Hissy Fit
Category: Real Person Fic
Characters: Julian Barratt, Noel Fielding
Pairing: Noel Fielding/Julian Barratt
Genre: Hurt/Comfort, Romance
Rating: PG-13
Status: Complete
Length: 1-5k words
Hissy Fit by spiderweb_kiss
“How did it go?”
“Well, Noel threw a croissant at the interviewer.”
“So quite well then?”
Julian shrugged off his jacket and fixed Mike with a pleading please-don’t-make-me-relive-it stare. He and Noel found places to sit among the cast-aside scripts, pens, half-full mugs and props. “We need a bigger office,” Julian muttered, moving a pile of brightly coloured fanmail so he could perch on the window sill. Mike shrugged in agreement because, well, there were five of them and the BBC had only seen fit to give them a four-by-six-foot pokehole to work in.
Rich, on the other hand, was less easily distracted. He wanted to hear more about the interview. Noel and Julian were giving off a non-talkative vibe, but it was too late: they had piqued his interest. “How come Noel’s throwin’ stuff now?”
“I’m not now,” Noel pointed out moodily. “She kept asking stupid questions.”
When he didn’t elaborate on this, a stuffy silence fell. If Noel and Julian didn’t want to talk, nobody else was really allowed to either. It was just one of those things. Fiddling with the red glass ring on his finger, Noel looked carefully at Julian. That coffee-brown hair was falling in his face like it always did when it was damp, and his brow was creased in a half-frown. Julian was a winter flower; he wilted in this sort of sticky heat. It hadn’t helped that Noel had pissed him off this afternoon, but sometimes peopled pushed too far and when that happened, Noel tended to get angry. Especially where things to do with Julian were concerned.
“Er,” Rich said. They both looked a hell of a lot more stressed now, and he still didn’t know what was wrong. Time to be a pushy American. “What’s wrong with you two?” He yelled in his Fossil voice.
“Leave it,” Julian sniped. He was staring out of the window at the London skyline, a blackening sense of foreboding rising inside him. This was not good. This was going to go horribly wrong.
Rich hadn’t expected an explanation from Julian anyway; Fielding was the one who rarely stayed quiet for long. And Noel was about to explode.
Three, two, one—
“It was getting ridiculous!” Noel burst out and everyone looked at him. Julian’s stare went hard, warning. A silent conversation passed between the two, unreadable to Rich and Mike, who waited in silence. Noel broke the intense gaze first. He was too indignant, too angry, to stay quiet. “She kept asking about… personal things! She wasn’t interested in the show at all, was she, Ju?”
“Noel,” Julian said.
“What did she ask?” Mike pressed, looking from Noel to Julian to Rich. Something vague and half-formed floated over their heads: a thought, a speculation that seemed to track Noel and Julian in their kaleidoscopic wake. Mike was tired of hearing it, being asked about it, wondering about it.
“She said,” Noel murmured, his voice muffled behind his hands. Nobody caught the rest of the sentence. Julian pointedly averted his gaze, watching pigeons on the fire escape opposite. He was pretending not to listen because, well, this sort of thing was unmistakably Noel’s job. And if someone had to say it, it damn well wasn’t going to be Julian.
This is ridiculous, Mike thought. Someone had better say it, if they aren’t going to.
“Are you and Julian—”
“Mike, seriously,” Rich warned, but it was too late. Noel’s head had snapped up and he was staring unhappily at his brother. The room fizzed with energy and misery and frayed nerves. “Why,” Rich said, tentatively, “don’t we call it a day?”
Noel slung the prop he’d been fiddling with on the desk and got up. He nodded vaguely at Rich, a sort of thank-you for not pushing it, and opened the door. Then, in a gesture that almost brought the tentative balance of emotion crashing down, he looked back at Julian. After a split second, Julian got up and followed Noel out, silently. The door shut behind them, quiet and final.
“Well done,” Rich muttered.
They were filming the next day. Well, supposed to be. Word had got out about the croissant incident, although details were vague. As far as most of the crew knew, something colossal and quiet and serious had ruffled Noel and Julian’s feathers sufficiently for them to walk out of an interview. That in itself was worrying; nobody had ever known the Boosh boys to be that pissy. The mood at the studio was tense, quiet.
Rich was the first of the cast to arrive, compulsively downing espresso shots and equally obsessively checking his watch. Dave came next, feeling like he was walking into a death trap. “What’s wrong?” he asked Rich as they picked at the refreshments table. Rich shrugged guiltily. It was another fifteen minutes before Mike came in, bad-tempered and dishevelled. The crew half-heartedly set up cameras and scenery, metallic clangs and muted calls to each other punctuating the near-silence.
By quarter to ten it was clear that Noel and Julian were not coming. At ten o’clock the assistant director stood up on a chair and told everyone they could go home. The studio slowly cleared out, until only Rich, Dave, Mike and Paul were left.
Paul approached the three actors clutching his clipboard and looking suitably lost. “Any ideas?” he said.
“We could leave them alone,” Rich suggested, putting his empty mug down. “It’s the least we could do.”
“The least—” Mike said hotly, “What the fuck? They’re the ones…” He sighed, frustrated. They’re the ones throwing things at the press. They’re the ones not showing up to filming. They’re the ones who dragged me into this whole TV show mess in the first place…
There was an expectant pause as Paul looked each of them in turn. He didn’t know what was going on today, he didn’t fully know what had happened yesterday, and frankly he didn’t want to. If Noel and Julian weren’t going to explain matters of their own accord, then he wasn’t going to force it. But they were on a budget. And a deadline was looming.
“What’s going on?” Dave asked at last, and everyone looked at Rich.
Sighing, he leant on edge of the refreshments table behind him. “They need a day,” Rich said at last. “Just leave them.”
End Notes: This never happened and I am making no money from it.
