Space Monkeys, a General fanfic

Space Monkeys
Improv becomes routine

Author: Augustus
Email:
Fandom: Eric Amber/ North Darling (3 Canadians) RPS
Rating: G
Category: fluff. weird, considering my current mindset...
Disclaimer: These fellas belong to themselves. Actually, North belongs to Belinda from Bardot... that's what he wants us to believe, anyway...
Summary: Improv becomes routine. North's POV.
Note: I've been meaning to write another north fic for a while - he got a bad rap in Think About You and he's a lovely guy who didn't deserve it. So he's the nice guy in this one!
Another Note: This all came out of a short part in their show last night. Eric's playing the ship's navigational system, Pal, and North's himself. Eric asks North if he loves him... North eventually says yes and asks Pal if he loves him. Eric's reply is something akin to. "I'm a computer. I don't have emotions." The fact that this wasn't in the first time i went to see it gave me a bunny.>

It's becoming a routine, this game of his. Perhaps not every night - sometimes he actually sticks to the script - but most of them. Enough to matter, enough to start a gradual erosion of my sanity, my restraint. It's easy for him; hiding behind those damn goggles, smirking at me through a television screen. Eric does a fantastic line in looking innocent: a widening of summer-blue eyes, a slight tremble of that narcotic lower lip and he'll have the audience believing in the charade, adoring the very manipulation he casts.

I know better than to accept the mask. We go deeper than that. There have been times when this 'innocent' has shredded my existence with a word or a glance, times when I, myself, have shadowed those same blue eyes through hatred and pride. The water under our bridge is an ocean, but it buoys and sustains us, linking us through pain and pure liquid history. He knows me, as I truly know him, seeing the glint beneath the surface, so well shrouded from the crowd.

A certain twisting of the lips is my warning. There's something cathartic in speaking through a screen, but Eric makes the game an art form. Characters form a shield. He, a computer, me a mere space monkey, and both of us taking the same tainted dance steps on a stage both literal and metaphoric. He always leads just as he knows I will always follow.

The game becomes more than a routine, becomes a script in itself. Laughing
with his eyes if not his mouth, he draws a confession of my love. My chuckle of disbelief is as much a mask as his own wide-eyed curiosity. I always speak the words, forever hiding truths behind lines, role and humour. It's a routine with comedic value, even though it shrinks me every time. My confessions; his silence. The joke scrapes jagged along the truth, the characters a surreal definition of ourselves, as he strips me continually naked then leaves me grasping for his silence, ever an unspoken hope that one day it will be different.

Final night. Everything flows the same, his teasing tide of words, my stilted affirmation - a familiarity almost comforting in its prophecy of pain. Already knowing of his answer, I ask the question all the same, bathing masochistic in the humiliation that floats invisible above those who sit before me.

Silence.

Then, softly, almost timidly, come words that must surely be an illusion, perhaps just the ringing of echoed laughter in over-eager ears. ((I love you too, North...)) Behind the screen the smirk is gone, a ribbon of true vulnerability tangled around his features, comical plastic goggles hiding widened summer-blue eyes, lower lip trembling slightly, almost imperceptibly. Not a mask any more, just the truth - frightened space monkeys laid bare before each other as, for a second, the laughter finally stills.