Work Text:
24 Timbercrest Avenue
Robin’s first thought is, ‘Oh. He’s hot.’
It takes an embarrassingly long time for Robin to recover. He stumbles over his words, focusing too much on the clients toned arms, his bright blue eyes, his kind smile. Robin can’t even remember how many bedrooms the home has, much less the square footage of the guest cottage. He feels a little bad for anyone else who came to this open house, because Chrom is getting all of his attention.
“So what brings you here today?” Robin asks, glancing sidelong at Chrom as he flips through a folder full of floor plans. He can’t even remember what the address of this house is.
Chrom, who had introduced himself earlier with a warm smile and a firm handshake, avoids eye contact, shuffling his feet and glancing around at the kitchen. Yeah, the stainless steel fixtures are shiny and the subway tile is cool, but Robin wishes Chrom were looking at him instead. “Oh. Uh. Honestly, I’m not moving yet, I’m just looking right now.”
“Really?” Robin doesn’t look up, keeps thumbing through paperwork until he finds the one he wants. “No new job? No new girlfriend?” He sets the floor plan-- so it was four bedrooms all along, whatever-- onto the marble countertop and pulls out a pen.
“No! No, nothing like that, no girlfriend.” Chrom gets adorably flustered, taking a step back and knocking over a plastic vase full of plastic flowers.
“Really?” Robin asks, glancing up at Chrom, hurriedly trying to put the flowers back in place as if Robin hadn’t noticed. “That’s surprising.”
“What do you mean?”
Robin doesn’t answer. He carefully writes his name in the top corner of the floor plan, then a smiley face, then his personal phone number.
“Here’s my number. Let’s do this again sometime.” Robin keeps his intentions vague as he hands the paper to Chrom, with the warmest smile he can muster. “It was really nice to meet you, Chrom.”
“Uh. Yes.” Chrom smiles, laughs lightly. He still won’t make eye contact after killing the plastic plant.
1721 West Parkway Court
The 5 bedroom, 3 bathroom colonial is set on the edge of a golf course frequented by all the local politicians. It has vaulted ceilings, granite countertops, a walk-in closet with floor to ceiling mirrors and one of those obnoxious chandeliers in the entry way, the kind with little crystals dangling from it that will refract the evening sunset when it poured through the window.
All Chrom is looking at was the gorgeous real estate agent standing at the foot of the grand staircase. A little too late, he puzzles out that the expectant stare Robin was directing at him meant that he’d just asked a question.
“Yes,” Chrom replies with an unwarranted amount of confidence.
Robin’s eyebrows quirk and a smile almost tugs at his lips, but he patiently says nothing, continues holding his clipboard silently as that gaudy chandelier reflects a glow over his lovely features.
“N-No?” Chrom’s confidence melts away in almost an instant when he realizes he gave the wrong answer.
Robin smiles, shakes his head in a way that isn’t quite chastising. “I asked,” he says gently, “what you think of the tile.”
Tile? What tile? Chrom glances around at the floor, seeing it for the first time. Little details are inlaid in the colorful tile, making intricate floral patterns out of bits of painted glass. “It’s, uh. Nice. Good. It’s good. Looks good.”
If Chrom was at all smooth, he wouldn’t be in this situation. His lack of interpersonal skills had him on his second house showing with this same real estate agent instead of on their second date. It was almost too embarrassing to handle.
Robin politely covers his mouth with one hand to hide a gentle chuckle. “It’s not the only good looking thing in here.” Robin turns away.
“Oh. Yeah.” Chrom quickly looks around, pretending he’s been paying attention all along. “The curtains are very… velvety.” Honestly they were ugly, too big and clunky and… aggressively purple. They seemed to drain the life out of the entire open floor plan. But that was too rude to say.
“Uh. Yes.” Robin sighs a bit and looks back at Chrom with a forced smile. His grip on the clipboard is tight enough it could snap. “W-Well anyway, the last homeowner did the tile by hand. He painted the glass and installed it all on his own. Pretty amazing, right?”
“Sounds like a lot of work. Why’d he move after doing all that?”
Robin’s smile melts into a grimace as he turns and starts up the stairs, pointedly avoiding eye contact. “He didn’t move. He died.”
Chrom nearly chokes on his own spit. “Oh.”
221 Windy Way
Chrom, as it turns out, is an absolute idiot .
In his defense, Robin knows he was vague about the phone number thing.That’s on him. He thought his wording combined with the smiley face was enough of a hint, but he could see how it wasn’t, and he was willing to concede that.
Chrom’s complete inability to realize he was being hit on, however… is unforgivable. He thought that line in the foyer was slick, but it flew over Chrom’s head faster than a missile. Robin still couldn’t figure out if he was dense or just pretending to be, but it was driving him up a wall.
He thinks maybe he’ll be more blunt at the next showing, a lakeside cottage in the woods that could either be a delightful weekend getaway home or the setting of a horror film. No matter how pretty it is, Robin can’t shake how creepy the empty halls are, or the eeriness of the dead silence from the front porch.
Robin keeps trying to crack jokes to ignore the creepiness, stupid, unfunny jokes about property values and lead paint chips, but Chrom laughs anyway, the lovely sound echoing through the overly-mahogany dining room.
Robin grins. “You have a cute laugh, you know?” He leans a little closer to Chrom when he speaks, their arms brushing together. Chrom smells softly of soap and a modest amount of some expensive cologne Robin probably hasn’t ever heard of. The house smells like moth balls and musty paper, and the closer he is to Chrom the easier it is to ignore it.
“Eh?” Chrom’s smile falters, his head tilts to the side. “My laugh is… cube?”
Cube. Cube. Robin wants to smash his head into the marble fireplace. Whatever bizarre olympic gymnastics Chrom does to misunderstand him, he must be a gold medalist. “Yes,” Robin says, clear resignation in his voice. “Cube.”
“I see...” The confusion running through Chrom’s mind plays out across his face in slow motion. “Thank you?”
Robin almost hopes this really is a murder house so he can die and escape this hell. “You’re--” There’s a crash from the kitchen, and Robin instantly takes back that thought about being murdered.
“What was that?” Chrom whispers over the sound of tinkling glass hitting old tile. He steps between the kitchen and Robin.
“I don’t know.” He grabs onto Chrom’s arm with an iron grip without even realizing. “Someone’s in the kitchen.”
Chrom grabs a faux gold candelabra off the dining room table and starts cautiously moving toward the kitchen. On one hand, Robin wants to hiss ‘don’t break that it’s a rental for home staging and I’ll have to pay for it’ but he decides to say something more rational.
“Wait. Wait ,” He hisses, trying to tug Chrom’s arm and pull him back. “You can’t just rush in there. They could have a knife! You’ve got to think this through.”
“There’s no time for thinking!” Chrom shouts, obliterating any chance of planning… or survival. He rushes into the kitchen, kicking the door wide open and weidling the candelabra like a baseball bat, with Robin still clinging to him. “Show yourself, criminal!”
The extraordinarily fat raccoon sitting in the sink stares back at Chrom with little interest. He’s surrounded by shards of the window that had already been cracked, and he has the decorative plastic apple that had been on the counter in his paws.
“Oh.” Chrom says. He drops the candelabra to the floor, and Robin already knows the cheap gold paint is going to be chipped. He buries his face against Chrom’s sweater and decides the bill is worth it for… whatever this experience is.
114 Cottonview Drive
“The filtration system for the pool was just replaced last year,” Robin says, gesturing grandly at the enormous pool that takes up half the backyard. “Do you like swimming, Chrom?”
The sun is setting, casting a warm, orange glow over the spacious, immaculately landscaped yard. Robin’s pale hair catches a warm hue, his eyes bright and his smile gentle.
“Yes.” It’s an acceptable answer this time, at least.
Robin smiles. “Check this out,” he says over the howl of cicadas resting in the decorative cypress trees. He takes a gentle hold of Chrom’s wrist and leads him around to the side of the house, past an herb garden, through an honestly excessive amount of ivy trellises. Chrom nearly trips over a pot of tiger lilies, but Robin puts a warm arm around his shoulder steadies him.
Through a grove of raspberry bushes (honestly, Chrom isn’t sure they’re still at the same property anymore) the two of them come across a pond. Lily pads coat the surface, but Chrom feels like he can almost see something fluttering back and forth beneath the surface.
“Don’t be shy,” Robin says, waving Chrom closer. They crouch in front of the water, so close together that their shoulders brush. Chrom’s heart races as he watches Robin lightly brush the surface of the water with his fingertips.
Within seconds, three fat koi fish swim to the surface. “Sorry, I don’t have anything for you today,” Robin says gently as the fish circle around his fingers. One of them, shimmery yellow with silver patches, headbutts Robin’s hand, and Robin laughs. Chrom thinks it’s the loveliest sound he’s ever heard.
The fish keep circling as Robin looks back at Chrom with a bright smile. “Pretty cute, right?”
Chrom still hasn’t looked away from Robin. “Yeah. Really cute.”
46 122nd Street
Last night Robin had spent a frankly embarrassing amount of time on Yahoo Answers trying to puzzle out if realtors are allowed to formally ask a client out or if there’s some kind of rule against it.
He ended up staying awake far too long watching Youtube videos about the most arbitrary outdated laws in specific parts of the world. He arrives at the cozy 3 bedroom ranch ten minutes late and barely awake with an americano in one hand and the wrong clipboard in the other.
“Sorry, sorry!” He calls out, hurrying up the stupidly long driveway. The mid-morning light catches Chrom just right as he waits on the porch, and it annoys Robin more than anything. He has no right looking so good at this hour of the morning.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Chrom says with an easy smile. “I’m just glad you’re here. You had me worried.”
“I promise I’d never forget you, Chrom,” Robin says with a dismissive hand wave as he unlocks the door and steps inside. Instantly he’s affronted with the sour smell of fresh paint, strong enough to make his coffee feel like lead in his stomach. “Well, I’m sure you can tell all the paint is new,” he mumbles.
“Yeah. But hey, Listen. Robin. Can I talk to you?”
“About the house? Yeah, that’s what I’m here for.” Robin doesn’t turn around. He waves tiredly towards the ceiling. “Nice crown moulding, right?”
“Yeah, nice. And no, not about the house. It’s…”
Robin leads him to the kitchen and sets his coffee down on the counter after taking a long sip. “The house with the pond? The house with the murder raccoon?” A headache is blooming in the front of his skull. He closes his eyes and rubs his temple. “The one at the golf course just sold a few days ago, so--”
“It’s not about any houses.”
Robin opens his eyes and stares blearily at Chrom from across the center island, with a double sink and a hidden wine rack. Chrom is tense, his jaw tight and his cheeks a bit pink. “I’ve gotta be honest with you Chrom, giving people life advice really isn’t my forte, and--”
Chrom slaps both his hands down on the counter like he’s finally found some hidden resolve. “Robin! I’m--”
He falters and Robin stares blankly at him, filling in the blanks with all the most outlandish things Chrom could possible finish that sentence with. He didn’t get a chance to turn on the air conditioning yet and it’s hot and his brain hurts and he’s tired and--
“G-Go on a date with me! Please. If you want to. I didn’t mean to sound so demanding oh god I--”
Robin continues to stare and stare and after a moment everything clicks in his head. Chrom was dense and an idiot but oh god so was he . Had Chrom been trying to ask him out all morning? Had this-- had this been going on even longer? “You’re asking me out?” He asks, idly running a hand through his hair as he watches Chrom fluster.
“I-- uh, well, I guess so?” Chrom is shuffling around vaguely, looking everywhere but at Robin and wringing out his hands.
Robin leans over the counter and takes Chrom’s face in his hands, forcing Chrom to look at him with those pretty blue eyes that captivated him when they first met. “First of all,” he says, feeling clammy and shaky but writing it off as just being from that heavy paint smell, “I asked you out first. The first time we met. That’s my personal phone number, you’ve been waking me up with your 3am texts about houses for days. ‘Let’s do this again sometime’ was supposed to be a date, not open houses.”
Chrom turns redder and opens his mouth to speak, but Robin beats him to it.
“Second of all, of course I’ll date you. So--” Now it’s Robin’s turn to get flustered. He drops his gaze and now feels like the hot spotlight has been turned in his direction.
“That doesn’t count,” Chrom complains. “You said ‘let’s do this again’ when we were at a house. It wasn’t a date so we couldn’t do it again and--”
Robin knows Chrom is about to be right and make him look stupid, so he squishes Chrom’s cheeks a bit and looks up at him again. “How about this: you can have credit for being first but only if you get out of here with me and buy me breakfast. Deal?”
Chrom smiles and laughs lightly, leaning into Robin’s touch. “You can have anything you want.”