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Dinner With the Winters.

Summary:

Ethan sketches to work through his trauma. Chris comes over for dinner to keep an eye on him.

Notes:

this is a result of that twitter post the other day that said "ethan sketches and plays piano!" as well as the 1 billion ideas eddie and I have gushed over together. <3

Work Text:

Dinner with the Winters is soft candlelight and smooth jazz.

“You don’t need to impress me,” Chris says one night, half a carafe of wine in, when he catches Ethan grimacing at a particularly vile saxophone solo. “I promise you, I won’t be offended if you turn this shit off.”

“But you love jazz,” Ethan responds.

“I really don’t,” Chris says. “I’m extremely indifferent. Bordering on disliking it.”

“You love jazz,” Ethan insists, but Chris shakes his head again. Ethan turns to Mia, wild desperation in his eyes. “You love jazz?”

“I don’t really care for jazz,” Mia says apologetically.

“Then-” His voice cracks. “Then who likes jazz?”

Mia reaches out and places a hand over his. “You do, sweetie.”

In one frantic motion, Ethan plants his elbows on the table and digs his fingers into his hair. “I like jazz?” he begs.

Chris and Mia exchange a look. She leans in to rub circles on his back.

“Maybe-” she flounders, shrugging helplessly when Chris throws a pair of what is happening eyes at her. “Maybe you want to like jazz,” she suggests.

Ethan stares at his dinner plate, unseeing. “Yeah,” he finally says, taking a deep breath. “Yeah, that’s it.”

“Ethan,” Chris says hesitantly. “You know you can, uh. Turn on something else. Something you actually like.”

In that moment, Chris is thankful for his decades of training, because the feral look in Ethan’s eyes is enough to make anyone flounder for purchase.

“I can’t. I don’t have anything else,” he says, a gasping panic flooding into his voice. “My CD binder was in my old car.” He buries his face in his hands. “Wasn’t my wife enough? She had to take my Weezer discography from me too?”

“Ethan. The stereo system I bought you has Bluetooth,” Chris says.

Ethan peeks an eye out through his fingers. “It does?” he asks wetly.

“Yes. It’s 2020.”

“Oh,” Ethan says. He looks down at his dinner, ruined by tears, and pushes it away. He pulls the phone out of his pocket and gets restlessly to his feet. Scrolls through the devices, and yeah, there it is. VTA-230E.

He opens his Spotify playlist. Scrolls down past Tame Impala and The Strokes and Sublime and even Weezer, and presses his thumb down on Chumbawamba’s Tubthumping.

The jazz cuts out. Real noise starts to blare.

“Fuck!” he yells, and in a few seconds he’s jumping around, screaming, fully abandoned and completely maniacal.

The night ends with Ethan sprawled out on the couch, covering his face with his palms, grumbling a rhythmic mantra, I get knocked down, but I get up again.

Chris drinks another glass of wine with Mia, both of them watching him.

“He’s not doing great,” Mia says, arms crossed and teeth gritted.

“Yeah, I can see that.”

“He talks about you all the time, you know,” she adds, taking a sip.

Chris' eyes shift over to her. “What kind of talk?”

“Combat training,” Mia shrugs. “Hangouts at the bar. How big your arms are.”

Chris rolls his eyes and gives a rough laugh. “He’s jealous.”

“In a way.” Mia tilts her head and narrows her eyes, doing a sweep of him.

What?” he demands.

She smiles and shakes her head.

-

Mia shows Chris some of Ethan’s drawings.

A woman with a bug’s nest for a lower half. A man with barely any of his body parts. A giant, horrifying head formed out of a heap of muck.

“Jesus,” he murmurs.

“Ethan’s therapist asked him to start journaling,” she explains. “To help him process some of the things he’s been through. But… I think drawing comes more easily to him.”

Sometimes there are little scribbles accompanying the sketches. “Flamethrower :)“ or “happy birthday, bitch!!!” or “that’s gonna leave a mark.”

“He’s not very funny,” Mia supplies.

“He’s a little funny.”

“Please do not let him hear you say that.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t. Thanks, by the way,” Chris says, handing the scrap pieces back to her. “Try to preserve these if you can. They could be handy tools for tracking his mental state.”

“Well,” Mia says, looking shy all of a sudden. “That’s not exactly what I wanted to show you.”

Chris responds with a curious look.

“He’s stopped drawing stuff about the Bakers, and started- well,” she says, fishing into the pocket of her oversized knit sweater. “Look.”

She hands them over and they’re like a deck of cards. All loose pieces. Drawings.

But instead of being depictions of horrific monsters, they are the likeness of two people. Himself and Mia.

Chris eating a plate of spaghetti while Mia heaps more onto his plate. Chris, sitting up but asleep in the armchair by the tv. Chris covering his ears while music notes that he can only guess must be indicative of Eminem (the scribbles on the side say now this looks like a job for me etc. etc.) float aggressively around his head.

“So… keep coming for dinner?” Mia suggests with a sheepish grin.

-

“You know how to play this?” Chris asks, sitting down at the piano bench.

Ethan looks up from his pencil and notepad. “Yeah,” he answers. “Took classes as a kid. Do you?”

“No,” Chris laughs. “Not to save my life.”

He presses down on the same key over and over, spilling the air with noise.

Lying the couch, Ethan sketches him. The back of his head, the shape of his arms, the hulking size of him knelt over the delicate body of the piano. In the margins, he writes E E E E.

-

After a while, Chris starts coming for dinner practically every night. Then for breakfast, too.

Chris loves breakfast.

He might daintily work his way through a dinner plate, but when it comes to breakfast, Mia has never seen a man eat like that. He wants meat. He wants carbs. He wants eggs and coffee and orange juice, and he wants to shovel it all in like he’s starving to death.

It doesn’t take long to cut out the middleman, and soon, Chris is sleeping in their guest room a couple nights a week.

“We should get a cat,” Ethan tells Mia in a manic fit one afternoon when they’re out gathering cherry tomatoes from their garden. “I love cats. I know I’m allergic but like, a hairless cat? Or maybe a normal cat and we could just shave it all the time?”

“We have a cat,” Mia reminds him. “His name is Chris.”

“Oh yeah,” Ethan says.

-

Ethan starts drawing Chris around the house.

Asleep, mouth wide open, drooling on the guest bed pillow, with a border that looks suspiciously like a bedroom door creeped open just far enough to allow a pair of eyes to peek through. Brushing his teeth over the sink. Filling a bird feeder with seed. Fixing the leg of a chair that Ethan stumbles over and takes to the ground with him and then wrestles for retribution.

He draws Chris and Mia on the couch, watching a movie together. This one’s more like a comic. In the next panel, they are lent against each other, both asleep. Then, in the next, there’s a jagged speech bubble beside the tv that says damn you all to hell! and both of them jolting awake.

-

Chris helps them put up a wooden swing in the backyard, suspending it from a tree branch.

Ethan coerces Mia onto it and then makes Chris push them, giggling like a child. Then he wants everyone to back off and let him see how far he can jump.

He’s acting like a kid but neither of them mind. He’s working his way out of the mired gash in his mind, from curling up and screaming and crying, to staring blankly at the world in front of him, to trembling at even the faintest of noises, to losing his shit in places as public as the Home Depot, to now, where he is full of reckless abandon, like he is making up for lost time and he doesn’t give a fuck how dumb it makes him look.

It’s going to be a long time until he’s all the way back to himself. He’s still very much out of his fucking head.

But there’s one night, when he’s out swinging, looking at the dinnertime picnic Mia and Chris have spread out in the grass below, that his head catches up.

He jumps off the swing and onto the grass, then collapses on his knees right onto the blanket with them.

“Woah,” Mia says, lightning-fast reflexes pulling back the decanter of wine before he can spill it.

But he hasn’t landed on their dinner. He’s landed on Chris.

“Woah,” Ethan echoes, his a lot quieter than Mia’s. A blushing, microscopic laugh spills out of him at the way Chris grabs onto his shoulders and looks at him, both amusement and concern in his eyes.

They study each other for a second, eyes flicking back and forth.

“Oh,” he says gently. Then again, “Woah.” He turns to look at Mia.

“It’s okay,” she murmurs, a little smile on her lips.

Almost as though in a daze, Ethan nods. He leans in and looks at the other man again, and then, when Chris puts a hand on his face, kisses Chris’ lips. He gives another nervous, bubbling laugh, and that’s when it finally catches up to him.

That’s what all those drawings were about.