one shots ❯ joshler

note by note, hand in hand.

holy nuts first off let me apologize for my absence. I've been feeling eh still and felt as if i deserved a break.

I hope you all had a lovely Christmas and are enjoying your Hanukkah or Kwanza, if you celebrate those holidays, and if you don't, I hope you and your family are doing swell :-)

I'm back with a three thousand worded fic, as a thank you for 7.9k reads (almost 8k!!!), and as an apology for my deficiency.

This one is where Joshua is new to this fancy boarding school thingy and finds Tyler in their music room. There's much to this story, that's just a shitty summary.

Without further ado,

Enjoy.

♡

Joshua didn't hate a lot of things. At best, he'd find something incredibly irritating to him personally; he was able to see the value that others could perhaps place in it. But there was one thing that he did hate with an absolute passion, and even in his young age, he was sure he'd never stop hating it: moving.

That is, relocating; attempting to entirely shift one's entire life from one place to another, with rarely any success.

Joshua had moved six times in his short life, always to a different city. He only vaguely knew the reason—he'd stopped asking soon after the second move—knowing why they were moving wouldn't change the fact that they were.

And Joshua could deal with it for the most part. He'd gotten used to changing his address and saying goodbye to friends and somehow always losing one thing or another in the void that is the moving van.

But the one thing that Joshua couldn't stand was switching schools.

That awkward position of being a 'new kid' in the middle of term, of being stared at and wandering hallways lost beyond all hope without even having the excuse of being a proper first year. Not knowing which clubs to join or where to eat lunch or who to avoid—it could all be too much.

And sure, eventually Joshua would find his niche, that he knew, but the interim period of weeks before that happened filled him with absolute dread.

It was about a week into this dreaded interim period and Joshua was still spending lunch wandering the vast halls and wings of the school which he hadn't yet seen, which incidentally were quite a few since this was one of the bigger schools he'd attended.

He was just about to turn a corner when suddenly he heard what sounded like jingle bells wafting from a door across the hall that was slightly ajar. Joshua had never really been musically talented himself and it astounded him that someone could make any possible sense of the music sheets which to him looked like ink splatter.

Not wanting to disturb whoever was playing, Joshua leaned towards the crack in the door, closing one eye to get a proper view.

He was surprised to find it was another student, though, by the looks of him he wasn't a sophomore like Joshua, maybe a junior or a senior—it was difficult to tell without seeing the year of graduation stitched onto his shirt.

His long fingers moved easily over the keys even with his eyes closed—he had moved on from Jingle Bells to Let It Snow with ease and Joshua was rather enjoying watching him like this, and maybe not entirely for the music.