it takes a little while to get used to samwell. it’s slow. chris misses home, the beaches, the sun, his mothers homemade chinese food. there’s no homemade chinese food at samwell.
usually, nursey and dex can tell when he’s homesick. they do things like send him a string of emoji hearts, or bring him coffee from annie’s, or just sit with him, watching netflix or hockey.
once, bitty made char siu for chris. it was nothing like his mother’s, but chris ate it anyway. when nursey found him crying in his room after dinner, he slid into bed with chris and listened to chris tell him about all the food his mom cooked, and how the flavors felt more like home than any place chris had ever been.
the next morning, chris found a piece of notebook paper folded up in one of his sneakers. it was a poem about the taste of missing home. chris taped it on the wall next to his bed.
he is homesick, and that never goes away. missing home is second nature, but eventually it begins to fade.
not because he misses it less, but because he’s found a second home. here, at samwell, with ransom and holster shouting over each other, and shitty’s hugs and sloppy kisses, jack’s quiet words of encouragement, bitty always making sure that chris is okay.
lardo lets chris sit with her while she’s painting, and chris doesn’t know how to describe the way it feels to watch a work of art bloom onto a blank canvas, the way it feels to have a sanctuary, but it’s good. nursey writes more poems, and they talk about what it’s like to feel distant from the cultures they were raised on. dex tells him about his own family, manages to keep chris laughing with stories of his sisters when the two of them start to feel sad again.
he meets caitlyn farmer. she’s fierce and funny and understands chris in a way that makes him breathless. he fits into her life like there was a place created just for him. they talk, and they dream, and she makes him smile even when he thinks he can’t.
chris starts a new set of roots, across the country, for his second family. it’s not like california, of course. it’s different, but it begins to feel like home just the same.
hey have we considered that dex is the next johnson and hes just mad about it
I acknowledge that this comment was not actually a call for fic, but have it anyway.
Dex knows what he’s in for as soon as he sets foot on the
Samwell campus.
Oh no, he thinks. I’ve found the main plot.
A little while later, he thinks, Shit.
He’s spent the better part of the last eighteen years
successfully avoiding the plot, just trying to stay in his happy little
non-existent bubble. He didn’t matter to the plot, so he didn’t exist, and he
was happier there.
But now.
He sees the bright, cheery blond boy handing around mini
pies and gift bags and he thinks it’s an odd literary device to have the
protagonist and POV character played by the team manager rather than one of the
players. But then he learns that Bitty is in fact actually a player on the
team, and there’s no hope.
“I’m leaning towards a state school,” he says when prompted.
But of course, he ends up at Samwell anyway.
Most people are content to ignore Dex, except for their old
goalie who throws him a mock salute before vanishing from the narrative. Dex
groans at that, but tries to get through it. If he’s forced to exist as part of
the story, he’ll just keep to himself. It almost works. But then there’s Nursey.
“Yo chill, Dex,” he says, just all the time. Dex can’t tell
him that he can’t chill because he wants to go back to non-existence rather
than existing here at Samwell with Nursey. Because Nursey’s got stupidly pretty
eyes and a stupidly pretty everything and it makes Dex want to be involved in
the storyline, even though that’s not his place.
It’s worse when he and Nursey bicker though, because Dex can
actually hear the people start shipping them. Not that he can tell Nursey that.
He can’t just say, “Hey, you’ve got to stop getting on my nerves. The people
who read this comic we’re in think we should date,” because then he’d have to
explain what the hell he’s talking about, and he’s not sure he actually can.
Dex is the first one who notices when Jack starts showing up
in just black t-shirts that are a little too small and jeans that somehow just
barely fit over his gigantic ass.
“And Jack has firmly taken on the role of hunky love
interest,” he mutters one day, accidentally where Nursey can hear him.
“To who?” Nursey asks.
Dex can’t respond, can’t tell Nursey that they’re only
secondary characters in a webcomic about college hockey in which Bitty, the southern
pie-baking figure-skating gay boy, is the narrator and he’s either about to end
up in a serious amount of gayngst with their hot as hell Canadian Adonis of a
captain, or end up in a fluffy ending akin to the 100k college AUs people write
RPF for of actual professional hockey players. Dex can’t tell Nursey that in
the real world, the Providence Falconers, Seattle Schooners, Vegas Aces, and
Houston Aeros don’t actually exist, that Kent Parson’s glorious hockey record
isn’t real, and that in the real world boys who look like Derek Nurse don’t
talk to boys who look like Dex, and in the real world this would never happen.
“Not to you, right?” Nursey asks, and suddenly he looks a
little nervous. “You’re not crushing on Jack, are you?”
“No,” Dex says, because that would be the least likely ship
he can think of for their entire team. He’s got a better chance of dating Kent
Parson. “No not for me.”
“Oh good,” Nursey says.
“Pretty sure he’s there for Bitty,” Dex says.
“Really?” Nursey asks. “I thought Jack was dating Camilla
Collins.”
Dex barks out a laugh. “You know for a writer you’re really
terrible at following the plot and picking up subtext.”
“What plot? It’s real life, man,” Nursey says, frowning at
him.
Dex smiles, sadly. The comic is going to end when Bitty
graduates, and he’ll never get to know if he and Nursey finish their fourth
year of school, or if they end up somewhere good, and maybe that’s kind of
okay. Because they’ve got the present, and that’s what matters. So Dex kisses
him, so softly, and says, “You’re lucky you’re pretty, Nurse.”
Nursey laughs, their strange conversation forgotten. “Nah, you’re lucky I’m pretty,” he replies.
And Dex is glad to pretend, for just a bit, that he can have this.
Idk why Nursey and Bitty think that there’s any possibility that Dex will move back on campus? 1. Getting a room on campus (or even off-campus in a diff house) halfway through a semester is difficult as hell. 2. Dex is stubborn af and believes he’s in the right and that he earned this (honestly I’m on Dex’s side there) 3. I don’t have a 3 but 1 and 2 still stand.
3. Living in student residence is fucking expensive and if you end up with a roommate you can’t stand but are paying half, if not less, what you would have otherwise, you suck it up and deal by spending more time in the library or common areas and waiting for next year.
4. Dex would literally rather string a hammock up in the basement than admit defeat.
Fantasy AU where Nursey is the prophesied hero on a quest to finally take down the tyrannical rule of the Chads. Dex is a fisherman who gets roped into sailing Nursey across a sea for his quest and unwillingly becoming the salty sidekick on the adventure
Some more on this AU
Bad Bob was the loving, kind king before the Chads took over
Bob, his wife Alicia, and his son Jack were like, the cutest family ever everyone loved them
The Chads were able to take over because they somehow got their hands on something that gave them ice powers
When the Chads take over, the Zimmermanns take refuge with the Bittles, a family of bakers a few towns over from the capitol.
(This got really long so the rest is under the cut)
I don’t even know where to start with this 1) Nursey’s hand on Dex’s back 2) the eyes or 3) the fact that Nurse is trying to convince Dex to live with him
just moving along like everyone else 