Night Watch
Category: The Mighty Boosh
Characters: Howard Moon, Vince Noir
Pairing: Howard Moon/Vince Noir
Genre: Fluff, Humour, PWP (porn without plot)
Rating: NC-17
Warning: Smut (graphic sex scenes)
Status: Complete
Length: 1-5k words
Notes: From a prompt LA gave me aaaaaages ago: ‘I have a head-canon that Vince only ever agreed to work night watch (on the condition it was with Howard) cos he was hoping Howard would make a move – what if once they’re together they role play ‘nightwatch’ so Vince’s fantasies can come true?’
Night Watch by Culumacilinte
The jacket’s a little looser than it was, and the jeans don’t fit his arse like they used to, and his face is considerably leaner than it was when he worked at the zoo, but overall, as he looks in the mirror, Vince thinks the effect is a good one.
He’d even done his hair, which admittedly is maybe a bit much for a sexual fantasy, but Vince had dreamt about this for years; he wants everything to be right. Howard had yelped when he’d seen the fluffed mass of chunky highlights and lowlights instead of the Joan Jett black Vince had favoured for the past few years, and looked at him in concern. ‘Your hair, Vince!’ Vince just laughed. ‘Nothin’ wrong with shakin’ things up, is there? ‘Sides, I can always change it back, easy.’
However narcissistic he is, the sight of himself in his Zooniverse jacket had never before been sufficient to turn Vince on, but, well, it’s all about context, isn’t it? He preens a little at his reflection, pivoting on the heels of his trusty old white cowboy boots, and gives himself a quick grope by way of teasing, or encouragement, before going to find Howard.
He’d decked out the spare room in a surprisingly accurate recreation of the keeper’s hut at the Zooniverse for what Howard called ‘added verisimilitude’. (Howard hadn’t said anything on the subject, but he’d smiled wryly to himself after he’d got over his surprise and vague trepidation about the whole affair. Try and talk to Vince about theatrical traditions of set-dressing and the way costume influences character and he’d scoff and complain about it being boring and pretentious, but frame it in a context he appreciated and he was all over it). Howard’s there already, puttering around and fiddling with the contents of shelves and drawers, probably trying to get into character or whatever, and Vince grins from the doorway, feeling an excited little jump somewhere around his diaphragm.
‘Howaaaaard,’ he whinges as he throws himself down on the couch. ‘Night watch is so boring. Can’t we at least put the telly on?’
‘It’s night watch, Vince,’ Howard chides, not bothering to turn around, ‘not a sleepover. We’re not here to watch telly and paint each other’s nails, are we?’
Howard’s uniform, like Vince’s, doesn’t quite fit like it used to. His Zooniverse jacket had always been a little snug around the middle; now, he hasn’t even tried to zip it; his hair curls longer over his collar than it ever used to, and Vince truthfully probably couldn’t get away with calling his moustache a cappuccino stain now. Still, the effect is a fucking good one, and Vince happily lets himself fall into the fantasy.
‘Could be,’ he says flippantly, wiggling down further into the sofa and kicking his feet up on the arm. He wishes he’d thought to find a piece of gum. He arches his hips up a little mid-wiggle, half to show off just in case Howard turns to look, and half just for the sensation, tight denim against his already stirring dick. ‘It’d be fun,’ he wheedles.
Howard turns to give him the kind of stern, Aggravated Superior look he used to give Vince all the time, and Vince feels it right down in his hips, the giddy jerk and the impulse to prod at Howard until he makes good on the promise of that stern look. ‘Have you done the Moonlight World?’
Vince rolls his eyes, resisting the urge to grin. ‘Yeahhhh. Everyone’s all settled in; I checked with the bats, they’re not up to anything too crazy tonight.’
Howard nods judiciously, and when he actually ticks off a box on a checklist he’s apparently made up, Vince has to wriggle on the spot to hold back the fond laughter bubbling up in his chest like fizzy lemonade. ‘Good,’ Howard intones. ‘I’ve been round to the aviary and the Reptile House and checked the lookout booth–’
‘Yeah, yeah,’ Vince interrupts, ‘and I’ve checked with the monkeys and all; everything’s locked up, honest, Howard.’
Howard harrumphs and ticks off two more boxes, and Vince shifts his arse a little against the couch cushions. ‘I dunno why we even have to be here, there’s nothing to do.‘
Finally, Howard turns to look at him, and Vince flashes him a grin with a cheeky bit of eyebrow action, running his tongue over his front teeth. They could find something to do, that grin is meant to say. Howard doesn’t turn bright red, the way he’d done when they were first figuring out their relationship, nor does he entirely ignore Vince’s blatant flirtation as he had before that. Instead, he just stares at Vince’s mouth for a moment, his own tongue touching wet and pink at his lip, before blinking and turning hastily away to fiddle with more of the set dressing. It is shockingly hot, that play of stymied wanting, and that takes Vince by surprise.
The thing about Howard is that he isn’t actually that good an actor, no-matter how he might bluster and boast about Gogol and Stanislavsk-whoever, but now he keeps darting these looks at Vince, all sneaky-like out of the corners of his eyes like he’s not sure he’s allowed but he can’t help it.
He’s hard too; they’re both hard, Vince flopped out on the couch and Howard making a show of nervously moving around and organising things. Vince hadn’t anticipated that the waiting would be so delicious. Normally, he hates to wait, but now – it’s like a strange echo of what he remembers from night watches at the zoo, the nervy, strung anticipation that twisted itself up in his throat of maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe tonight Howard’ll do something, make a move, and all the images he’d had to pretend weren’t banging around the inside of his head like a technicolour porno.
Admittedly, Vince hadn’t thought Howard would drag it out quite this long, but there’s something exciting about that too. Vince can wheedle and goad and tempt and make a show of draping himself over the furniture, but Howard’s the one who gets to decide when to make his move. Vince knows he will, just not when, and that makes the difference.
‘Well,’ Howard says eventually, clearing his throat, ‘We, uh, we’d better get to sleep, little man. Lots to do in the morning.’
For the first time, Howard has the stilted sound of awkwardly reciting lines from a script, but Vince isn’t fussed. If anything, it makes him smile; if they weren’t playing this particular game, he’d have to kiss Howard for that, for his sheer, stupid Howardness.
Vince changes into his pyjamas right there, as he’d done on more than one occasion back at the zoo, and revels in more of those furtive glances from Howard. His cock is straining the fabric of his purple cotton pants, a hard bulge that he can’t help giving a little squeeze before he pulls his jammie bottoms on, and he startles when Howard snaps at him.
‘Vince!’
He blinks up at Howard, genuinely confused, to see Howard giving him that stern look again. ‘You are in company,’ Howard sniffs. ‘If you think you can keep your animal urges under control for one night? I don’t need to see that.’
You sly rooster, Vince thinks, but he pulls an awkwardly contrite face, tugging his pyjamas on. ‘I was just adjusting myself, ‘s all,’ he mumbles, trying to sound sulky, and he thinks he can see a brief flash of a smile across Howard’s face as well.
The sleeping bags had always been Vince’s favourite part of night watch, for more than one reason. One time, he’d zipped himself all up into his, nothing but his head poking out the top, and scooted around the floor of the hut, pretending to be a caterpillar and laughing all the while at how ridiculous it was. Howard had sighed and said he wished Vince would hurry up and pupate. But actually sleeping in them – there was something a bit naughty about it, Vince had always felt. Like teenage sleepovers in those American films where kids always ended up playing Spin the Bottle or whatever. Lying next to Howard, listening to his breathing, watching his chest rise and fall with it, heads close enough that sometimes their hair would brush, that he could feel the heat of Howard’s body and smell the sleeping smell of him; it was wonderful and horrible all at once. Sometimes, if he was really sure Howard was properly zonked out, he’d have a sneaky wank. Sometimes, even better, Howard would do the same, and Vince would lie there, turned away from Howard and trying as hard as he could to keep his breathing deep and even and sleeping, when all he wanted to do was rub himself against the floor, or his own hand, or something, to the accompaniment of Howard’s snagging breaths and the dirty sounds of flesh on flesh.
Now, Howard knows all that, and Vince’s cock twitches a little as Howard turns off the light and they both wiggle down into their sleeping bags. ‘Night, Howard,’ Vince says, into the half-dark of the room.
‘Night, Vince.’
Vince isn’t sure how much time passes; enough for him to mentally hum the first verse and the chorus of All the Young Dudes, before he speaks up again. ‘Howard?’ It’s a whisper. And then, a little louder: ‘Howard? Howard? Howard? Howaaaaaaard? Howard?’
‘I am trying to get some sleep,’ growls Howard, twisting heavily around in his sleeping bag. ‘If you don’t shut up, I’ll put a move on you, just you wait.’
And that’s it, that’s the cue; Vince’s stomach twists itself up in excitement, his breath catching up in his throat. Even though it is just pretend, for a breathless weightless instant, Vince feels it like it’s real, like this is Howard finally doing what Vince had dreamed about, all pounding nerves and giddy, disbelieving arousal. Vince isn’t much of an actor, but he’s always been good at playing pretend. He swallows. ‘Howard?’
Howard puts a move on him.
Vince hadn’t bothered to zip up his sleeping bag, and Howard knocks the flap of it back, big warm hand at his crotch in a moment, kneading him through his pants, and Vince makes an embarrassing whimpery noise. He’s been hard all night, and finally, finally getting a little proper handling has his hips bowing up into the touch.
‘What’d I tell you?’ Howard breathes roughly, and Vince laughs around his gasp.
‘Shut up?’
‘And you couldn’t even do that.’ Howard’s hand is inside his pants now, shoving them down, curling around his dick, all wonderfully familiar long, strong fingers and callused fingertips. ‘No-one respects me at this zoo,’ he grumbles, but his voice is breathy and strained with arousal, and Vince keeps laughing, helpless, giddy giggles, too overwhelmed to do anything else, until Howard shuts him up with a kiss.
This isn’t acting anymore; Howard during the zoo times would have been frozen with nerves, no idea what to do even if he had managed to make the first move, awkward and inexperienced and probably would have kissed like a guppy. This is where Howard’s so-called verisimilitude goes out the window. This is Howard now, who knows exactly how to kiss Vince breathless, acting out Vince’s fantasy, and it’s amazing. So Vince moans, and wriggles, fucking up into Howard’s hand and kissing him back with sloppy relish. Moving to kiss him had pressed Howard up against Vince’s side, and he can feel the twitching heat of his cock against his hip, and that makes Vince moan too, tilting his chin up to suck on Howard’s tongue. Howard looms above him, and Vince feels pinned to the floor with the force of the kiss and Howard’s big hand on his cock.
‘You were looking earlier,’ Vince accuses in a hitching breath when the kiss breaks. There’s room for breath between them but not more than that, and his lips catch on Howard’s moustache and saliva-slick lower lip with every movement. ‘Weren’t you? Havin’ a sneaky look at me fiddling with meself. Like a big old pervert.’
For a moment, Howard just stares at him, the kind of intensity that sometimes makes such a change from his usual darting cockerel-eyes that it makes Vince feel a little squirmy. Sometimes, it’s a little freaky; now, it just gives Vince more of that giddy, juddering feeling of being deliciously on a precipice. He suspects it’s just Howard trying to figure out what to say next, but he doesn’t care. ‘Yeah, I was looking,’ he says eventually, and another one of those tiny smiles gusts across his mouth when Vince’s cock throbs with the admission. ‘You wanted me to, didn’t you?’ he continues, twisting his fist, stroking with his thumb. ‘Prancing about in your pants, draping yourself all over the sofa like a little tart. You wanted me looking.’
Vince suspects dizzily that if he’d heard any of that from Howard when they’d actually been at the zoo, he would have come on the spot. Possibly combusted. Howard’s voice is obscene when he gets himself out of his self-consciousness long enough to use it. He’s a right fucking dark horse sometimes. ‘Yeah,’ he murmurs. ‘Fuck, yeah, yeah, I did.’
‘Peacock,’ Howard accuses fondly, and Vince is about to say something in return, when Howard pushes himself down and all but swallows Vince’s cock. Zoo times-Howard wouldn’t have known how to suck cock, either, but Howard now is a fucking expert, and Vince’s eyes cross at the sudden, gloriously wet suction.
‘Christ, Howard,’ he groans, clutching at the stripy cotton of his pyjama top, toes curling as Howard licks a stripe up the underside of his cock, head bobbing and tongue pressing and generally employing every trick in his arsenal to make Vince fall apart at the seams. ‘Thought about this for so long,’ Vince breathes, eyes glassy and not really seeing the ceiling. Because even though Howard knows all this already, Vince has told him, that’s why they’re doing this in the first place, Vince has never been very good at shutting up during sex. ‘Fu-uck, thought about waking you up like this in the morning after a night watch, or – Christy, doin’ it outside ‘cos there’s no-one here. You’re so bloody distracting, you’ve no idea; always tellin’ me off for – ah! – daydreamin’ on the job, ‘s ‘cos I’m thinkin’ about you, wanna make you moan, want you to make me, make me – fuck, Howard–’
It’s only Howard’s hands on Vince’s hips that keep him from doing a backbend when he comes, extravagantly, and Howard swallows every drop of it. Vince’s whole body feels like it’s full of static, and he’s laughing again when he falls back to the floor, rubbery and loose-limbed and entirely satisfied. When he opens his eyes (he’s not sure after how long; he doesn’t have the presence of mind to mentally hum anything this time), Howard is kneeling next to him and starting to look just a little shifty, like he’s not sure if the game is over now that Vince has come.
It isn’t, Vince is fucking sure of that.
So he smiles, pushing up to catch Howard in a filthy, sloppy tongue-fuck of a kiss. Howard’s still hard, cock obscenely and gorgeously obvious through his loose pyjama bottoms, and his mouth tastes of tea and Vince’s spunk, and he whines helplessly into the kiss. Vince grins, breathing hard against Howard’s mouth, their foreheads nearly touching. ‘Lemme suck you off.’
‘Yes?’ Howard says, like he’s confused, and Vince laughs, crowding Howard backwards and up onto his feet.
‘On the couch? Lemme blow you on the couch, that’ll be so hot.’
It takes a moment for Howard’s brain to catch up with the visions that are dancing in Vince’s, but when he does, he smiles too, all shiny-lipped and lustful and just a little self-conscious. And Vince was right, it is fucking hot when he gets down on his knees, nostrils full of the smell of Howard and the old leather of the sofa, Howard’s big hands in his hair, and sucks until Howard’s a whimpering, moaning mess. Vince doesn’t swallow; he clambers up into Howard’s lap and kisses his come into his mouth, and Howard sputters and Vince laughs and they both end up snogging thoroughly enough that after a few minutes, there isn’t a trace of it left.
‘So that was, uh, what you imagined?’ Howard ventures, once Vince has given up on the kissing and just flopped to the side, slumped over the couch and Howard’s lap, flushed and half-naked and thoroughly, thoroughly happy.
Vince reaches for his hand and gives it a little shake. ‘M not gonna take the piss outta your acting chops in the future, I’ll say that much.’
Howard frowns vaguely down at him, like he feels he ought to defend the honour of his acting skills, but can’t quite muster the brain power to do so. Vince laughs again. ‘It was genius,’ he assures him. ‘Seriously, Howard, that was – yeah, wow.’
And that seems to satisfy him. Vince isn’t ordinarily the list-making sort; he leaves that to Howard. But if Howard can be a dark horse about certain things, so can Vince, and right now, he’s definitely compiling a mental list of other games they might play later.
