starfishstar

ONE WEIRD THING

Fandom: Call Me By Your Name

Summary: Oliver is so irritatingly perfect. Why, Elio wonders, can’t he have just one weird habit?

Characters: Elio, Oliver, Samuel, Annella

Words: 200

Notes: A Yuletide Madness treat for

lionessvalenti.

Dear lionessvalenti, I read your Yuletide letter and I loved this prompt so much:

“What I love about this movie is its exploration of intimacy. It has these really beautiful moments or not just sexual/romantic intimacy, or the familiar intimacy of Elio and his parents, but the things people do when they're alone. The silly things, the mindless, the quiet. One of my favorite little scenes is that moment when Elio puts Oliver's trunks on his head. It's something no one would ever do with anyone around, but there's a freedom in being alone, and seeing someone just being alone makes this movie so beautiful. I think that's the beauty of the infamous peach scene, and Elio's reaction, is having those weird things we do by ourselves called out and noticed.”

I tried for ages to write you a different, longer, more serious fic to that prompt, but it just wasn’t working out. Then Karios told me you like drabbles! So instead, here’s a (double) drabble for you.

Thank you to Karios for betareading. :-)

Read on AO3, or here below:

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1.

His father makes odd little faces, grimacing and smiling to himself as he pores over his books in the muted light of his study. His mother has a habit of singing to herself, diaphanous tunes that are not quite songs, not quite real lyrics, and yet are more than mere humming, as she drifts through the house in the late afternoons, checking that all is well throughout her domain. And Elio knows he himself is a chaos of neuroses and strange desires.

But Oliver, Oliver is sleek perfection, impossibly, improbably, annoyingly so. Why can’t he have just one weird habit?

2.

“What are you doing?”

Oliver looks up at Elio in the doorway, his expression almost guilty. “Oh, uh – I just, I have a certain order I like to put my socks in. No big deal; just like it better this way.”

Elio gazes on in mounting delight as Oliver waves a hand at the bottom drawer of the dresser that was Elio’s and is now Oliver’s, where his socks are arrayed in perfect color-coordinated precision, in utter contrast to the comfortable mess in which he keeps the rest of the room.

And Elio walks away, grinning from ear to ear.

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End notes: Seriously, I can't tell you how many weeks I spent trying to think of something, anything weird and quirky that I could plausibly assign to golden, confident, always-okay-with-himself Oliver. ...And so, extremely frustrated, I went ahead and wrote that frustration into the fic. :-)