Work Text:
Ava didn't have time to check Ao3 since she started working for Deborah. For all of her talk about being into productions with meaning, she was secretly a sucker for juicy dramas with queer undertones, and checking to see what the freaks were writing on Ao3. Unfortunately for her, she had missed the toxic drama of Succession and the various L Word revivals. Plus she never got around to finding out if Linda Cardellini’s character in Dead To Me got with the hot blonde.
So it had been a while since she’d checked on her fandoms. It had also, unashamedly, been several years since she had typed in her own name into the search bar. She was always curious about if she would ever turn up in the RPF tage. She knew that her chances were low given that she was a writer. Everybody liked a face. There was actor RPF, music RPF, hell even hockey RPF went off on Ao3. Writer RPF? Not so much.
So she was shocked, shocked , to find that there were multiple fics with her name in the character tag section.
Shipped. With. Deborah.
"FUCK YEAH!" Ava shrieked at the top of her lungs.
Deborah groaned, rolling over onto her stomach as if that would give any reprieve from Ava's voice which seemed to bounce right off the glass window of Deborah's luxury hotel room and curled back into her ear. It woke her right up. She clung onto her sleep, working hard to ignore her companion.
They were meant to be writing material for Deborah's translator in Singapore. Deborah had, as had become commonplace recently, drunk way too much and closed her eyes (read: passed out) on a boat on the harbor. Ava had to roll her back to the hotel at 5am on a waiter's trolley. The tiny wheels kept snagging in grooves in the concrete and Ava didn't know how Deborah didn't wake up from the amount of times she swore out loud, but had woken up from one (1) full belly shout.
The sunrise was beautiful though, Ava had to give the city that. Granted, any time of the day, Singapore was gorgeous, at least the parts she got to see were. It's almost as if somebody paid for the citystate to constantly show Ava the most impressive scenery, continually charming her into staying a day longer. It was working.
It was probably the only thing that was working.
With Deborah back to sleep, Ava returned her attention to her online creep on herself. She tapped the 'Filters' button and tapped 'Rating'.
"I'm such a horny bitch," she muttered to herself, grinning as she slid into the warm space on the bed that Deborah had opened up by rolling onto her stomach.
The older woman was snoring beside her. Her back was rising, falling. A thin silk camisole strap slipped down her arm. Ava glossed her eyes over the lightly freckled, pale skin, then bit her lip. It was huge for Deborah to give up Late Night for Ava. It was a dedication of love like Ava had never experienced, and always wanted from Deborah. Suddenly she knew exactly how Deborah felt about her, what they meant to each other. And then there was nothing. Nothing .
Months went by with Deborah spending day in and day out on her own. It drove Ava crazy that she wouldn’t answer her calls. What was she even doing all of that time? Ava just could not imagine Deborah not working. The only thing that made sense was Deborah writing a book. If it turned out she was doing that without her, Ava would have killed her.
So when, out of the blue, Deborah asked her to go to ‘Hawaii’ together, of course she said yes. Of course . Of course there were no questions about what Ava had been doing since Deborah went into her self-isolation mode. How was Ava getting by? What seethingly pointless writing ideas was she having? Oh, none? Glad you didn’t ask.
The whole time she was in Singapore she was trying to figure out what Deborah wanted. Obviously she wanted to work. But what did she want from Ava. What did they mean anymore? There were drunken looks. Eyes on her lips, on her boobs. That was something she had never had from Deborah before. Was she letting loose, finally? Opening her mind to what her body wanted?
Ava could feel Deborah’s body heat radiate beside her. The woman was a furnace and wanted the air conditioning down to Arctic temperatures. When Ava had come to Deborah’s room to test a joke only to find Deborah barely able to keep her eyes open, she had climbed into the end of Deborah’s bed desperate for some protection against the winter winds. Closer to Deborah, she felt like she was thawing out.
Or at least, a certain area was feeling hotter than it was before.
WIth her lower lip still between her teeth, Ava returned her attention to her phone. Looking at the results of the filtered search, she was delighted to see that there were more explicitly fics than there were in any other rating. She scrolled through to find something spicy. Weirdly there were two fics where the author had shipped her with her ex, one of which had the most hits in the list by virtue of the author tagging Ruby’s Wolf Girl .
She didn’t dare read those fics. The thought of thinking about Ruby messing with her and Deborah made her uncomfortable. Thinking about her sexually though, well, she’d been there done that. It was the fics where the authors had shipped her with Deborah that were the most compelling. When she found a summary and set of tags that tickled her, she pulled a pillow down behind her head, laid on her back and slid her free hand over the crotch of her jeans. Just to hold herself, just in case.
She read on. It was kind of weird to read about ‘Ava Daniels’ as told by some random girl online but in a way, Ava was intrigued by the person she thought she was. And the particular Ava Daniels she was reading about was forward as fuck! She had pushed Deborah up against a wall and was feeling her up around her inner thighs. The author had even gone to the detail of naming the brand and fabric type of the palazzo pants that Deborah often liked to wear. Which made Ava start to question whether the fic was written by someone they knew or just someone really tuned into the type of clothing that Deborah Vance liked to wear.
Ava tried not to think too much about who was behind the fic. She was already enjoying the scene too much. Thinking about doing to Deborah what someone had written her to do was… empowering. She moved to undo the button on her jeans with a quick flick of thumb and forefinger, and pushed down the zipper. Then she threaded her fingers underneath her underwear, widening her legs so that she could reach her clit. She kept reading, enjoying someone else’s fantasy which was, embarrassingly, better than anything she had thought of doing.
"What are you doing?"
Ava's cheeks were volcanic the instant she heard Deborah’s voice. She yanked her hand out of her underwear and replied shrilly, and without thought, "You know exactly what I was doing."
Deborah's disgusted face turned disturbed as she rolled over once more, away from Ava and pulled herself up against the velvet headboard.
"Oh don't look at me like that," Ava protested. "You can't pretend that you haven't read a little chick lit and flicked ya clit."
Deborah pressed the heel of her hand to her forehead. "I don’t need a little story to get me off and even if I did, I wouldn't do it with you right next to me!!!"
"I acknowledge I crossed a line with that--"
"You think?"
Ava had her hands up in surrender, her phone still in hand. She then planted her free hand on the bed in the space between them, drawing herself closer to show Deborah what was on her phone.
"--But you have to hand it to the online girlies. They've written some hot shit."
Deborah scanned the screen for half a second then dismissively said, "Ava," but then she said nothing more. She looked at the ceiling in pensive thought.
Trying to save the situation, or potentially dog herself into an even deeper hole, she said, “You’ve really never gotten off reading a sexy little story?”
“Don’t you use a vibrator like everyone else?” Deborah said. She brought the blankets onto her lap and began folding them over neatly, as if it would equal out the crude conversation.
“I mean, I do,” Ava admitted, “Sometimes I do both. You really have never had any supplementary material?”
“If you’re suggesting I watch porn, the answer is no. I have no need for that. The men I’ve been with have been perfectly satisfactory. You can have all sorts of people and you still feel the need for, uh, what did you say, supplementary material?”
“Well, yeah, that’s what this is,” Ava said, pointing to her phone. “They’re erotic stories people put online for free.”
“You’re not making it sound any better.”
Ava edged a little closer to Deborah, her knee touched Deborah’s hip. “No, you’ve got to understand. These girls are crazy talented. They write about so many things, characters in all kinds of situations. They’ve even written stories about us. That’s what I--” Ava held her tongue.
She looked sheepishly at Deborah.
It took a minute for Deborah to really process that. "What do you mean?"
Ava brought her phone back and hit back on the fic she was reading, then showed the page of a list of fics to Deborah. "See that? There are some fucked up people out there writing sexy stories about us ever since your little showdown at Late Night."
"That's so… weird..." Deborah decided.
"Not really," Ava said, on a high horse of defending herself. "What is weird is people like David Jenkins--"
"David Jenkins? Am I meant to know who that is?"
"David Jenkins, creator of Our Flag Means Death only the most seminal queer media of my generation? Oh no, I forgot you don't give a shit about queer storytelling."
"I support the queers! Gay men love me! I hired Marcus and Damien, both gay men. And my Pride float, every year, come on, Ava. Oh, oh! And I let Kayla grind on me at the last parade. "
"Okay. That's rad." If anything Ava was a little jealous. She continued, "But none of those are about queer storytelling so if you’re really an ally you’d listen to me, a queer storyteller. Back to David Jenkins. Before Our Flag Means Death, he wrote this show called People of Earth and hired a bunch of SNL comedians including Wyatt Cenac who was on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. And guess what? He confronted Jon Stewart about a racist bit and was punished for it. He got bullied out of the job.
“And do you know what David Jenkins did? That little freak, respectfully. He wrote an entire show for Wyatt, with the villain called Jonathan , who’s actually pretty hot--”
“Ava, get to the point,” Deborah said, rolling her eyes.
“No, okay, hear me out. So David Jenkins wrote this whole comedy show for Wyatt Cenac to like work through the fuckery that Jon Stewart put him through only for him to have sexual chemistry with the villain and by the end of Season 2 they end up having totally gay vibes.”
Ava stopped talking. Deborah stared at her, reminding Ava that Deborah had not spent her childhood chronically online writing fanfic about Ben Affleck and Matt Damon.
“Right, so David Jenkins basically wrote real people fic into a show and then made the guy he was meant to be supporting be sort of sexually attracted to the guy who was supposed to be his enemy. That's fucked up. That's more fucked up than some girl on the other side of the world writing about us sharing a foot-long dildo."
Deborah turned her face away, but there was a hint of a smile on her lips. "Je- sus ! Why would they do that?"
"I guess they, like, understood our connection and wanted to explore that."
"Understood? Understood?” Deborah turned to her again, looking her right in the eyes. “If they understood our relationship they would know we're not a couple."
"Yeah I mean, I know that,” Ava replied, even though it hurt to say it. “But they're just like writing what it might be like if we, I don't know, explored each other's bodies carnally." She said super chilly, her lips pouted.
“Right…” Deborah had finished folding the blankets neatly over her lap. She stared at Ava who was sort of curled towards her and also spread out all at once.
The strap of her camisole was still wayside. If Ava had any of the balls that the fic version of her had, she would reach up and move the strap back over Deborah’s shoulder. It would be the perfect gesture to fill the awkward silence. So she did, not before swallowing hard.
Interestingly, Deborah didn’t flinch. She just watched with her heavy eyelashed eyes as Ava readjusted the strap. Ava dropped her arm to her side lamely. She felt like if she were in a fic that that moment would have been way more sexually charged than it actually was.
“Why did you do that?” Deborah asked, looking at her expectantly.
“I don’t know,” Ava said, shrugging. “I felt like it would be super in character for me.”
Deborah narrowed her eyes. “Okay fine, let me read it.” She made grabbing motions at Ava’s phone. “Give it.”
Ava looked at her phone and considered whether she should tap back into the actual fic that she had been reading or just the page she was on. Unfortunately she didn’t get a chance to make the decision because Deborah grabbed the phone out of her hands.
“Hey!”
After sliding her glasses on, Deborah settled back in her spot and studied Ava’s phone. Ava watched the way she pursed her lips, and tensed her jaw and the way her neck was so slender and beautiful. She wanted to kiss her there.
“How do I turn the font size up? I can’t read this.”
“How about I send you the link and you can look at it on your own phone?”
“Oh, good idea!” Deborah grinned. It was kind of cute how into it she suddenly was.
Ava took back her phone and sent Deborah the link, only remembering afterwards that she had sent Deborah the link filtered to explicit fics only.
“There’s like, totally tame ones in there as well, if you want to look at those instead.”
“I’m good with this,” Deborah said, engrossed in her phone screen. “Can you send me your favorite one?”