Title: Room with a View
Author: simarillion
Fandom: RPS
Pairing: Shia LaBeouf/Zac Efron
Rating: R (overall)
Beta: draft version (unbetaed)
Word Count: 2489 (total: 7478)
Warning: AU, Voyeurism, M/M

Summary: When Shia gets grounded for a month by his dad, he starts spending his time watching his neighbours. One neighbour is of particular interest to him.

Disclaimer: Some of the persons mentioned are real, but there’s nothing real about the story. The events and the interactions are wholly invented, and I do not claim to know anything about the real persons, or their private lives.
This story is made up, and I do not claim to know anything about the characters privat life, and/or their sexual preferences. No money is made with the writing of this piece of fiction.

Author’s Note: This is actually a fic inspired by Shia’s Disturbia. When the question arose about the interest in Disturbia slash, I thought to myself, what if Shia hadn’t watched his young female but his young male neighbour? Here is what might have happened, RPS-style.


Part One || Part Two || Part Three || Part Four || Part Five



Part Three

Early next morning, shortly after his parents have left for work, there’s a knock on the front door. Shia slowly wanders over, his cream cheese bagel still in hand. When he opens the door, he’s greeted by Zac’s bright smile.

“Good morning. I though we might get an early start today.” The smile is accompanied by a pair of smugly fitting jeans, and a shirt which is making it real hard not to stare at his chest and shoulders.

“Huh,” is Shia’s sole reply to the other boy’s enthusiasm. “Uh, did we plan to do something?”

“No, but since I’m at home alone, and you are all on your own the whole day, why not do something together?” He follows Shia into the kitchen, who’s still trying to get his sleepy brain to work.

“You’re lucky, I’m already up.”

“There’s no luck involved. I already knew you’re awake, cause your mum told me when she saw me outside in the garden.” Zac leans back in the kitchen chair. A feat which is not easily done, since the wooden chairs are about the most uncomfortable pieces of furniture, ever.

“Huh,” another mono-syllabic response, but this time it sounds much more awake than the other one before.

“You are not really a morning person, huh?”

The question is almost answered with another ‘huh’, when Shia’s brain finally decides to join them, and he can formulate a more competent answer. “Actually, today I’m really bouncy, compared to my usual form.”

“Well, then let’s take advantage of this, and think about what to do the whole day. I could get more DVDs, but I really don’t want to watch TV all the time,” Zac says.

At this Shia just nods, and then goes back to eating his bagel. After a couple of bites, he remembers his manners and gestures the other boy to the bread and the spread. His offer of food is verbalised with a short and simple ’uh’.

“Thanks.” Zac starts to make himself a bagel, and Shia can’t help but notice they graceful way, he spreads the cream cheese on the bread.

Well, graceful compared to him, and that doesn’t really say much. Shia with his eternal bad luck, would have cut himself with the knife, and then dropped the finished bread into his lap. If he’d been lucky.

“So, what would you have done after breakfast?”

The question is kinda problematic. Shia would have returned to his chair, and started another day of Zac-watch, but now that the other is here with him, he can’t do that. Frantically he starts to think about something that could be of interest to Zac as well.

“Uh, not much. Listened to some music and stuff.” Well, not prefect, but better than admitting that he’d have spied on Zac.

“Okay, well, how about I go over to my house and get the playstation, and we hook it up to the TV?”

“I’m not supposed to play games.” Shia just wants himself to shut up. The chance of Zac deciding it to be lame to stay with him, is getting bigger with every word he says.

“Okay, so what can we do?” The bagel finished, the other boy stretches, keeping his eyes on Shia’s all the while. “Want to watch another movie?”

“Sure.” He gets up from the table, and after putting the breakfast stuff away, heads over to the living room. “I downloaded the new The Mummy movie. Wanna watch that one?”

“Okay.”

He puts the burnt DVD into the player and sits down into the arm chair he occupied yesterday. Zac claims the couch as his own again. The other boy curls into the utmost corner, next to Shia’s chair. The close proximity makes it possible for Shia to smell the clean scent of him.

The quality of the video is not the best since it is a cam shot, but the audio is fine, and there really isn’t that much plot, that a shadow of someone walking by to get popcorn, or take a leek, doesn’t make the watcher miss any essential part of it.

Once the movie is over, Shia gets up to get the disc out of the player. He has absolutely no plan, what to do know. Since he had never planned on entertaining the walking wet dream he’s been obsessing about for so many nights, the end of the movie is also the end of the programme he’s come up with so far.

“D’you want to watch another one?” is his tentative question.

“I dunno. How about you show me what I can choose from?”

“Uh, okay.” Showing his DVD collection to Zac means that he has to lead the other boy upstairs to his room. This is bad in two ways. Number one, there is the great danger of Zac finding out about Shia’s current favourite pastime. Number two, having the other boy in the very same room, he jerked off in, thinking about the other naked, is all kinds of embarrassing, and stressful. Just the though of showing Zac to his room, gets him all worked up.

“Well then, lead on to the DVDs.” Zac gets up from the couch, and the way he folds himself out of the pillows, has Shia swallow hard. The day promises to be long and strenuous.

He climbs the stairs, as if he’s walking to his own execution. The feet seem to get heavier with every step he takes, and his heart is beating hard. Even though the other doesn’t say a word, following silently to the first floor, it seems like every breath Zac takes, is taken right next to his ear, loud and hard.

Luckily for him, the door to the observation room is closed, and so they pass it by without Shia having to explain why there’s a chair facing the window which looks out to the house next door, Zac’s home, and why there are binoculars resting on the windowsill.

“The room’s a bit messy.” More like, a lot. The clothes of he last nine days are strewn all over the floor, and Shia’s sure he spies at least two pizza boxes. He can’t remember anymore, if there’s still a cold slice inside, or not.

“I don’t really mind,” is Zac’s comment to the chaos, which reigns the room. After a short scan of the mess, the other boy steps over a couple of heaps of clothes – maybe clean, maybe dirty – and sits down on the bed, which is actually the only piece of furniture not covered under heaps of papers, clothes, garbage, and magazines.

Shia has to turn away from the sight before him. The boy he has a crush on is sitting on his bed. This image will induce many a wet dreams in the nearest future. What would he give for the other to lie back and ….

A quick shake of his head, and he is back on track, searching for some DVDs they might want to watch. He grabs some more downloaded movies, but gets some classics as well; he doesn’t really know Zac’s taste after all.

Having picked about ten different DVDs, he walks over and hands them to Zac, to let him pick one to watch. All the while the other boy is sorting through the cases, Shia watches him closely. He just can’t help himself. Even though he knows that seeing him sitting on the bed like this is pure torture for him, he memorises the image. It will serve him well late at night, for his fantasies.

The noise of shouting interrupts his appreciation of Zac, and curiously he walks over to the window, to try and find the source of the distraction. He can barely make out the front yard of the Whitakers, where Mr and Mrs Whitaker are fighting. On the ground next to the man are three large suitcases, and he carries two suit bags. Mrs Whitaker is mostly hidden from view, but she seems to be crying, and holding on to one of the three suitcases of her husband.

“What’s happening over there?” The voice right next to his ear, surprises Shia, and he almost jumps back. He doesn’t dare turn around, because he’s afraid of what Zac might see on his face, if they are that close to each other.

“Looks like Mr Whitaker’s moving out.” He carefully takes a little step closer to the window, and therefore slightly away from the temptation behind him.

“Why’s he moving out?” The voice is still far too close for Shia’s liking.

“He found out yesterday, that his wife’s been cheating on him with their neighbour.” Shia takes another step away.

“How do you know?”

“Uh, everyone knows.” His distraction made him slip up. He now has to come up with some explanation that is actually believable.

“No, not everyone knows. We’ve had lots of visitors from neighbours all around, and not one of them said anything about Mrs Whitaker cheating on her husband. Just the opposite, they mentioned them as an example of the perfect couple,” Zac says.

“Well, I kind of noticed, then.”

“You kind of noticed?” The other sounds confused and disbelieving.

“There’s nothing much to do, all day at home, and one day I noticed her heading over to her neighbour right after her husband had left.” Shia decides that there’s nothing to be done about revealing at least a little bit of information about his pastime. “Yesterday, when Megan was over, they started shouting and screaming over there, and we saw Mr and Mrs Whitaker fighting, and Mr Whitaker leaving after punching Mr Grady in the face.”

Zac laughs amused. “You know this neighbourhood turns out to be rather entertaining.”

They continue the spectacle on the other side of the street. Shia notices that there’s movement at the window of Mr Grady, but the other man stays inside this time. He seems to prefer not getting hit a second time.

“Hey, is there somewhere we can see them better?”

The question has him swallow, but he nods and leads on to his dad’s study. From here they have the perfect view at the lawn of the Whitakers. They can hear some of the accusations and pleadings shouted, but most of it does not make it into the room. There is the possibility of opening a window, but then again that would be really weird.

The fight goes on for half an hour, during which Mr Whitaker packs his stuff into his car, and his wife tries her best to keep her husband from leaving. In the end though she’s left standing at the curb, as Mr Whitaker pulls out and drives off. The woman sits down on the sidewalk, crying, and only ten minutes later does she get up and walk back inside the house.

“D’you think they’ll get back together?” Zac asks.

“I wouldn’t know. But, I would not want to stay with someone, who cheated on me for such a long time.” Shia glances over at Mr Grady’s house, but the shape at the window has disappeared.

“Yeah, you’re right.”

Now that their entertainment has left, they walk back to Shia’s room. Zac sits back down on the bed, but he doesn’t pick up the discarded DVDs, he just watches Shia, who starts to grow more and more nervous under the unexpected scrutiny.

“Anything else going on, that is entertaining to watch?” The question is a dangerous one, but since he already revealed that he watches his neighbours in his free time, he decides to take the risk, and update the other boy, about the latest happenings in the neighbourhood.

“Well, there’s this young couple, they live in the house behind ours, who make their own sex tapes.” And with this Shia tells Zac about everyone around them. About big secrets he discovered, funny episodes he witnessed, and bizarre quirks he found out about. Zac laughs with him, asks for more detailed information on some stories that particularly interest him, and makes up funny stories, together with Shia, about the things he saw.

“You know, you’re like that guy in that old Hitchcock movie. The one, where the lead character is tied to a wheel chair because of some injury, and he starts to sit at the window with his camera. He watches everyone in the apartments around him, and then he finds out that one of his neighbours is a murderer.” They are sitting on the floor now, kicking back and enjoying themselves. “The title was something with ‘window’ in it.”

“Yeah, well, no murderers or criminals in our neighbourhood, so far.” Shia says.

“So far. It would be fun though, to solve a crime or something like that, huh?” Zac stretches, and leans back against the bed behind him. “We could collect evidence and search for clues.”

“Beats watching movies any day.” And it would be the perfect excuse to have the other boy over every day. Then again, he wouldn’t get to watch him swimming in the pool.

“You bet. So, what have you discovered about us, so far?” The question almost has Shia start to hyperventilate.

He could of course pretend that he didn’t spy on Zac and his family, but after all the information he revealed about everyone else, there’s no way the other will believe him that.

“Uh, well not much. Your parents are gone a lot of the time, and that you like to read, play basket ball and swim.” He swallows nervously, his voice almost breaking. “No great discoveries and secrets so far.”

“Damn, we are one boring family compared to everything else that is going on here.”

Shia doesn’t really think them to be boring, but then again Zac wouldn’t really be interested in watching himself swim all afternoon. The information about why he spent a whole afternoon watching the other boy swim, is even less what the other wants to and must know.

“So, which house is the best to watch at this time of day?” is Zac’s question.

“Um, the Burrows, the house behind yours.”

The answer has Zac get up from his spot on the floor, and he rubs his back.

“Man, the floor really isn’t the best place to sit.” He smiles at Shia. “Come on, let’s go and do some watching.”

Nervously Shia gets up and follows the other to the closed door of his observation room. At least now he can pretend that there’s another reason for his binoculars and the chair at the window except the vantage point which allows him to keep an eye on the pool.

“Awesome, you have binoculars!” is Zac’s happy exclamation, as he sits down in Shia’s chair, forcing him to stand right behind it, to get a view of the Burrow’s backyard.

“We might have to wait a little, but Mr Burrows ought to be out real soon.”

With this words they start their afternoon of neighbour watch.