Work Text:
It was quiet in the workshop in that comfortable way in which it wasn't quiet at all, but none of the sounds disturbed Ben and Hobie's peace: the rustle of a soft cloth over an armoire as Hobie oiled it; the clinks of metal-on-metal as Ben assembled a clasp; the muffled rush of traffic outside, barely audible in their basement workshop; classical music on the record player. Ben sighed, satisfied, as he set the finished watch down on his benchtop. He picked up his long-abandoned mug and had a sip of tea as he watched Hobie.
Hobie, in his apron over his comfortably worn old work shirt and his greying hair in its little ponytail, looked like the kind of man who would whistle or hum as he worked; but he was always quiet, completely absorbed in whatever he was doing. He did smile, though, as he ran a finger over the nearly-invisible join where he had replaced a piece of flaking veneer, or a particularly elegant line of table leg or chair back. He looked perfectly at home as he drifted from workbench to armoire and back, moving between the pieces of furniture as though he could navigate the space with his eyes closed — and perhaps he could. He was a big man, Hobie, nearly six and a half feet tall and sturdily built; someone who didn't know him could easily imagine him as the proverbial bull in a china shop, but he moved around the workshop as easily as if he'd spent his entire life there.
Ben put down his tea and picked up the watch. He nestled it carefully in tissue paper and set it in a box on the benchtop. "Would you like me to start dinner?"
Hobie looked up, startled, as he often did when disturbed at his work. "No, no, I'll come up." He ran the cloth over the armoire one last time before setting it aside, replacing the lid on the bottle of furniture oil, and wiping his hands off on a clean cloth. He wound his way between his projects and over to Ben's desk. "How's the watch coming?"
Ben smiled as he nudged the tissue paper aside and lifted out the watch.
Hobie gently took it, the delicate watch dwarfed by his strong hands. "That's a real nice piece, Ben." Hobie smiled down at him. Gold- and silver-smithing weren't his line, but he'd worked in antiques long enough to have a decent eye. "I wouldn't be able to tell it was ever broken."
Ben lifted one shoulder in an easy shrug. "It was a simple repair."
"You're always selling yourself short." Hobie handed the watch back.
Ben settled the watch back into the box. He got to his feet, looking up at Hobie; Ben was nearly a head shorter. He put one hand on Hobie's stubbled cheek. "You said the other day you weren't sure about that Queen Anne you restored. I thought it was perfect."
Hobie laughed. "What's good for the goose..." He leaned down and kissed Ben, one of his large hands coming up to cup the back of Ben's neck.
Ben closed his eyes. He slipped his arms around Hobie's broad chest, pushing up onto his tiptoes to bring them closer together. When Hobie broke their kiss, letting his hand linger on Ben's neck for just a moment longer, Ben said: "I don't know that expression."
Hobie chuckled as he led the way up the stairs to the main level of the building. He was well accustomed, by then, to explaining English idioms. "What's good for the goose is good for the gander."
"You must be the gander."
"Exactly." Hobie smiled over his shoulder. "Though you're not much of a goose."
Ben laughed. "I'm glad to hear it."
After the dim light of the workshop, it was a relief to come out into the warm sunlight streaming through their kitchen windows. The kitchen was one of Ben's favorite rooms in the house, just behind the workshop. In the middle of its old-fashioned comfort, with hardly an appliance younger than thirty years, it was easy to imagine himself back in his grandmother's house in France.
Though Hobie made nothing complicated, and rarely with a recipe or even a name beyond simply describing the ingredients, he was a good cook. Ben was happy to leave him to his experiments. That evening, Hobie chopped apples and onions on his worn old butcher block, wiping onion tears away from his eyes with the inside of his wrist.
Ben cracked open a bottle of wine and poured them both a glass while Hobie bustled around the kitchen. He thought about the watch he'd just finished, sitting innocently in its box on his bench top. That watch was for an above-board client, but that morning he'd worked on another piece for someone with less licit intentions. While it was actually a forgery, Ben had told Hobie that it was a recreation of a family heirloom lost in a house fire. Telling such lies was starting to wear on him. It was easy to lie. Hobie was so kind-hearted, so ready to believe anything he was told — and that was why it was so difficult. All Ben could do was to reassure himself that despite combining their separate workshops into one, they'd never combined their businesses. If he was ever caught, his crimes should not reflect back upon Hobie.
The scent of onions frying in butter roused Ben from his guilty reverie. He looked over at Hobie, who popped a piece of apple into his mouth.
"Why does frying butter smell so good?" Ben asked, lifting his wineglass to his lips.
Hobie shrugged his massive shoulders. "All I know is that I'm glad it does." He went around the countertop to pick up his wine. Ben held out his hand, palm up; Hobie caught it and kissed it before letting it go. "You could come stand by the stove, but I'm afraid I have to babysit these onions."
Ben kept drinking his wine as they talked about what they'd been reading lately. He'd been in the habit of reading books on art history even before university, but since meeting Hobie, his interests had expanded. That week they'd each been reading about the history of art theft and forgery. Ben's heart had plummeted into his stomach at Hobie's suggestion, but he thought it was better to go along without protest than to risk getting into a thorny conversation.
"I don't think forgery is wrong in itself," Hobie said slowly, adding the apples to the frying onions. "It's another way of appreciating a piece, of connecting to it."
Ben swallowed, choosing his words carefully. "Like what you do with your pet projects." He admired the way Hobie combined parts from pieces of furniture that had seen better days and the styles of their creators with new pieces of wood and Hobie's own artistic sensibilities.
"A bit." Hobie smiled. "I could try to make an exact copy, and it would be beautiful too...but there's something magical in the parts I salvage that I'm not sure I could recreate."
"You could." It was true; Hobie could work magic with wood just as well as any master of furniture.
Hobie looked up from the pan, his face wreathed in fragrant steam. "You have such faith in me." He chuckled as he poked at the apples with his spatula. "If I could, it would be a love letter to the woodworkers that came before me. Honoring their work. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, after all...though flattery is, perhaps, the wrong word. There's no need to flatter a great, and no point at all in flattering a dead man."
"There are some pieces I wouldn't dare attempt," Ben said, "though that's because I don't want to make a fool of myself."
"You could never be foolish."
Ben laughed. "I am often foolish," he corrected, thinking of all he'd done for Assane.
"You would make it charming, at least." Hobie smiled up at him before taking another sip of wine.
Ben inclined his head in thanks, smiling.
"Even when it comes to selling a forgery..." Hobie paused to sprinkle brown sugar over the mixture and cover the saucepan. "As long as they're honest about it, there couldn't be anything wrong in increasing appreciation of a piece, in letting someone see the details they can't see in a photo. Letting them hold the art in their hands. It's reasonable to ask to be paid for their effort." He went to the old fridge and pulled out some bacon, wrapped in butcher's paper.
"What is it about lying that makes it wrong?" Ben asked.
Hobie's hands paused on the butcher's paper. "I've never considered it." He tilted his head as he finished unwrapping the bacon and laid the strips into a pan. Ben sniffed, appreciating the scent, as the bacon sizzled in the melted butter.
"There's a company that engages in...performance art, I suppose," Ben said. "They make hundreds of copies of a given piece of art. They put the original in with the copies. There's no record of which is which; anyone who buys one knows that they likely have a copy."
"That's still being honest," Hobie pointed out, turning the pieces of bacon.
"Yes. But they ask, does duplication — that particular kind of duplication, without knowing which is the original — destroy the original, or destroy its value?"
For a moment, the only sounds in the kitchen were the sizzles and pops from the stove and the rush of distant traffic.
"I should think most of those who buy one are hoping they have the original," Hobie said at last. "They couldn't make any money from selling it, not without its provenance, but they would believe there was something special about the original."
"So what makes the original special? Are any of them harmed by believing they might have it?"
Hobie scooped the apples and onions onto two plates. He lifted pieces of bacon onto each before bringing them to the table. Ben took his plate before clinking his glass against Hobie's. They both swallowed down their wine. Ben refilled his glass, letting the thoughtful silence stretch between them.
"I don't know," Hobie said. "It seems indefinable, but that doesn't mean the distinction doesn't matter. In any case, if someone paid what they believed what a piece was worth, but it turned out the piece was worthless and they couldn't recoup their investment by selling it...that's wrong, for the forger to make money while knowing the person they sold to would lose out."
There was the crux of the issue, the thing that would always come between them. It was the reason Ben couldn't confess his crimes to Hobie. What he did wasn't right, Ben supposed, but those who could afford to spend hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars on art could stand to lose some. Not that he, or Assane, was Robin Hood. They were, in general, as self-interested as anyone else.
Hobie put his hand on the table, palm facing up. Ben put his hand over Hobie's and squeezed.
"Despite your high opinion of me," Hobie said, eyes twinkling, "I don't think I could create something good enough to be taken for an original Chippendale or anything else. This is all theoretical."
"Yes," Ben agreed, his heart squeezing painfully in his chest.
Later that night, Hobie snored gently at Ben's back, his nose buried in Ben's hair. He smelled of sawdust, sharp and sweet, and furniture oil. Ben thought back to when they'd first met, when Ben had moved into the neighborhood. He'd been intrigued by the shop down the street, though it was rarely open. Finally he happened to walk by when it was lit up from inside, casting all the pieces in the front window in a golden light.
It had been magical in there, quiet and dusty. The air was suffused with love for all the pieces within. Ben had trailed his hand over a beautiful chest of drawers and admired a silver teapot decorated with delicate filigree.
The proprietor had come out to say hello. He'd looked like he belonged in the workshop rather than the storefront; even as he talked to Ben, it was obvious that part of his attention lay elsewhere. But he'd had a lovely smile, shy but warm, that came out when Ben asked about his work.
"I do the furniture," he'd said, resting a hand on the edge of a tallboy the way a shepherd might rest a hand on the head of one of his sheep. He'd looked Ben over. "Would you like to see the hospital — that is, I mean, my workshop?"
It had all began, then, with visits to each other's workshops: admiring tables and chairs in progress in one, and watches and bracelets in the other. Part of Ben had fallen for Hobie the moment that shy smile broke across his face; part of him fell as he saw Hobie pick up one of his bracelets ever-so-gently in his enormous hands; part of him fell whenever Hobie poured him a glass of whiskey and shyly talked about his latest project. In all his past relationships, Ben had rarely been the one to make the first move. He'd known very early on that he would have to be, with Hobie. Though he'd prepared himself to be brave, it turned out to be very easy, one night when they were half-dozing in front of the little stove in Hobie's kitchen, to lean over, put his hand on Hobie's knee, and lean in for a kiss. Hobie's eyes had widened much further than Ben had ever seen them — little seemed to surprise Hobie or take him off-guard — before he smiled a heartbreakingly tender smile, put his hands in Ben's hair, and pulled him back in. Later, when they'd gone up to Hobie's room, Hobie had undressed Ben like he was something precious. He'd run his hands over Ben's skin like he was a work of art. He'd taken Ben's cock in his mouth like he was something to savor.
Ben was happy, genuinely happy, with his life. He needed to stop lying to Hobie. That, or stop taking on projects for illicit purposes.
It did not feel that easy.
While Ben loved the challenge of what he did, of working to make sure that his pieces were indistinguishable from the originals, he would be lying if he said he hadn't gotten into the field because of Assane. Assane had said he was done with crime as part of their move to America — though he had said, in the past, that he was done before taking on "one last job" — and he'd stuck to the resolution thus far. He and Ben didn't see each other as often as they had when they were working together in France. Taking on shady projects was Ben's way of feeling connected to Assane. Could he truly give them up, when it felt like giving up more than just an ill-advised facet of his career?
Ben rolled over in Hobie's arms. Hobie murmured something unintelligible, mostly asleep; Ben held his breath as he ran his thumb over Hobie's cheek. Dear Hobie, who never took Ben for granted. Hobie, who, after all that time, sometimes looked at Ben like he was surprised and delighted they were together. Hobie, who gave Ben all the space he needed.
Hobie, who didn't deserve to be lied to.
"Hmm?" Hobie's eyes didn't open as he hummed; Ben wasn't sure if he was awake. His arms tightened around Ben's chest, pulling him closer.
Ben barely needed to move in order to brush his lips over Hobie's chin, feather-light, not enough to wake him. He tucked his own chin to his chest and let himself relax into Hobie's embrace. He had time to think; with Hobie, there was no need to rush.
He had all the time in the world.