I would start a riot

New Routines ~ January 2015

"How are you doing?" The sofa dipped next to him, causing him to glance up. Dec had squashed himself into the smaller gap between Stephen and one arm rather than taking the larger space on his other side but tugged his arm to ward him off from moving up. He was smiling brightly, looking energised and about as far from panicked as he could. Stephen felt his own mouth turning upwards just at the sight of it.

"Good," he replied, "Don't think I've ever had such a weird collection of people tell me they're happy for me before." Dec laughed momentarily and then settled down, looking indescribably relieved. Maybe he'd worried that Stephen tended to get stuck with the oddballs, that he wouldn't see the normal members of the public to get the same sort of positivity as he did.

"It's nice, isn't it?" he agreed, beginning to steal scraps of food from Stephen's plate absentmindedly.

"Do you mind?" Stephen protested, although he did nothing to physically stop him. Dec had a way of getting what he wanted when his entire face was lit up like that and Stephen was hardly going to ruin his mood over something so petty.

"You can share some of mine," Dec replied nonchalantly, "I'm starving and they thought we might not be done for a little bit longer so now someone has to go and track our food down because it's disappeared to who knows where..."

"Are you going to breathe?" Stephen interjected amusedly, grinning as Dec rolled his eyes. He settled more comfortably, sinking against Stephen's side contentedly.

"It's never been like this before, eh?"

Stephen knew what he meant by that. At the last lot of auditions they'd settled for talking in groups, rarely getting the chance to talk together and definitely unable to be so comfortable. It was still something Stephen was working on, dropping that subconscious instinct to keep an eye on the rest of the room, knowing it didn't really matter anymore if they were caught. And they almost certainly would be spotted at some point, knowing the judges. They all had a talent for knowing exactly when the two of them were trying to be together like any other couple.

Despite all of this, there was an unmistakeable wave of calm that came over him when Dec was this close, his head tilted instinctively onto Stephen's shoulder. Stephen stretched an arm behind him, rubbing the pad of his thumb into the back of Dec's neck and smiling to himself when it made the other man shut his eyes and bury a similar expression into his blazer.

"You know," he started again eventually, sounding unusually doubtful. "I didn't really expect it to be this easy."

Stephen stroked the back of his neck again, used to being the one who was pessimistic about their first job together since being outed. Dec had been far better at managing his nerves, already getting through I'm a Celebrity without being shaken by the new angles of hate that certain people had turned to.

"It's like you always say; we deserve something to go our way for once," he replied, relaxing when Dec turned back to sitting at his side, face exposed and expression calmer.

"I don't like to think about any of it going wrong," he continued softly, accent always wrapping more thickly around the quieter admissions. "But being here just reminds me of last year. I don't like thinking about you being upset."

"I'm okay at the moment," Stephen pointed out, hooking a strand of Dec's hair around one finger and brushing it back into place. He knew he had to be honest if he ever wanted to convince Dec. And being honest required a little more elaboration than 'okay'. "I'm more nervous about when the show is on TV. People say worse things when they have a keyboard to hide behind."

It was true. As much as there had been scenarios running through his head of an angry contestant saying something unthinkable to one or both of them, he knew it was very unlikely to happen. The paranoia he carried from losing the trust of even some of his closer family members made it impossible not to consider the possibility and the idea of Dec being on the receiving end of anything like that was even worse than imagining it for himself. But the real fear came with social media, knowing that anyone who had a reason to dislike him before now had more fuel to add to the fire.