Work Text:
“Johnpraig?”
Craig raised an eyebrow.
“Erm… oh, Jraip?”
Craig raised the other eyebrow. “Steph,” he said.
“I know, there must be something snappier…” The waitress arrived with their coffees, and Craig shifted aside the trashy celebrity gossip magazine that had started this ridiculous conversation. Craig had rolled his eyes at the headline Brangelina’s Spilt-up Shock!, which had lead to Steph declaring that smushing together the names of couples was brilliant, and could and should be done to everyone at every opportunity. She had decided that, had she and Max been a celebrity couple, they would have been Stax.
This had soon lead to them both falling into hysterics when Craig was struck with the beautiful realisation that their mum and Jack became “Frack”. (Or possibly “Jankie”, which had the drawback of not sounding like a swearword, but was delightful, nonetheless.) They’d then been faced with the task of figuring out a good title for Craig’s current relationship.
Steph’s face lit up. “Oh, I know!”
“What?”
“It’s perfect!”
“What?”
“J-Craul!”
“What?”
Steph looked absolutely gleeful. “That is brilliant !”
“Brilliant? Steph, we sound like a bad wannabe rapper!”
Steph put on a face of fake sympathy. “Aw, love.” She patted his knee. “What about just Craul then?”
Craig let out a sound that was somewhere between a mad laugh and an insulted snort. “That’s even worse! It makes us sound like some sort of… lurky… thing. Like an insect or a ghoul or something. I refuse to be called Craul.”
But Steph had already decided that she would be running with it until the two inevitably split up again (and even then she’d still be slipping it in whenever the opportunity arose), so just laughed at him and said, “Sorry, but that’s just the best way for your names to go together. You can’t make anything attractive out of ‘John Paul’ and ‘Craig’.”
Craig gave her a withering look, which was somewhat diluted by the fact that he was still smirking a little, and was about to say something about how he thought they were very attractive together, thank you very much, and he would fight to the death against anything so ugly as “Craul” being affiliated with them in any way, but was interrupted by John Paul’s approach.
“There you two are,” he called out, making his way over to them. John Paul smiled broadly at them both in greeting, apologised for his lateness, and sat next to Craig, an arm over his shoulders. “So, what did I miss?”
“Well, we can never be a celebrity couple,” Craig said firmly.
John Paul blinked. “I – we – what?”
“Never. Either that or one or both of us change our names. Most preferably you, because your name’s too long and will only cause more problems in the future.”
“Craig, what are you talking about?”
“Aww,” Steph crooned, drawing their attention back to her. "Classic J-Craul."