that Bram responded by carrying Simon to his bed, throwing him onto it, and chasing down his tickle spots and giggling lips.

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