Chapter Text
“Hey, Alex?” Greg stuck his head through Alex’s dressing room door. “I brought — oh, fuck me, I’m sorry.”
“No, no, it’s fine,” Alex said hurriedly. He checked his watch. Sure enough, he’d completely lost track of time again. His post-show meeting with the Andys had been short, so he’d opened his laptop to get back to his project and immediately forgotten about lunch. “Come in. Just maybe close the door behind you.”
Greg sidled in, closing and locking the door behind him. He glanced at Alex, then groaned and covered his eyes. “Can you please put them away?”
“You’ve seen me almost naked at least three times.”
“Yes, but that’s different, isn’t it,” Greg said. “That’s just your skin, not your soul.”
Alex sighed and hid his soulmarks. “Fine. It’s safe to look.”
Greg uncovered his eyes gingerly, then dropped his hand and grinned sheepishly at Alex. “Thanks.”
“I really don’t see what the big deal is,” Alex said. He faffed around with his laptop so he didn’t have to look up at Greg. “They’re just soulmarks.”
“Why do you hide them, then?”
“Because I’d never get a job if I didn’t,” Alex said, not entirely joking. “It’s like nakedness, isn’t it? There are different standards in different places. Hiding soulmarks is entirely a social convention.”
“Show me a culture where they never hide them, then,” Greg said. He put a takeaway bowl down on the table next to Alex’s laptop. “Here. If you really don’t care what you eat, you can suffer through a salad with me.”
“I promise I genuinely don’t care,” Alex said. It’d make his doctor happy, too.
He opened the container and took the plastic fork Greg gave him. He wasn’t entirely sure that caesar salad counted as a salad, not with the amount of mayonnaise on this one, but if it made Greg feel like he was eating healthier then he wouldn’t challenge it. At least it didn’t have quinoa.
Greg sat down across the table from him and dug into his own salad. “What did you have your soulmarks out for anyway?”
“I like to let them breathe.”
Greg snorted. “Sure. D’you always have them out when you’re alone, then? Like walking around the flat in your pants?”
Alex had never felt the urge to walk around semi-naked, but he’d spent enough time with Greg to know that Greg did. “No. It’s — it’s for my latest side project.”
“What, are you writing a book called Soulmarkwatching?”
Alex raised his eyebrows. “No, but that’s not a bad idea.” Depending on what the results were, anyway. Although he rather suspected that Greg — and probably Rachel, too — would advise against it.
“Probably be a bit avant-garde for most people,” Greg said. He reached over and ruffled Alex’s hair. Alex let his eyes flutter shut for a moment. “Mind, you’re not most people.”
Alex hummed. “By definition I am not most people. In fact, I would even go so far as to say that every individual person is not most people. Most people is the main thing that is most people.”
Greg shook his head, smiling. “Dweeb. Well, go on, then. If it’s not a book, what’re you working on?”
Alex flushed. “I, uh. I’m making a spreadsheet—”
“Of course you are.”
“—of all my soulmarks,” Alex continued. “Categorised by location, colour, contents, approximate time of appearance, and so on.”
“Originating event, too?”
“Oh, of course.” Although that wasn’t always easy to identify.
“And then what? Statistics time?”
“Statistics time,” Alex confirmed. He’d already set up some of the calculations and graphs even though he’d only started entering the soulmarks on his arms so far. That wasn’t a large enough sample size to draw any reasonable conclusions about averages across his body, but he could confirm that the averages were similar on each of his two arms. He hadn’t decided yet whether that meant that his soulmarks were evenly distributed across his whole body, or whether different parts of the body would attract different sorts of soulmarks based on factors such as symbolism.
“You’re going to be analysing this in your head for the rest of the week, aren’t you,” Greg said.
“Well,” Alex said, and then wasn’t sure what he could say in his defence. “There’s always something.”
“I know there is,” Greg said. He squinted at Alex. “Why?”
“Why is there always something?”
“No, I know that, it’s because you’re a fucking nerd. Why are you making a spreadsheet?”
Alex considered the question. “Because it’s fun?”
“Hmm.” Greg shook his head. “No, that’s not it. Not this time. You have a goal, don’t you. Some silly little task you’ve set yourself, some question you’re trying to answer, and you’re hoping that this’ll solve it for you.”
Greg was sometimes frighteningly observant. “Maybe so.”
“I’ll figure it out, just you wait,” Greg said. Alex couldn’t help but notice the clear fondness in his voice. “Do you mind if I come sit next to you?”
“Oh,” Alex said. He moved his empty takeaway container and laptop so there’d be space on the table for Greg’s things. “Sure.”
Greg moved around to sit next to Alex, then drew him close, one arm around his shoulders. Alex considered their relative positions, then pulled his laptop down onto his lap so he could curl into Greg properly, legs folded up beneath him.
“God, I’ve missed this,” Greg said quietly. Alex wondered if he knew that his left hand, the one resting on Alex’s left shoulder, was gently rubbing circles against Alex’s jumper. “I’ve really fucking missed this.”
“It’s nice to have the audience back.” They’d made it work — Series 12 in particular had been brilliant even without the studio audience — but Alex couldn’t deny that it was better now. Everyone had been buzzing when they’d recorded the first episode of Series 13 that morning.
“That too,” Greg said. Alex was hyperaware of the heat of Greg’s body against his own, his familiar scent of chewing gum and candy floss vapes, the small habitual fidgeting of his thumb on Alex’s shoulder. “But I meant this.”
Alex hummed and rubbed his beard against Greg’s hoodie. One of the graphs on his spreadsheet wasn’t displaying properly, but he wasn’t sure he could be bothered fixing it just then, especially given that he hadn’t quite finished entering all the soulmarks on his right arm when Greg interrupted him.
“This is nice,” Alex ventured. It was easier to talk when he wasn’t looking directly at Greg.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.”
Alex saved and closed his spreadsheet. He wasn’t going to get anything more done on it then, anyway, not if Greg wasn’t comfortable with Alex making his soulmarks visible. He pulled up the script for the afternoon’s recording instead. He had a silly little thing planned for the banter, a letter to Santa that he’d written out on a tissue, and Greg was going to absolutely hate it. Alex was looking forward to it.
“Alright,” Greg said from above him. He shifted, pulling his arm back so he could reach out to the table. “I need to finish my bloody salad, and I can’t do that one-handed without spilling everywhere. And I’m sure you’ve got producer things you want to go over with me.”
“Okay,” Alex said. He pushed himself back upright. “Yes. Right.”
He had to take a moment to recentre himself. He wasn’t sure why he felt so off-balance. Cold, even, where in that brief moment he’d grown accustomed to Greg’s warmth against him.
“Okay,” he said again, and focused on the show. “So Andy D wanted me to remind you about not slouching…”
—oOo—
“What on earth are you doing?”
Alex grinned up at Rachel sheepishly. He supposed it must look a bit odd. He was kneeling shirtless on the ground in their ensuite — the one place in the house that the kids never entered — trying to read the soulmarks on the back of his left shoulder using a hand mirror. He’d planned to use both the mirror above the sink and the hand mirror, so that the writing would be reflected twice and therefore the normal way around, but that had proven too difficult.
He gestured at his open laptop. “I’m, uh. Doing a spreadsheet.”
Rachel sighed. She walked over to him and rested her hands on his shoulders. “Don’t tell me this is about the conversation we had the other day.”
“Well. I won’t tell you that, then.”
Rachel shook her head, smiling faintly, and Alex wondered once again how he had gotten so lucky. She was often exasperated at the way his brain worked, but never judged him for it, and they knew each other so well after some sixteen years of marriage that he could practically read her thoughts off her face.
“Alex. My darling. Just talk to him.”
“I will,” Alex said, and then his conscience prompted him to add, “Eventually. Probably.”
“As you wish.” She squeezed his shoulders. “You’re the one who’s all torn up over it, after all.”
Alex hummed noncommittally. She wasn’t wrong. She’d made her position clear, and now it was up to him to act, or not, as he chose. But he really did think that he needed more data first.
“Still good to do the morning school run?” Rachel asked.
“Hmm? Yeah, of course.” One of the useful things about being executive producer was that he had a lot of control over his schedule, and so if he needed to be available to get the boys ready and drop them off at school, he could make sure that he would be.
“Good. Don’t stay up too late, yeah?” As Rachel left the bathroom, she added, “Oh, and by the way. You’ve got a new one on your left shoulder, and I think it proves my point exactly.”
It took him a while to work out the angles again, but then he saw it: ‘I’ve missed this,’ in Greg’s familiar handwriting, exactly where Greg’s thumb had been rubbing his shoulder.