some people become your home

Sims 4 stories, lovingly staged and written with great dedication.

[amayarasims]

a little about me & what i make

Lena Vane · storyteller · she/her

"Some people change your life. Some people become your home."

I write soft hearts and hard people, the quiet devotion between those who've been through something together, and a little bit of the supernatural where it counts. Love stories, found families, and the long way home.

Everything begins in the sims for me — it's my sketchbook, my storyboard, the place my characters come to life before they ever reach the page. So you'll find both here: the images and the words, side by side.

The Only Face I Keep is available now on Amazon KDP.

I make all of this simply because I love to. No pressure to like or reblog — I'm just glad you're here. Stay a while.

[amayarasims]

Hot Tea Legacy Gen 1

Late

He came in still wearing the cap. That was the part he'd remember later, not the rest of it. He didn't get as far as taking off his jacket.

Sakura was awake. Not crying, just lying there with her eyes open in a room that had gone dark around her, waiting for someone to notice. She hadn't been fed. He checked, and then he checked again, because there was a version of the evening in which he was wrong about that and he wanted very badly to be wrong about that.

Rohan was at the kotatsu, eating.

Brooks fed her. Changed her. Put her down and stood there with one hand on the rail until she went under. Then he went to the kitchen and did the dishes that had been sitting since the morning, because he couldn't cook anything with the sink like that, and he hadn't eaten since a coffee at the stall.

He didn't say anything. There was a sentence available to him and he could feel the shape of it, and he knew exactly how it would sound out loud: petty, keeping score, ungrateful to a man who'd carried flour sacks for him all through the winter.

So he ate standing up, and he went to bed, and he filed it with the other things he'd decided not to say.

There were more of those lately than there used to be.

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Deandre Estes <3

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Brooks with his Daughter Sakura

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Hot Tea Legacy Gen 1

Sakura

He held out through dessert. Through the last of the wine, through Ren saying something he pretended not to hear, through everyone finding their coats. He was the host. He wasn't going to be the reason the evening ended.

By the time the apartment was empty it was too late to go anywhere.

Rohan went down in the living room. One moment upright, the next flat on the floor, and Myron carried him to the sofa and left him there because there was nothing else to do with him.

So it was Lucien. Who turned out to be a doctor, which Brooks had known and never had cause to think about, and who took over the way people do when they've done it before. Sway with me. Breathe out longer. Myron behind him with both hands on his back and no advice, which was somehow the more useful of the two.

Nothing was ready. He'd packed for a hospital, not for his own floor. Myron went out for supplies and was back so fast that Brooks registered it as strange and filed it somewhere behind everything else. He had a great deal else.

She came on the tatami, in the room with the low table, some hour with no name.

Sakura.

He named her for the trees on the bridge, the first thing in this country he'd stopped walking to look at. Rohan came round on the sofa an hour later and Brooks let him hold her and said nothing about missing it.

[amayarasims]

Hot Tea Legacy Gen 1

Pink

Rohan wanted a party. Brooks wanted a quiet afternoon and lost, cheerfully, the way he lost most arguments with Rohan, and so the apartment filled with balloons in colours that matched nothing else in the room and a dessert table he'd spent two days building and refused to let anyone help with.

Everyone came. Yuki, Reese, Lyndsey. Deon. Lucien, who he'd somehow become friends with over a market stall and a shared dislike of small talk, and Myron, who came where Lucien went. Brooks moved through his own living room with a plate in his hand and a hand on the small of his back and found, somewhere between the second and third tray of cake, that he'd stopped counting who he knew and who he didn't.

One person hadn't been invited. He'd thought about it longer than he wanted to admit, and then decided against it, and hadn't told Rohan why.

The cake came out pink.

A girl. He looked at it and something in his chest went sideways, and he set the plate down before anyone could see his hands.

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Hot Tea Legacy Gen 1

Nesting

The hospital gave it a name he had to look up twice, and a list of things to watch for that he pinned inside a cupboard where customers couldn't see it. PPROM. A risk, not a promise. They gave him something for the baby's lungs and told him to come in fast if anything changed, and then they sent him home to a body he no longer fully trusted to behave.

He told Rohan because there was no version where he didn't. He'd braced for a lot of things, but not for how simply Rohan took it. No flinching, no working out of exits. Just a hand over his, and by the end of the week a box of Rohan's things in the genkan next to the geta, and Rohan moving through the apartment like he'd always meant to end up there.

He wouldn't let Brooks lift the flour sacks anymore. He vacuumed at odd hours. He learned which cupboard the list was in and read it once, quietly, and never made a thing of it after that.

It should have been easy to sink into. Mostly it was. But some part of Brooks, the part his grandmother had trained to shake its own head and wait to catch its own mistakes, kept watching all this care arrive and wondering, with no reason and no kindness, how long he'd be any good at holding onto it.

He put the thought away. He got very good, that season, at putting it away.

[amayarasims]

Hot Tea Legacy Gen 1 Two Lines

It kept happening. At the stall, mid-sentence with a customer, he'd have to turn away. In the night, out of bed and down the hall before he was properly awake. Once at the edge of the road on the way home, bent over someone's hedge with a hand against the fence, hoping nobody he sold bread to walked past.

He'd told himself it was something he ate. He'd told himself that for a week.

The test was in his hand before he'd decided to buy it, and then he was standing in his own bathroom in a towel, looking at two lines and doing the math on a body that wasn't supposed to be able to do this and was doing it anyway.

His first thought wasn't Rohan. That came second, and complicated. His first thought, standing on the cold tile with his hair still wet, was of a kitchen too small for two people, and a grandmother who'd shaken her head and waited for him to catch things himself.

He caught this one on his own. There was nobody to shake their head at him now.

He kept it. He knew that before he'd put the test down. Whatever else came apart later, and something always did, this one he was keeping.

[amayarasims]

Hot Tea Legacy Gen 1

Halloween

Rohan talked him into the costume. Brooks would never have picked it himself, the fangs and the red contacts and the ridiculous ruffled collar, but Rohan had held it up in the shop with a look on his face that made arguing pointless, and so here he was, dressed as the one thing he'd have laughed at a year ago.

The party was underground in every sense, some basement lit red, floor glowing under their feet, everyone in costume and nobody quite themselves. He fit right in. That was the strange part. For once he was pale on purpose, strange on purpose, and it made him invisible in a room full of people trying just as hard.

He drank more than he meant to. So did Rohan. At some point the two of them ended up pressed together near the candles, foreheads touching, and Brooks let the night go soft at the edges the way he never let anything go. Best costume of the night, someone said. He raised his glass to it and didn't correct them.

[amayarasims]

Hot Tea Legacy Gen 1

Rohan

The club had been Rohan's idea, or maybe Brooks had let him think it was. Either way they'd ended up there, and Brooks had spent the whole first hour not hearing half of what he said over the music and leaning in for the other half. At some point the leaning in stopped being about the music.

He hadn't meant to hug him. It happened the way things happened to him lately, without a plan attached, and once his face was against Rohan's neck he stayed there a second too long and knew it.

The date was the next evening, and he spent longer getting ready for it than he'd admit to anyone. Shirt on, shirt off. Tie, no tie, tie again. He stood in front of the mirror like the answer was in there somewhere and settled, in the end, on the collar and the tie, because it said he'd tried without saying too much else.

He booked the place by the water with the lights strung over the railing, and he sat across from a man who ate dessert first and made no apology for it, and Brooks caught himself thinking this is easy in a way that should have worried him more than it did.

They kissed by the table before the plates were cleared. Rohan's hand came up to his face and Brooks let it, in full light, where anyone walking past could see.

In the morning Rohan wore Brooks' clothes, because he hadn't brought any of his own. Everything hung off him, sleeves past his wrists, and Brooks looked at him across the apartment and didn't say how much he liked it. He made soup instead, because it was the only thing that made sense to cook at that hour and he needed something to do with his hands. They ate it under the kotatsu with the heat on their legs, Rohan swimming in borrowed cotton, and neither of them said the thing about how fast it had gone.

Brooks didn't have a word for what this was yet. He'd learned, by now, not to trust how good he was at not asking.

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Hot Tea Legacy Gen 1 First Market

He'd made too much. He knew it while he was loading the car, and he did it anyway, because the alternative was standing behind an empty table looking like a man who'd expected more of himself than the town would give him.

The town gave him more than he expected.

By nine the fruit tarts were half gone. People stopped because the stall smelled like something they couldn't place, and stayed because he answered them in Japanese without the pause they'd braced for. A woman bought a whole plum tart and told him her mother used to make something similar, which couldn't have been true, and he thanked her as if it were.

The kids found him around ten. Two of them, red hair and dark, circling back to the pretzels twice until he gave them one to split. Their parents would hear about it. That was the point.

By the time the baskets were empty he'd talked more than he had in the weeks since he landed, and his face hurt from it in a way he'd forgotten faces could.

He drove home with an empty passenger seat where the tarts had been, and thought: again. Do it again next week.

[amayarasims]

Hot Tea Legacy Gen 1 Test Batch

The oven ran hot on the left side. He'd figured that out by the third tray, which meant the first two were a lesson rather than a batch, and he ate the evidence standing up at the counter.

These ones came out even. He put them on a plate because putting them on a plate felt like the right thing to do, and then he sat down across from a plate of cookies nobody was coming to eat.

The coffee was good, at least. He'd brought the beans with him.

He read for a while with one foot up on the chair, and let the apartment smell like a bakery for an hour.

[amayarasims]

Hot Tea Legacy Gen1 First Walk

The convenience store had flour. It had butter, in small foil-wrapped bricks that would cost him a fortune at the volume he needed. It did not have cardamom, not ground, not whole, not anywhere, and he stood in front of the spice shelf a lot longer than a person should stand in front of a spice shelf.

He found the building on a corner where two roads met at a bad angle. Narrow, two floors, the shutter half down and gone soft with rust along the bottom edge. Above it, an empty sign frame. The paint underneath had faded around whatever used to hang there, so the outline of a word was still readable, if you could read it.

Through the glass: a counter, an empty display case fogged from the inside, a calendar showing a month that had happened a long time ago. And behind all of it, in the back room, the shape of something heavy and built-in that he was almost certain was an oven.

He stood there long enough for his coffee to go cold.

The tap on his shoulder came twice before he registered it. An older woman, coat too warm for the weather, shopping bag in both hands. She looked up at him and her face did the thing he'd been watching faces do since he landed, a small recalculation behind the eyes, and then she spoke slowly and clearly, in English, one hand raised in a gesture that meant no, no.

"Closed. Not open. Long time."

Brooks pulled one earbud out, then the other.

"はい、知ってます," he said. Yes, I know. "何年くらいですか." How many years, about?

Her shoulders came down. She answered him in her own language, at her own speed, the way you'd answer anyone: six years, the owner gone to his daughter in Nagano, nobody wanting the corner since.

"ありがとうございます," he said. Thank you.

She said something else, halfway down the street already, that he only caught the end of. It sounded like good luck, and it also sounded like don't bother, and he decided on his own which one it had been.

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Hot Tea Legacy Gen 1

Moving In

The boxes were labelled in English, in his own handwriting, from a kitchen table three thousand miles away. Living room. Bedroom. Books. He'd written them without thinking about it, and now they sat in a genkan the size of a closet, next to a pair of geta the previous tenant had left behind and nobody had thrown out.

He carried them in one at a time. Took his shoes off first, every time, out of habit rather than politeness.

The kitchen had one oven. He opened it, looked in, closed it again. Two trays, maybe three if he was careful, and no proof it held its temperature.

He put the box down on the counter and stood there a while, in a room that was his now, thinking about a shutter across town with rust along the bottom edge.

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Hot Tea Legacy Founder Brooks Yuki Nagase

Born and raised in Sweden, son of a Japanese father and a Swedish mother. He got almost everything from her side — pale skin, pale blue eyes, a face that gives no one any reason to expect the surname Nagase. His hair is the one thing he did himself: dark at the root, warming through copper, blond by the time it reaches the ends. It takes work to keep it that way, and he keeps it that way.

He learned to bake from his grandmother on his mother's side, in a kitchen too small for two people. Kanelbullar, kardemummabullar, dark rye bread, semlor in February. She had him kneading dough before he could see over the counter, and she never corrected him — she just shook her head and waited until he caught it himself.

Moving to Japan was never much of a decision. It was more like something that had always been settled, and all he had to do was steer toward it. He chose Hakuba for the snow, and because a town in the mountains felt close to what he'd left behind.

His parents are still back in Sweden. They call, he picks up, everything is fine, and neither of them says out loud that he isn't coming back.

So here he is, in his father's country, where every shop clerk still tries English on him first, intending to sell his Swedish grandmother's craft to people who have never eaten a cinnamon bun in their lives. He signed a lease, not a season contract. Whether anyone in the valley has noticed the difference yet is another question.

[amayarasims]

another new sim for my Savefile his name is Brooks <3

[amayarasims]