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It’s not as if he hadn’t expected a certain level of small-mindedness to go hand-in-hand with a small town, but nearly a year into his relocation, Nicholas is getting juuuust a bit fed up with what passes for playful banter at the station. He’s settled into it a bit, of course. At this point it’s impossible to not even crack a smile when Doris starts snorting over innuendo. On the other hand, the Andies are starting to get on his nerves with all the gay jokes. Seriously. Grow up. At least try and be original.
And honestly, when it started, it wasn’t even that big of a deal, because at least they were just joking with each other. Wainwright would offer Cartwright the last doughnut or bring him back a sandwich if he went on a lunch run and Cartwright would snort “Gaaaaay,” before taking the offered snack anyway. Or Cartwright will ask Wainwright to accompany him somewhere and Wainwright will wryly ask, “You angling for a snog?” and they’ll crack up together. The others chuckle too. Even Danny laughs, which. Nicholas finds incredibly disappointing.
But still. If that’s how they’re going to treat each other as friends and co-workers, and they’re both doing it and neither of them feels offended, then fine. Nicholas isn’t happy about it, but he’ll overlook it.
Lately, though, Nicholas himself has been a target of theirs and he’s really, really sick of it. It starts subtly enough, a few raised eyebrows here and a few knowing grins there when he and Danny arrive at the station together or share their lunches.
Danny offers Nicholas the last doughnut sometimes. Nicholas never takes it.
The whole thing is incredibly juvenile and has escalated to outright whistles and innuendos if Nicholas so much as puts a hand on Danny’s shoulder. And it’s not as if Nicholas is even out here, as he doesn’t expect a village that can hardly handle the concept of someone being gay to wrap their brains around bisexuality, but that’s hardly better. Whether they’re being ignorant and think they’re “just having a bit of fun” with him or deliberately targeting him because they’ve sussed him out, bigotry is bigotry, and Nicholas is about two incidents away from putting his foot down. Maybe three.
Still, there’s enough going on around the village that he usually doesn’t have to think too much about it. There’s always a speeding ticket or a littering fine to hand out, a primary school safety presentation to give. He and Danny have an excellent routine going these days, dropping by their favorite coffee shop for pastries before doing their first daily perimeter. It honestly stuns Nicholas how much drama there still is to deal with even in the tiny, post-cult village.
His head’s in thirty different places trying to mentally sort through the day’s nonsense and the associated paperwork, so he doesn’t register the sounds coming from the Andies office (or the honest-to-god sock on the doorknob) until it’s too late.
“Oh, jesus!” he yelps with a start, sloshing his coffee all over himself and the floor and then trying to mop himself off with his tie.
Cartwright bangs his head on the underside of the desk that he is definitely on his knees under holy christ and he groans, reaching up to rub at the spot he’d hit.
“Alright, alright, don’t just stand there with your mouth open, we’re not selling tickets you perv,” he says. It’s somewhat less convincing given that his own mouth had been open about thirty seconds prior in order to suck off Wainwright which is just, is just, is just not registering at all.
“What?!” Nicholas splutters at last.
“Oi, prick, get out,” Wainwright responds, looking moderately annoyed and using his chin to gesture Nicholas out like he doesn’t have his pants around his ankles.
Dazed, Nicholas has no choice but to obey, turning right around and walking back out of the Andies’ office and shutting the door firmly behind himself. The sock falls off in his haste pulling the door closed and he swears, bending over to hurriedly toss it back on lest another poor soul walk in on them before hurrying back to his desk.
“You alright?” Danny asks when Nicholas sits back down. He’s got the end of his pen in his mouth and Nicholas cannot bring himself to look at him directly considering what he’d just seen.
“Yeah,” he assures Danny tersely, picking up the nearest stack of papers and staring at them like they’ll make sense and also erase the past five minutes from his memory.
“You sure?”
“Yes, Danny,” he says, hearing how strained he sounds even as he does.
“It’s just...you’re reading the station Premier League betting pool really intensely...”
Nicholas’ vision seems to focus at last and he finds that, indeed, he’s been poring over Doris’ football club picks.
“Ah, yes, well. I was wondering how Arsenal’s odds are looking.”
Danny raises an eyebrow, laughs. “I’d have taken you for a United supporter.”
“Pshh,” Nicholas scoffs with a frown. “Fuck off, never.” Danny laughs harder, more pleased than surprised now.
“Good man.”
Nicholas sets aside the sheet outlining the terms of the station pool and picks up a packet of actual work, a series of reports on messes left at a shop in the square. It’s a compelling case. The doors and windows are locked tight, but in the morning, shelves are in disarray and items strewn about on the floor. Nicholas is pretty sure that if he was using all of his brain power right now he’d really be onto something. Unfortunately. He cannot stop reliving the past ten minutes. And he’s really really trying not to.
He’s been zoning out staring at the same sentence on page three of the reports for who knows how long when he suddenly becomes aware of something hitting him on the head. Frowning, he looks up just in time to see Danny shooting another spitball at him.
“Hey!” he yelps, dodging it just before it hits him square between the eyes. Danny giggles.
“You’re so out of it today, I hardly recognize you,” he says. “What’s crawled down your trousers?”
“I don’t think that’s how that—never mind, that isn’t—I’m fine.”
Danny whistles. “No, you’re definitely bothered, Nicky, and I’m going to find out why.”
Nicholas sighs, admitting defeat. “I don’t want to make a scene,” he says, carefully, quietly, articulating as clearly as possible to make up for the lack of volume. Something this sensitive needs to be handled with care. “I went into the Andies’ office earlier—”
To his surprise, Danny snorts a laugh and groans, “Oh, I see. Surprised this is the first time you’ve had to bear witness to that.”
Nicholas frowns. “So you’re aware of what they’ve been up to in there as well?”
“Who isn’t? They aren’t exactly subtle.”
That’s...news to Nicholas. It feels pretty damn subtle to him.
“Really?” His heart is sinking a bit now. Is he really that unobservant of the goings-on of his own officers? “Is it...new, then?”
Danny gives him a funny look.
“God no, they’ve been disgusting since secondary school, I’ve had to watch them and walk in on them for years, and then they got bloody married and it just escalated from—”
“Sorry,” Nicholas splutters, because w h a t. “They’re married?”
“Well yeah. Obviously.”
“It’s not so obvious to me, Danny, why didn’t anyone think to tell me?” Even as he asks, several things he’s observed in his time Sandford begin making a lot more sense. The doughnuts, the innuendos, the...gay jokes. Oh christ. “I take it they aren’t raging homophobes, then.”
“No,” Danny agrees, clearly incredibly entertained with how dumb Nicholas has been. “Nah, as much as they’re annoying as hell and the reason we had to institute a station-wide no PDA rule, those two really helped me out a lot when I was figuring myself out, you know?”
Nicholas doesn’t know, actually. But he thinks he might be starting to.
-----
After the incident, though, Nicholas finds he’s actually getting along much better with the Andies. Now when Cartwright responds to Wainwright doing him a favor with, “Alright, piss off you pansy,” Nicholas hears the fondness in it and sees him wink at Wainwright after.
He decides he ought to be the one to extend the gay olive branch, so to speak, so he decides to join them on their next lunch break.
“Gentlemen,” he says with a nod, sitting across from them at the break room table and pulling out the sandwich he’d packed himself. The Andies exchange a look before turning back to him.
“Alright, what’s this?” Wainwright asks.
Nicholas smiles pleasantly. “Just thought I’d sit with you two for a little change of pace.”
“Tiff with the missus?” Cartwright asks, tone more knowing than mocking, which is deeply unsettling. “I’d put in a good word for you, but you should know that Danny’s one of my best mates and I’m going to have to take his side every time. No offense.”
“Uh, none taken,” Nicholas says absently, mind whirring away.
It’s the same sort of joke they might have made weeks, months ago, except back then Nicholas had thought the cracks about Danny being his boyfriend were at best ignorant jokes and at worst active homophobia. Now, though. Now...
“Sorry, what was that about Danny?” he asks.
“If you cock things up with him we’re both going to have to turn on you, it’s nothing personal,” Wainwright says, as if they were discussing the weather.
“Oh. Right. Of course.” For a conversation where the facts are entirely wrong, it makes an awful lot of sense to Nicholas. He just nods, swallows, decides to ponder this at a later time, and asks, “So how long have you two been married, then?”
Cartwright makes a face that can only be described as sappy, turning to grin at Wainwright before saying, “We’ve been Common-law for about ten years, but I made him take me to the Netherlands to put a ring on it back in ‘02.”
“That’s...actually very sweet,” Nicholas says sincerely. Wainwright snorts.
“Well don’t sound so surprised. We might be ‘country folk’ but we aren’t animals.”
“No, no, of course not. I just, I don’t know, everything’s still so up in the air with marriage legislation, it’s just nice to hear a story with a happy ending.”
The Andies smile at each other knowingly.
“You aren’t thinking about popping the question, are you Angel?”
“Me? Oh my god, no, no, I think you’re misunderstanding me here—”
“Shhh, there there, Angel, we won’t say a word, right?” Wainwright says, miming zipping his lips shut and turning to Cartwright, who nods at Nicholas patronizingly.
“Not a peep.”
Nicholas falls silent; clearly nothing he says here is going to change their minds that, somehow, Nicholas is working up to proposing to Danny.
The three of them pick at their lunches for a few minutes. Nicholas is pretty sure the Andies are playing footsie under the table, so he eventually decides to try to get the conversation back on track.
“So you were married pretty recently, then? How’s that, uh. What’s that like?”
Cartwright groans loudly, rolling his eyes and leaning back in his chair, but Wainwright pats him gently on the shoulder and says, “Not too different from before, to be honest, apart from the name change and all.”
“Name change?”
“Well yeah, we wanted to do it up right when we got married but we also didn’t want to lose the names we were building our police careers on, so we just combined our last names. I took his -Wright, he took mine.”
Nicholas blinks slowly, once, twice, three times, absolutely speechless.
“...Would it not make more sense to combine them the other way? Both of you Cartwright or both of you Wainwright?”
“Don’t be a git,” Cartwright says crossly. “That would just be confusing.”
-----
Danny comes over at the end of the day. He comes over most nights, Nicholas is realizing. They pull together some sort of half hearted pasta dish that Danny swears up and down is fantastic even though Nicholas has his doubts, and he even helps with the washing up after they finish. Something about watching Danny dry his dishes and put them back in the cupboard is making him really think about what the Andies had been saying earlier, what they had implied. Assumed.
He and Danny aren’t together, but. Well. Nicholas thinks it might be kind of nice to have him around always, to eat his inedible culinary attempts and watch action movies with, and even to share the household chores. Hell, Danny already does all of those things. And he is around all the time. And Nicholas likes him. God help him, he hadn’t even thought about it until the Andies pointed it out but now it’s all he can think about. Surely if they’ve managed to be together in one way or another for the past couple of decades, they know a good thing when they see it. Nicholas will just have to trust them on this one.
“Not a bad day, eh?” Danny says happily, settling on the sofa like he does just about every night. Nicholas will go to join him in a minute. In a minute he’ll go sit beside him and they’ll squabble over what to watch tonight, Danny gunning for some incredibly loud and dizzying film that Nicholas has never heard of. And Nicholas will acquiesce, eventually, as he always does, and will find he even likes the movie. Because Danny likes it.
Honestly, how had he not jumped to this conclusion much sooner.
“No, not bad at all,” Nicholas agrees after a minute.
“You alright mate? You aren’t still dwelling on catching the Andies in the act, are you?”
Nicholas laughs, but Danny might be onto something, honestly.
“No, not quite. I was just thinking...” he trails off, shakes his head. It makes no sense to do this, this is such a big step, such a huge leap of faith to be taking on two people he thought actively hated him until this afternoon. “I don’t know. Perhaps I’m being a bit silly.”
“You can tell me,” Danny says, soft and sincere, his warm brown eyes all earnestness. Nicholas kind of melts.
“I don’t know, it’s just...the Andies...said some things and got me thinking, is all.”
Danny frowns. “What did they say?” he asks, half curious and half nervous. Fancy that.
“Well they seemed to be under the impression...they seem to think we’re an item.”
The frown deepens. “Item?” Danny repeats, clearly missing the point entirely, and Nicholas despairs of anything ever happening between them at all. And he’s? Disappointed? He wants something to happen between them, more than anything.
“They think you and I are together,” he says lightly. The frown disappears, and instead Danny raises his eyebrows, somehow looking both surprised and sheepish. Nicholas smiles at him. “I wasn’t totally sure where they got that idea from, at first, but I can see their point,” he says, gesturing between the two of them.
“Yeah?” Danny asked, tone hopeful. Is it hopeful? Nicholas really wants it to be hopeful.
“Yeah. Makes sense, doesn’t it?”
“‘S’pose it does,” Danny agrees. “I mean, you coming to Sandford is the best thing that ever happened to me.”
It’s not how he’d describe himself ever under normal circumstances, but in that moment, Nicholas is weak.
“Come here,” he says, and Danny does after a second. He gets up from the couch and comes over to Nicholas, who’s still standing in the doorway feeling stupidly fond. “Can I—could I kiss you?” he asks. He hears his voice crack embarrassingly as he does, winces and half wants to take it all back the moment it’s out, but then Danny absolutely beams at him and all self consciousness goes out the window. All he can think is that Danny should always smile like that.
“Yeah, alright,” Danny says. Nicholas will take it.
Kissing Danny is really, really good. He feels incredibly silly for not doing it sooner. He’s wasted so much time here in Sandford doing other things when he could have been kissing the best friend he’s ever had instead. Now that he can, though, now that he has permission, he’s pretty confident he’s going to make up for all of that lost time. It’s absurdly cliche, he knows it is, but he can see fireworks in his mind’s eye, can hear trumpets, a whole brass band, doves cooing...
“Birds,” he says suddenly, pulling away from the kiss abruptly, pulling away from Danny entirely. “It’s birds.”
“What?”
“That’s what’s been causing those messes in the shop downtown. They’ve got birds nesting in the rafters and mucking up the place.”
“Leave it to you to crack a case in the middle of our first kiss,” Danny chuckles. Nicholas feels his shoulders sag.
“Sorry,” he says quickly. It’s not as if he wants to lose Danny before he even really has him. This has always been his problem, with Janine and everyone else before her, Mark and Sarah and Heather.
“What are you sorry for? It’s brilliant, you’re brilliant. I only meant I wanted to maybe snog you a bit more before we go rushing off to the station.”
“Oh. Right, of course, absolutely. That seems only fair.”
Danny giggles before leaning back in to kiss Nicholas again. God. Nicholas is never ever going to grow tired of this, he can already tell.
-----
They bring up the birds first thing in the morning at the station the following day, and the theory is met with general groaning and mutterings of, “How have we spent weeks on this,” but by now Nicholas has caught on that this is considered office camaraderie. He cracks a smile. They make plans to head into the square and locate the birds so they might be safely moved somewhere less destructive, and the day passes rather peacefully.
“You seem in awfully high spirits today, Chief Inspector,” Cartwright says pointedly, Wainwright humming beside him in agreement. “I take it you and Danny had a successful evening, yeah?”
Nicholas is only about 75% sure he even knows what they’re insinuating, but he’s far too happy to be annoyed or embarrassed, so he just says, “Oh yeah, snogging all night,” dismissively.
Wainwright frowns in what might be disgust. “Alright, alright, keep your snogging to yourself, this is a place of business,” he says, wrapping an arm around Cartwright and leading him off, presumably to go shag in a supply closet or something. Nicholas smiles as he watches them walk away.
“Who’s snogging?” Danny asks, having just re-entered the room.
“Us, maybe, if we get all this paperwork wrapped up soon,” Nicholas says.
“Oh, I’ll get right on that,” Danny says immediately, starting to head right back to his desk. Nicholas laughs.
“Slow down, there’s no need to race on my account.”
“Well I’ve only just gotten you, haven’t I?” Danny asks. “I’m gonna leap at every chance I’ve got.”
Nicholas kisses him, quick, a brush of his lips against Danny’s more than anything else, but Danny flushes neck to nose, grinning that wonderful little grin Nicholas is impossibly fond of.
“Speaking of paperwork,” Nicholas says, clearing his throat meaningfully. “I uh, I filled out the necessary disclosure forms this morning. For us. Have you gotten yours in yet?”
“Oh, I’ll do your paperwork,” Danny says, winking.
“No, Danny, really, it’s important,” Nicholas says.
“I know it is,” Danny says, absolutely giddy, and Nicholas can tell he hasn’t gotten through to him at all. He’s about to try again when Danny adds, “Oh, almost forgot,” and holds up the pastry box he’d been carrying. “Saved you the last doughnut.”
Nicholas accepts it happily.