cleverly disguised as a responsible adult

I am 40 today. Huzzah. I have spent the day at work, as per, baking myself a cake, and feeling grumpy because my wife's flight home Sunday was canceled due to tornadoes in the vicinity (you cannot make this shit up), which means she's not getting back until very late tonight instead. So to distract myself, here, have a fic.

Somehow I churned out 18k words in a week for this. It was supposed to be a quick and silly meet cute. IDEK. Happy birthday to me.


ready to dive (18468 words) by kaydeefalls
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Heartstopper (TV), Heartstopper (Webcomic)
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Nicholas "Nick" Nelson/Charles "Charlie" Spring, Darcy Olsson & Charles "Charlie" Spring
Characters: Charles "Charlie" Spring (Heartstopper), Nicholas "Nick" Nelson, Darcy Olsson, Elle Argent, Tao Xu (Heartstopper)
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Pride, Strangers to Lovers, Romantic Comedy, mass transit mishaps, strangers to friends to lovers speedrun, queer found family is so important, Hijinks & Shenanigans, Sexual Content, this is not a slow burn for once, they've got the hob on medium high and are jumping right into it, Meet-Cute, the mildest of angst before a happy ending, Confident Charles "Charlie" Spring (Heartstopper), Smitten Nicholas "Nick" Nelson
Summary:

In which Darcy is a drunken chaos gremlin, Charlie has to clean up their mess, and missing the last train of the night might just be the best thing that Nick has ever done. (A Pride-themed uni meet cute AU, because why the hell not.)