Just in Time for Tea

[slash_cave]

Title: Just in Time for Tea
Authors: gattodoro & silvan_lady
Cave Dwellers: Usual suspects will feature prominently... as always!
Rating: R
Warning: Crack!fic
Authors' Note: It started as a text message and it grew and grew...


Just in Time for Tea


Orlando rolled over in his Slash Cave bed and looked around groggily. What had wakened him? Not Sean whose smiling face was squashed against the pillow, or Viggo who was spread-eagled across the foot of the huge bed with one hand under the duvet somewhere close to Sean's groin. That probably explained the smile. A movement caught Orlando's eye and he found himself staring at... nothing. Or rather at nothing that was slowing turning into something.

“What the f...?” Orlando remembered just in time not to use the ‘F’ word because previous incautious usage had resulted in Eric having a Pavlovian response whenever it was uttered and although there were times when Orlando liked nothing better than to be thrown onto the nearest flat surface and buggered senseless, he generally preferred to wait until after he’d had his morning tea.

Not to mention that the mysterious something was growing larger by the second and Orlando had a feeling that this wasn’t a good thing.

Orlando blinked slowly in the hope that the something would go away. It didn’t. So he reached over to prod at the nearest body part, which, rather boringly, was Viggo’s elbow.

“Vig, Vig what is that thing?” Orlando hissed urgently

“Nghhhh, uh?” replied Viggo, with the erudition customary after he’d spent an evening drinking whisky with Sean.

Orlando prodded harder and kicked through the duvet at Viggo’s hip.

“What!” Viggo raised his head. He looked extremely bleary-eyed and his hair was sticking out in random directions, which ordinarily Orlando would have found endearing, but at that moment he was rather hoping for a deployment of Viggo’s legendary leadership qualities.

“That!” Orlando’s mother had always told him that it was rude to point, but he felt that normal rules of etiquette could be set aside when some rapidly expanding swirly thing was eating the corner of their bedroom. Now that really was bad manners.

Just then, the door burst open, crashing back on its hinges so hard that the wall shuddered. It was Harkness, always one for the big entrance.

‘Oi, do you mind, a little more care with the decor please! I mean, I know it needs redecorating, but really,’ grumbled Gatty.

“Gentlemen, THAT, is a temporal expansion construct,” Jack explained as he swaggered into the room.

Variations on the theme of “Huh?” and “A what?” were heard from the bed, along with a deep sigh followed by “Oh no, not again”. This last was from Karl, who decided that he definitely wasn’t ready to face the day if it was going to be one of those so he drew the duvet back over his head and went back to what he was doing. Or rather what he was having done - being blown by Eric - which explains why we haven’t heard from him so far.

“Is it dangerous?” asked Orlando nervously. He wasn’t in the mood for deeds of derring-do, well, at least not before he’d had his tea.

“Very,” replied Jack with obvious relish. “This sneaky little bugger feeds on weekends, it snacks on leisure hours and before you know it your working days expand to be twice as long as they were before.”

“That doesn’t sound good,” Sean commented, while privately thinking that taking a few minutes out of Saturday afternoons might be a way of improving his beloved Blades’ woeful form.

“It’s terrible,” proclaimed Jack. “Just think about it, if Silv and Gatty have to spend more time working, how will they find time to Slash us?”

“Oh my God, that could be disastrous!” Tea or no tea, Orlando was not going to stand idly by while the very fabric of his existence was threatened. He leaped out of bed, a move appreciated by Jack who, like many people, never tired of gazing at Orlando’s tanned and toned body, especially when it was as naked as it was now. “How do we stop it?”

Jack’s slow smile was positively vulpine, the way he twirled his phallus shaped blaster entirely indecent. “Well, let me tell you...”

Gatty put the kettle on, it was going to be a long day, she could tell.

“Please do,” said Orlando, heading determinedly for the kitchen. Gatty wasn’t the only one who needed tea. He was more than willing to listen to Jack’s no doubt indecent explanation, but he was at least going to try to have a cuppa first. He reached for the Earl Grey.

“Well, you can try surrounding it with a ‘Happy Hour Vortex’ - but that doesn’t always work.”

Orlando’s hand hovered over the Earl Grey and regretfully decided that maybe this was a Tetley’s morning. “Why doesn’t it work?”

“Because like Happy Hours everywhere, you think you are getting one thing at half the cost, but you end up getting two things at the same price. You spend just as much money instead of saving it, and by the time you’ve had two drinks, going home after Happy Hour is no longer in the plans. In this case you end up with two constructs, and oh boy, does that get complicated. You wake up before you’ve gone to sleep, and find yourself coming home before you’ve gone out.”

Orlando regretfully put the Tetley’s back on the shelf. There was nothing for it. It had to be Yorkshire Tea today. The china cup was replaced by a heavy earthenware mug. You just couldn’t be too careful where hot beverages were concerned, especially in a Slash Cave full of naked men.

“So no Happy Hour Vortex. What else?”

Jack took a few turns around the cave. He didn’t need to walk to think, but it made his greatcoat twirl attractively and he liked the image. Orlando was, of course, entirely immune to Jack’s posing and poured out the hot water, belatedly adding another five mugs.


Sometime later…

“Is this really necessary?” asked Orlando plaintively. He was kneeling, naked naturally, with a collar fastened around his neck and his arms bound behind his back. Thankfully there was a thick rug between him and the hard floor, but it still wasn’t the most comfortable position however much some perverted people (i.e. Jack) liked it.

“Necessary? Well, it’s not absolutely vital no, but it does help with the ambience,” replied Jack, who was gazing approvingly at Orlando’s slender, yet muscular form and the beautiful dark eyes looking back at him in (entirely fake) suppliance.

Orlando wasn’t entirely sure he liked the twinkle in Jack’s eye and he glanced desperately towards the bed, but didn’t anticipate getting any help from that quarter. The shape and movement made by the covers and the periodic inhuman noises suggested that a grizzly bear was fighting with a wolf under the duvet. More likely Eric was humping Karl, but one never knew. Sean and Viggo had gone to have a shower to slough off their hangovers. To judge from the banging noise it had been a success, but it seemed unlikely they’d be finished with each other any time soon unless the water ran cold. Which left Hugh as his only potential source of support, but he’d gone for his usual early morning gym session. Orlando didn’t understand how Hugh could be up for it at every hour of the day and remain so chipper, although people had been known to say much the same about him so…

Right on cue, Hugh returned looking all hot and buffed and delicious. Jack whistled appreciatively.

“Helloooo handsome, aren’t you a long cold drink of water.”

Hugh grinned back at Jack. “Good to see you too mate. Having a spot of bother with the Elf?” he nodded at Orlando and took a moment to admire the view.

“Hugh, great! Can you just smite the swirly thing with your Wolverine claws and we can get back to normal?”

Hugh chuckled, “Orlando, I keep telling you that the claws aren’t real … unless?” Hugh looked meaningfully upwards to where ‘they’ lurked.

Gatty squealed. ‘Yippee! I’ve always wanted to write this!”


‘Snikt’

Out popped the claws. Gatty also took the opportunity to get rid of Hugh’s shirt – such a shame to hide those biceps - and trade his jeans for a pair that were much, much tighter – ditto those abs!

“Oh my, aren’t you a big boy,” Jack enthused.

Orlando frowned. He didn’t mind Hugh distracting Jack at all, but he’d rather be untied first as (a) he couldn’t see what advantage there was in being immobile while the swirly thing expanded, and (b) he still hadn’t managed to drink his tea. He wriggled trying to loosen the bonds, and then frowned upwards, while Jack was momentarily distracted by Hugh, who not wanting to be the only one being involuntarily undressed, had just used a talon to flick the buttons off Jack’s coat.

Silv took pity on Orlando and the ropes disintegrated, but then, being in a pervy frame of mind as usual, she tipped him over until he was lying spread-eagled on his back. She wasn’t entirely evil though, his mug of tea appeared at his elbow, gently steaming.


Jack, meanwhile, took the hint, and discarded a few more items of clothing. Things could have got a lot more interesting but a loud cry of “Strewth, mate, what the fuck is that?” from the bed, reminded all parties that there was something important to be dealt with before they got down to shagging themselves silly again.

Jack launched into his explanation once more, however, Eric’s eyes had glazed over by the second sentence.

“Are there a lot of these things around then?” Eric interrupted, deciding that the rest of the explanation was unnecessary.

“Thousands,” said Jack with a gleeful grin. “Usually they’re a lot smaller than this one, but most people experience them without realising it. You know, when Sunday evening comes around and you’d swear it’s still Saturday. They’re pretty prolific on Friday afternoons too - they make the afternoon twice as long as normal, and they’re diabolical with alcohol!”

Eric snorted and rolled his eyes in the direction of the shower where Sean and Viggo were still enthusiastically working off their hangovers.

Jack nodded. “Exactly. Let one of these temporal expansion constructs near alcohol and they can completely obliterate hours from your life. It’s quite an amazing phenomenon really.”

Eric failed to be impressed. “Just get rid of it mate,” he recommended. “I’ve got better things to do than watch that. It’s making me queasy.”

“Yes, me!” Karl stuck out a tousled head. “Do me! It’s Saturday and I’m waiting for round three!” The duvet heaved and both heads vanished.

Orlando rolled his eyes, and then looked pointedly at Jack. “C’mon, mate. You’re our universal alien exterminator. Just do whatever it is that needs doing and stop the mucking around.”

Jack harrumphed. “Well, to be honest, it just needs something to do. Give it a time related challenge and it’ll be happy. The harder the challenge the longer it will be occupied. If he,” Jack pointed at Hugh, “would be so kind as to make an opening for us, we can toss in something for it to wrap it’s temporal tentacles around, and all will be well.”

“Something like what?” Orlando was much smarter than people like to think, but coming up with a temporal challenge first thing on a Saturday morning was asking a lot.

Jack pouted. “I don’t know, I used up my last good idea on the Disney queue for Crush’s Coaster so that Silv and Gatty’s ten minute wait behind two incredibly gorgeous gay guys seemed like 90 minutes. The ladies were very grateful you know; they’ve often said it was the best queue they ever had to wait in.”

“If they’re so good at handling these things, why don’t they come up with a solution then?”

Orlando gazed upwards and pointed hopefully at the swirling glow that had now expanded to fill half the room. “Err, excuse me you two. If you don’t do something about this, you might not have any Slash Cave left. Can you please find a time-related challenge to occupy it while Jack sends it on to a theme park or something.” Orlando’s grasp of the facts was slightly sketchy but Jack leaned over and patted him on the bottom, or as close as he could get in the circumstances. (It should have been the shoulder of course, but Jack was Jack, and Orlando’s bottom was irresistible.)

“Genius! A theme park! Alton Towers is the perfect place for it to stay permanently. They have all these wonderful notices that say ‘waiting time so many minutes’ and they are always wrong. Now we just have to give it something very challenging to keep it occupied while I use my penile-projection blaster to re-locate it.”

Luckily for our boys and the Slash Cave in general, Silv had the perfect solution. A small piece of black folded paper with green and white printing on it, floated down from the ceiling and landed at Orlando’s feet. He picked it up. “LondonMidland Timetable,” he read. “This can keep that occupied?”

Jack, who knew far more about various modes of travel than anyone else in the Slash Cave, looked upwards in awe. “There is nothing more difficult to understand or to predict than the workings of LondonMidland trains,” he confirmed. “Do you know, that in their world the train is on time unless it’s more than thirty minutes behind scheduled arrival, but everywhere else on the planet one minute’s difference is considered late! I’ve often wondered if they had a temporal expansion construct of their own.”

“Okay, what next?” Orlando didn’t travel by train and wasn’t going to, so he wanted to move on before Jack gave him another lecture, and then they could get back to the usual Saturday morning Slash Cave shenanigans.

Jack bowed in Hugh’s direction. “If you would so good as to use those extremely fetching ‘accessories’ to make an opening?”

Hugh put on his put-upon, ‘why me?’ face of disgruntlement, but was secretly pleased to be asked to come to the rescue. Not only did it feel good to have something to slash at, he was sure that they would be appreciative and in his experience, an appreciative Slash writer was likely to be a creative Slash writer. This was a good thing.

The temporal expansion construct, which had been swirling away quite happily while pondering the design of a new, and even more fiendishly compulsive level of ‘Angry Birds’, was somewhat surprised to be penetrated by nine inches (of admanatium claw, what did you think we meant?), but wasn’t much bothered by it since it had no physical form. (The visual manifestation of swirliness was simply dust motes moving in the air since Gatty was well behind on the dusting, as usual.) It was substantially more disturbed by the rude insertion of a work of fiction - or the LondonMidland timetable as it was known to the evil minds responsible for so many commuter calamities. The construct immediately started to digest a series of tasty chronological paradoxes and in attempting to calculate the scheduling impossibilities to three decimal points was forced to fold into itself repeatedly until it was no larger than a split pea, at which point Jack pounced, encased the construct in glass and fired it back through time and space. The construct came to rest in a bag of marbles belonging to a 1920’s schoolboy who was being forced to endure a Sunday lunch of corned beef and tinned peaches with his aged, and very deaf aunt. This was before television, well before computers and certainly pre-Internet. In other words, this was a time when nothing happened, v-e-r-y slowly and the construct was in its element. (The schoolboy would grow up to become Dr. Beeching and therefore is not deserving of your sympathy.)

“That went rather well, I think,” Jack said with a smug twirl of his greatcoat, “whatever shall we do now?” He eyed Hugh in blatant invitation (of course it was blatant, this is Jack we are talking about) and what could Hugh do but respond with a growl and a pounce that put Jack flat on his back, though not before he’d collided with, and taken a chunk out of, the wall. The claws made short work of the rest of Jack’s clothing and Jack’s accommodating nature took care of everything else. It was a good thing that the greatcoat was stain proof.

“Hey,” Orlando called plaintively from his supine position, "what about me?” He wasn’t used to being ignored, quite the opposite in fact; he felt his bottom lip begin to quiver, but he was prevented from reaching the full pout by the timely reappearance of Sean and Viggo.

“Now then lad, none of that. You know that Silv has introduced a no pouting zone in the Slash Cave.” Just then Sean spotted the row of mugs and seized upon one gratefully even though the liquid was now on the cool side. “Ah, nectar,” he declared, after emptying the mug in a few gulps, “nothing like a good, strong cup of tea to set the world to rights.”

“Mmph,” said Viggo who had also taken up one of the mugs. He was generally less convinced of the merits of Yorkshire Tea than Sean, but just now anything that made his mouth feel and taste less like pocket lint was welcome.

“Stuff the tea!” Orlando shouted, “I demand a shag!”

It finally dawned on Sean and Viggo that Orlando was (a) naked, (b) spread-eagled invitingly and (c) likely to get fractious if he didn’t get laid soon. The answer was obvious, except…

“Sean, don’t you think it highly improbable, not to say inconceivable that men of our age, let alone hung-over men of our age who’ve just had athletic shower sex could get it up again so soon?”

Sean looked at Viggo pityingly, “How many times have I told you that self-awareness is a redundant concept in Slash fiction? Not to mention that this is a crack fic and they have powers that go well beyond Viagra.”

Viggo sheepishly inclined his head to acknowledge his foolishness and immediately sprouted a throbbing erection that drew a sob of appreciation from Orlando and a cry of ‘Less talking, more fucking!”

With no further delay, Sean and Viggo set to their appointed task and Orlando was duly pleasured, upsides and down, until he was hoarse from screaming words that would make a stripper blush and all three men were sticky and satiated and calling for more tea..

And so it was that what passes for normality was restored to the Slash Cave.