okay i love nurseydex and i love enemies to lovers nurseydex and i love nurseydex being in love but! let’s talk about the stage in between
let’s talk about nursey and dex being best friends???
sending each other stupid memes and captioning them all “u” no matter what it is
lengthy philosophical middle of the night discussions when they stay together on roadies, talking about what they wanna do and what they think their place in the world is
watching those weird 3 am infomercials together and debating heatedly over what is more useful, the magic bullet blender or the shamwow
actually taking nice photos together very occasionally instead of just ugly ones zoomed in on like nursey’s left nostril or whatever
playfully messing up each other’s hair???
going hard af as a ping pong team at kegsters
trying to cook a fancy recipe and having to throw it all out and settle for ramen
“dude should i buy this shirt? do i look good in it?” “well nothing’s gonna fix that face but it’s a nice shirt”
making fun of each other’s regional accents (except they accidentally pick up a bit of the other’s accent after a while oops)
acting deeply personally offended when the other hasn’t watched one of their favorite movies and forcing them watch it
automatic backup singer??? (nursey: i be UP in the GYM just working on my fitness he’s my witness/dex: ooEEE)
idk they’re best friends man!!! they’re best friends
literally so here for nursey losing his chill this year. im so here for him to become the dramatic nerd child he his on the inside. i want him to get jealous of dex being better friends with whiskey right off the bat and i want him to write twenty poems about it and grumpily stare at dex at breakfast and i want dex to be like “whats ur deal nurse maybe you should just. like–” “don’t finish that sentence dex.”
It happens in slow motion, and every single fucking detail
is burned into Nursey’s mind. He doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to forget the
sound Dex made as he crashed into the boards, or the lurching in his stomach
when the ref blew the whistle and Dex wasn’t
getting up, why isn’t he getting up, Jesus Christ Dex please get up.
Bitty nervously gathers his friends one afternoon in the late winter to tell them that he and Jack are dating. Jack is planning on coming out at the end of the season, so Bitty wants to give them all some warning. They’re all happy for them of course, but a few are a little hurt Jack and Bitty had kept it from them for so long.
“I’m sorry, y’all. I hated lying to you, but it just wasn’t the time yet. I feel so bad about not telling you– something as big and as important as that!” Bitty wrings his hands and apologizes again. The rest of the team is nodding their forgiveness, but Dex looks more and more uncomfortable with each word.
“Anything you’d like to share with the class?” Lardo asks casually. Dex looks like he’s about to faint. She loves the kid, but heaven help her if he has a problem with Bitty and Jack…..
“Bitty’s right. It’s not something we should hide. And I’m sick of lying about it.”
“Wait, when did this happen?” Chowder asks, caught between astonishment and excitement (his natural state of being, but just stronger in this particular moment).
Dex flushes. “Like…..last year? After we lost the playoffs?”
“Right after,” Nursey confirms.
“Ah,” Holster says sagely. “Roadie magic. That’s when me and Rans first started hooking up.”
“WHAT?” squawks Bitty. Rans claps a hand on Holster’s shoulder. “Shit, bro, I think we forgot to tell them.”
“What else haven’t y’all been telling me?” Bitty demands, and after that, confessions start rolling in.
“I’ve had at least two drunken sexcapades with Shitty.”
“Lards, bro! Same!”
“Didn’t Johnson get it on with the other goalie that one time? Goalies are weird, man.”
“Hey, Ollie and Wicks are totally doing it, right?”
Then, amidst the increasingly loud and colorful tales of sexual exploits, Tango shouts, “I’ve thought about kissing Whiskey!”
The rest of the Haus falls silent, Ransom and Holster smothering giggles. Whiskey calmly looks Tango up and down. “Huh. Cool. Let’s do that sometime.”
–
That night when Jack asks Bitty how it went telling the team, Bitty sighs helplessly. “Honey, I don’t know where to begin.”
listen….. in one of our first ‘australian wildlife biology’ lectures we had a PhD student talk to us about their work on freshwater fish in the kimberley….. they literally got attacked by a crocodile there’s a photo of them grinning and one has a bandage wrapped around his head….. just fucking smiling all serene… dex is basically steve irwin and nursey is smitten
ok but..dex…in all khaki…and gross boots… who knows all these bizarre tricks to fend off mosquitoes who says “fuckin oath, mate” once a week…Nursey loves him.
has the photo of dex grinning with the bandage on his head as his lock screen.
Dex sees a hot guy and says ‘crikey, that’s a good lookin’ fella’. Nursey’s brain actually breaks. Partially because did Dex just come out to him??? and also partially because oh no is this a kink oh no oh no oh no
I’m kinkshaming Nursey tbh, he deserves it.
he can peel 5 prawns in 30 seconds and nursey is just mesmerised by dex’s hands he doesn’t even care they’re covered in prawn guts
I FOUND THE PHOTO have you ever seen anything more ridiculous LOOK THIS IS CHOWDER AND DEX JUST HAPPY TO BE THERE
literally so here for nursey losing his chill this year. im so here for him to become the dramatic nerd child he his on the inside. i want him to get jealous of dex being better friends with whiskey right off the bat and i want him to write twenty poems about it and grumpily stare at dex at breakfast and i want dex to be like “whats ur deal nurse maybe you should just. like–” “don’t finish that sentence dex.”
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.
just moving along like everyone else 