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- Posted: Tue, 17 Feb 2009 05:14:15 +0000
Update: May 30th - Chapter 11, Part I (on page 97)
Update: January 19th - Chapter 10, Part II (on page 95)
Update: September 15th - Chapter 10, Part I (on page 91)
Update: August 20th - Chapter 9, Part II (on page 87)
A/N: Takes place in the early 90's
I make no excuses for this. Mostly humorous romance. It does contain homosexuality so please don't read if that makes you uncomfortable.
I'm posting this as I write, so most have only undergone minor edits. Very grateful for any grammar errors or awkward phrasing pointed out!
Mega thanks to pikachufan2164 for quick links to the story!
Sections
Chapter 1
Rewritten Chapter 1
Chapter 2, Part I
Chapter 2, Part II
Chapter 3, Part I
Chapter 3, Part II
Chapter 4, Part I
Chapter 4, Part II
Chapter 5, Part I
Chapter 5, Part II
Chapter 6, Part I
Chapter 6, Part II
Chapter 7, Part I
Chapter 7, Part II
Chapter 7, Part III
Chapter 8, Part I
Chapter 8, Part II
Chapter 8, Part III
Chapter 9, Part I
Chapter 9, Part II
Chapter 10, Part I
Chapter 10, part II
Chapter 11, part I
Extras
Six Things You Never Knew about Sam Irving
Time Jump (Warning: major spoilers ahead)
Alternative Universe with FAIRIES
Fairies, Part II
Side story on Thunder
April Fool's Joke
Chapter One:
Inartè Black was three extremely important things: a moody sixteen-year-old, aiming to be a photographer, and very, very gay. It had hit him around puberty that while girls didn’t have cooties, the set of whatever they had down there couldn’t possibly be any better. Plus, men were hot. Luckily, he hung out with open-minded people (who verged on too open-minded at times), so by the time he was fifteen, the whole gay thing wasn’t such a big deal.
Until his family moved.
They moved from the city to a small town in a small place that nobody knew about except for, apparently, his parents, and the only reason they ever gave him and his older sister was that it would do them good to get a 'breath of fresh air.' The real reason was that his mother gained a new job that required them to move, and they figured up heaving his life was a small price to pay.
The town was nothing special and neither was the new high school, Antora High, that he started attending except for one tiny little problem.
To put it simply, it was a pretty damn homophobic, Christian place where everyone knew everyone else, and he figured he was odd enough with his strange family and his strange name without having to throw his sexuality in as well. He had entertained, of course, going to school in glitters and high heels and maybe a feathered boa too just to see the reactions, but it probably wasn’t worth the risk of his sister finding out that he raided her closet.
Only a select few knew that he was gay and they were, for the most part, cool about it. Josh did get rather annoying at times with how elated he was because he finally had a gay friend (********. What was he, a circus freak, now?), but at least he never spread any rumours or gave him any crap which was more than he could have said for some of his past ‘friends.’ The path to high school hell, however, didn’t really start because he was gay. It started because of something else that he was.
Remember how he also aimed to be a professional photographer? Yeah. That.
Inartè always, always walked around with an old and dented camera around his neck like some sort of bizarre tourist (a tourist in beaten up sneakers and poorly dyed hair that was) and on those kind of sunny, kind of not days where it was easy to get a decent shot without fiddling too much with the lighting, he liked to wander around town and just take pictures of random things. Random places, random animals, random people, and – well, you get the idea.
So one afternoon, he stayed behind after school when nearly everybody else had gone home and just… took pictures. Dozens of them. Five alone on a fire alarm. When he had started wandering the school fields looking for more things to shoot, he saw the soccer team – with Josh being one of the people running after the black and white ball with some sort of possessed frenzy – and he decided to take a few pictures of them too.
Simple. Harmless. Damned him to hell.
God, he hated his life.
His closet was his darkroom where he developed most of his photos himself – unless he was feeling particularly lazy and had money to spare which in that case dropped the film canisters off at the mall to be developed like any other sane person – and afterwards, he would spread them around on the floor of his somewhat messy room and just browse through them, one by one. Screw homework.
Pictures of garbage, of trees and clouds, and even a few on gavel (for texture reasons, or so he told himself) before he came to the photos he took of the soccer team. They were mostly taken because he wanted a few of things in motion – lots of them focused on soccer balls and legs and feet kicking up dirt – but he still had a few on profiles, and those he stared at with his head tilted and his mouth firmly set in a frown.
Truth to be told, there was nothing special about any of them. Just people he didn’t know captured in a moment frozen in time with their guards dropped and their attention focused elsewhere. There was Josh, Hank, and Mike – though everyone called him Mickey because of how short he was – and faces upon faces that he barely recognized. That’s when he saw him. Sandy brown hair, light grey eyes, and freckles on a face that seemed too open and cheerful to be real – Inartè stared at him for a few seconds longer than necessary before moving on. A year from now and that person would be the most important man in his life, but until then, he was nothing more than just another face in the crowd.
Had that been that, things would have been left the way they were, but during lunch the next day when he was circling parts of different photos that he liked with a red pen, Josh decided to drop over and rifle through them. Inartè never minded when he did that so he paid him little attention – oh, that’s a nice shade of green there – as he circled on, until –
“Oooh, what’s this?” Josh said, dangling one of his photos in front of him as if it was something tantalizing instead of a, well, a photo that he took. The picture in question was one that he took of the soccer team with a person’s face circled. He had tried panning with that one and it worked pretty well so he liked it.
“It’s a photo, you moron. You know, out of the dozens of others that you were pawing through?” he bit out as he continued on circling. Later on, he would go through them with a blue pen to cross out anything that he didn’t like. Some of his friends thought that he was a bit obsessed at times. They were probably right.
“No it isn’t,” Josh tried to insist. “It’s of Sam. And you circled his face.”
Inartè gave him a weird look when he looked up. “Who the hell’s Sam? I only circled that person’s face because the panning looked decent.”
“That’s Sam.” Josh pointed at the teen whose face was circled as if he hadn’t gotten that by now. Thank you captain obvious. “God, I know the girls are all over him, but I never thought you would be too.”
“Excuse me?” Oh so this was what it was about? Good lord. “Look, that’s just some random picture I took that I liked. I’ve never even seen the guy before.”
Josh scoffed as he sat on the table that Inartè was working on. “Got to try better than that, Inny. You have, like, three classes with him, man. Besides, it’s Sam Irving. Everybody knows who he is. Captain of the soccer team, head of the student council, the town’s golden boy, and so on and so forth?”
“Huh?”
“My best friend?”
That’s when it clicked. No wonder the face looked familiar. He’d seen the guy around Josh all the time (he wasn’t going to comment on the part where he shared three classes with him. Wasn’t his fault his classes were so goddamn boring and he never paid attention in them), and probably around a few other of his friends as well. “Him? That person you watch chick flicks – oh I’m sorry, I mean hang out at guy’s night out, with? That’s Sam?”
“‘Somewhere in Time’ was ******** amazing and is much more than just a simple chick flick, thank you very much,” Josh argued as Inartè rolled his eyes. “And yeah, that’s him.”
“He’s… pretty good looking, I guess,” Inartè said, after squinting at the photo a bit more. Actually, Sam was damn good looking, but he knew no good would come out of admitting that to Josh.
“Pretty good? Pretty good?” Josh said, sounding as shocked as he did when he first found out Inartè was gay. “He’s the best looking guy here, okay?”
“Okay, okay.” He held his hands up in defeat and wondered if that would get Josh to leave him alone so he could get back to his photos. “Sorry I’m not worshipping the ground that he walks on just because you think he’s the hottest – I mean, the best looking guy around.”
“Trust me, you talk to Sam once and I guarantee you that you’ll have a crush on him the next day.” Josh scowled. “It always happens. Even with Maureen who Sam knew I liked and –”
“Your poor, shattered love life,” he said, without much sympathy, considering Josh was currently going out with a cheerleader. “You do know that I care more about stuff like personality than good looks, right?" Inartè paused. "Oh, no, wait a minute, no I don’t. Because that would imply I think more with my head instead of what’s in my pants, and we all know guys don’t work that way.”
Josh shrugged. “Say what you want. You’ll like him. You’ll see.”
“Oh ******** off,” he snapped, annoyed. If there was one thing he hated more than blockheads like Josh, it was said blockheads trying to – to what? Play matchmaker with him? “Believe what you will, but my true love still belongs to my camera and my collection of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle figurines. Besides, he’s not really my type. None of you sports maniacs are.”
His friend shrugged again as he readjusted his backpack and stood up. “Alright. Whatever helps you sleep easier at night. Just a warning though, Sam’s not gay.”
Inartè glared at him. “I said, ******** off!”
Huh. So as it turned out, Sam was in three of his classes. More than just that, as Sam was also the person getting the highest score in all three classes and what was more or less the teacher’s pet. Not in a bad way, really, as he never sucked up and all he did was just… be brilliant at everything. It was still kind of irritating.
“Congrats,” Sam said to him, smiling, when he handed back Inartè’s test. It was the day after their geometry unit exam and because angles were the only things that made sense to him, it was the only math test he had gotten perfect on.
“You’re really not supposed to look at our marks you know,” he commented dryly as he took it, folded it, and tucked it away into his binder so he would never have to look at it again, finals and midterms be damned. “Invasion of privacy and all that.”
“Sorry,” the teen apologized, but his smile didn’t dampen at all. “Couldn’t help it. Everybody does it, you know.”
Inartè smiled faintly back. “At least you admit it. You’re on the soccer team, right?”
“Yeah, been on for about… two years now – oh, hang on, where’s Julia?” Sam looked around him before spotting her and handing her test back with a ‘congratulations’ as well. The girl gave him a grin that seemed too bright and too flirty for something as simple as returning an exam back. “But, uh, yes. Two years. It’s quite fun. I’ve seen you hanging around the field sometimes when we practice. Do you play soccer too?”
He balked slightly at the information that Sam actually knew he took pictures of them occasionally. Great, way to guilt trip him even more on the fact that he didn’t even know the other teen existed until Josh pointed it out to him. “I only do photography. I’m not good at sports.”
After handing tests backs to a few more people, Sam turned to talk to him again. “Photography sounds cool. You should give soccer a chance though. It’s really not as bad as people make it out to be as soon as you get the hang of it.”
“Funny, that’s what they tried to tell me about dating girls too,” he said before he could stop himself. s**t. There was definitely a better way of phrasing that. “You, uh, know. Girls. So annoying.”
He shrugged. “I’ve got a few girl friends.” Then, as if realising how that might be taken the wrong way, added, “Girl. Friends. Not girlfriends.”
Inartè was just about to comment on that when the bell rang, signalling the end of school, and Mr. Golden Boy gave him another smile before going to pack up his things and leaving.
Hmm. So that was Sam Irving.
Update: January 19th - Chapter 10, Part II (on page 95)
Update: September 15th - Chapter 10, Part I (on page 91)
Update: August 20th - Chapter 9, Part II (on page 87)
A/N: Takes place in the early 90's
I make no excuses for this. Mostly humorous romance. It does contain homosexuality so please don't read if that makes you uncomfortable.
I'm posting this as I write, so most have only undergone minor edits. Very grateful for any grammar errors or awkward phrasing pointed out!
Mega thanks to pikachufan2164 for quick links to the story!
Sections
Chapter 1
Rewritten Chapter 1
Chapter 2, Part I
Chapter 2, Part II
Chapter 3, Part I
Chapter 3, Part II
Chapter 4, Part I
Chapter 4, Part II
Chapter 5, Part I
Chapter 5, Part II
Chapter 6, Part I
Chapter 6, Part II
Chapter 7, Part I
Chapter 7, Part II
Chapter 7, Part III
Chapter 8, Part I
Chapter 8, Part II
Chapter 8, Part III
Chapter 9, Part I
Chapter 9, Part II
Chapter 10, Part I
Chapter 10, part II
Chapter 11, part I
Extras
Six Things You Never Knew about Sam Irving
Time Jump (Warning: major spoilers ahead)
Alternative Universe with FAIRIES
Fairies, Part II
Side story on Thunder
April Fool's Joke
Finding Mr. Perfect
Chapter One:
Inartè Black was three extremely important things: a moody sixteen-year-old, aiming to be a photographer, and very, very gay. It had hit him around puberty that while girls didn’t have cooties, the set of whatever they had down there couldn’t possibly be any better. Plus, men were hot. Luckily, he hung out with open-minded people (who verged on too open-minded at times), so by the time he was fifteen, the whole gay thing wasn’t such a big deal.
Until his family moved.
They moved from the city to a small town in a small place that nobody knew about except for, apparently, his parents, and the only reason they ever gave him and his older sister was that it would do them good to get a 'breath of fresh air.' The real reason was that his mother gained a new job that required them to move, and they figured up heaving his life was a small price to pay.
The town was nothing special and neither was the new high school, Antora High, that he started attending except for one tiny little problem.
To put it simply, it was a pretty damn homophobic, Christian place where everyone knew everyone else, and he figured he was odd enough with his strange family and his strange name without having to throw his sexuality in as well. He had entertained, of course, going to school in glitters and high heels and maybe a feathered boa too just to see the reactions, but it probably wasn’t worth the risk of his sister finding out that he raided her closet.
Only a select few knew that he was gay and they were, for the most part, cool about it. Josh did get rather annoying at times with how elated he was because he finally had a gay friend (********. What was he, a circus freak, now?), but at least he never spread any rumours or gave him any crap which was more than he could have said for some of his past ‘friends.’ The path to high school hell, however, didn’t really start because he was gay. It started because of something else that he was.
Remember how he also aimed to be a professional photographer? Yeah. That.
Inartè always, always walked around with an old and dented camera around his neck like some sort of bizarre tourist (a tourist in beaten up sneakers and poorly dyed hair that was) and on those kind of sunny, kind of not days where it was easy to get a decent shot without fiddling too much with the lighting, he liked to wander around town and just take pictures of random things. Random places, random animals, random people, and – well, you get the idea.
So one afternoon, he stayed behind after school when nearly everybody else had gone home and just… took pictures. Dozens of them. Five alone on a fire alarm. When he had started wandering the school fields looking for more things to shoot, he saw the soccer team – with Josh being one of the people running after the black and white ball with some sort of possessed frenzy – and he decided to take a few pictures of them too.
Simple. Harmless. Damned him to hell.
God, he hated his life.
~*~
His closet was his darkroom where he developed most of his photos himself – unless he was feeling particularly lazy and had money to spare which in that case dropped the film canisters off at the mall to be developed like any other sane person – and afterwards, he would spread them around on the floor of his somewhat messy room and just browse through them, one by one. Screw homework.
Pictures of garbage, of trees and clouds, and even a few on gavel (for texture reasons, or so he told himself) before he came to the photos he took of the soccer team. They were mostly taken because he wanted a few of things in motion – lots of them focused on soccer balls and legs and feet kicking up dirt – but he still had a few on profiles, and those he stared at with his head tilted and his mouth firmly set in a frown.
Truth to be told, there was nothing special about any of them. Just people he didn’t know captured in a moment frozen in time with their guards dropped and their attention focused elsewhere. There was Josh, Hank, and Mike – though everyone called him Mickey because of how short he was – and faces upon faces that he barely recognized. That’s when he saw him. Sandy brown hair, light grey eyes, and freckles on a face that seemed too open and cheerful to be real – Inartè stared at him for a few seconds longer than necessary before moving on. A year from now and that person would be the most important man in his life, but until then, he was nothing more than just another face in the crowd.
Had that been that, things would have been left the way they were, but during lunch the next day when he was circling parts of different photos that he liked with a red pen, Josh decided to drop over and rifle through them. Inartè never minded when he did that so he paid him little attention – oh, that’s a nice shade of green there – as he circled on, until –
“Oooh, what’s this?” Josh said, dangling one of his photos in front of him as if it was something tantalizing instead of a, well, a photo that he took. The picture in question was one that he took of the soccer team with a person’s face circled. He had tried panning with that one and it worked pretty well so he liked it.
“It’s a photo, you moron. You know, out of the dozens of others that you were pawing through?” he bit out as he continued on circling. Later on, he would go through them with a blue pen to cross out anything that he didn’t like. Some of his friends thought that he was a bit obsessed at times. They were probably right.
“No it isn’t,” Josh tried to insist. “It’s of Sam. And you circled his face.”
Inartè gave him a weird look when he looked up. “Who the hell’s Sam? I only circled that person’s face because the panning looked decent.”
“That’s Sam.” Josh pointed at the teen whose face was circled as if he hadn’t gotten that by now. Thank you captain obvious. “God, I know the girls are all over him, but I never thought you would be too.”
“Excuse me?” Oh so this was what it was about? Good lord. “Look, that’s just some random picture I took that I liked. I’ve never even seen the guy before.”
Josh scoffed as he sat on the table that Inartè was working on. “Got to try better than that, Inny. You have, like, three classes with him, man. Besides, it’s Sam Irving. Everybody knows who he is. Captain of the soccer team, head of the student council, the town’s golden boy, and so on and so forth?”
“Huh?”
“My best friend?”
That’s when it clicked. No wonder the face looked familiar. He’d seen the guy around Josh all the time (he wasn’t going to comment on the part where he shared three classes with him. Wasn’t his fault his classes were so goddamn boring and he never paid attention in them), and probably around a few other of his friends as well. “Him? That person you watch chick flicks – oh I’m sorry, I mean hang out at guy’s night out, with? That’s Sam?”
“‘Somewhere in Time’ was ******** amazing and is much more than just a simple chick flick, thank you very much,” Josh argued as Inartè rolled his eyes. “And yeah, that’s him.”
“He’s… pretty good looking, I guess,” Inartè said, after squinting at the photo a bit more. Actually, Sam was damn good looking, but he knew no good would come out of admitting that to Josh.
“Pretty good? Pretty good?” Josh said, sounding as shocked as he did when he first found out Inartè was gay. “He’s the best looking guy here, okay?”
“Okay, okay.” He held his hands up in defeat and wondered if that would get Josh to leave him alone so he could get back to his photos. “Sorry I’m not worshipping the ground that he walks on just because you think he’s the hottest – I mean, the best looking guy around.”
“Trust me, you talk to Sam once and I guarantee you that you’ll have a crush on him the next day.” Josh scowled. “It always happens. Even with Maureen who Sam knew I liked and –”
“Your poor, shattered love life,” he said, without much sympathy, considering Josh was currently going out with a cheerleader. “You do know that I care more about stuff like personality than good looks, right?" Inartè paused. "Oh, no, wait a minute, no I don’t. Because that would imply I think more with my head instead of what’s in my pants, and we all know guys don’t work that way.”
Josh shrugged. “Say what you want. You’ll like him. You’ll see.”
“Oh ******** off,” he snapped, annoyed. If there was one thing he hated more than blockheads like Josh, it was said blockheads trying to – to what? Play matchmaker with him? “Believe what you will, but my true love still belongs to my camera and my collection of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle figurines. Besides, he’s not really my type. None of you sports maniacs are.”
His friend shrugged again as he readjusted his backpack and stood up. “Alright. Whatever helps you sleep easier at night. Just a warning though, Sam’s not gay.”
Inartè glared at him. “I said, ******** off!”
~*~
Huh. So as it turned out, Sam was in three of his classes. More than just that, as Sam was also the person getting the highest score in all three classes and what was more or less the teacher’s pet. Not in a bad way, really, as he never sucked up and all he did was just… be brilliant at everything. It was still kind of irritating.
“Congrats,” Sam said to him, smiling, when he handed back Inartè’s test. It was the day after their geometry unit exam and because angles were the only things that made sense to him, it was the only math test he had gotten perfect on.
“You’re really not supposed to look at our marks you know,” he commented dryly as he took it, folded it, and tucked it away into his binder so he would never have to look at it again, finals and midterms be damned. “Invasion of privacy and all that.”
“Sorry,” the teen apologized, but his smile didn’t dampen at all. “Couldn’t help it. Everybody does it, you know.”
Inartè smiled faintly back. “At least you admit it. You’re on the soccer team, right?”
“Yeah, been on for about… two years now – oh, hang on, where’s Julia?” Sam looked around him before spotting her and handing her test back with a ‘congratulations’ as well. The girl gave him a grin that seemed too bright and too flirty for something as simple as returning an exam back. “But, uh, yes. Two years. It’s quite fun. I’ve seen you hanging around the field sometimes when we practice. Do you play soccer too?”
He balked slightly at the information that Sam actually knew he took pictures of them occasionally. Great, way to guilt trip him even more on the fact that he didn’t even know the other teen existed until Josh pointed it out to him. “I only do photography. I’m not good at sports.”
After handing tests backs to a few more people, Sam turned to talk to him again. “Photography sounds cool. You should give soccer a chance though. It’s really not as bad as people make it out to be as soon as you get the hang of it.”
“Funny, that’s what they tried to tell me about dating girls too,” he said before he could stop himself. s**t. There was definitely a better way of phrasing that. “You, uh, know. Girls. So annoying.”
He shrugged. “I’ve got a few girl friends.” Then, as if realising how that might be taken the wrong way, added, “Girl. Friends. Not girlfriends.”
Inartè was just about to comment on that when the bell rang, signalling the end of school, and Mr. Golden Boy gave him another smile before going to pack up his things and leaving.
Hmm. So that was Sam Irving.
Next section lower down on the first page.
