Fake dating Taakitz: Kravitz's weird pushy mom, aka the Goddess of Death, keeps trying to set him up with people, despite having only the loosest of grasps on the concept of "dating," "attractive" or "romance." Clearly a fictional boyfriend is the solution. Lup, who Kravitz knows solely as "keeps getting her boyfriend off of minor necromancy charges by beating me at poker" may have a solution in the form of her chronically single brother. It's a match made in Something.
i can’t believe lup sold her brother to death.
“I’m sorry, you did what?”
“Calm down, babe,” Lup says, as if she hadn’t just admitted to selling him to the literal Grim Reaper.
“I am not going on a date with Death.” Now that he says it out loud, it does sound goth as fuck, but Taako is also not for sale, thank you very much. “What the fuck, Lulu?”
Lup shrugs and continues to eat the chocolate chip cookie she absolutely does not deserve anymore. Taako reaches out and pulls the plate of cookies over to his side of the table, glaring at her.
“You know how Barry’s dissertation research has him looking at correlations between cult rituals and mainstream necromantic spells?” Lup asks, like Taako hasn’t watched Barold scare away strangers literally everywhere they take him for the past five years. “Well, there’s sort of been… you know, a problem when he starts testing those correlations because he’s maybe breaking the laws of life and death occasionally? Only minor infractions.”
Taako glances at Barry, also present, looking sheepish beside his sister. “What the fuck, Barold?”
“Science is the art of testing your hypothesis and making sure you get repeatable results,” Barry says. “It’s not like I mean to do it. It’s just—you know, you never really know with these old rituals, whether they’ll work or not, and it’s not like someone pops up right away to tell you you broke the rules. It takes them a while to get to you, and by then you’ve done a few more and…” Barry trails off and shrugs.
“Right,” Lup agrees. “So Barry does his experiments and everything seems fine, and then Kravitz shows up and starts talking about how he’s broken the rules of life and death and—”
Taako holds up a hand, stopping her. “Kravitz?”
“Oh, right. That’s his name,” Lup says.
“The Grim Reaper’s name… is Kravitz.” Taako glances at Barry, for confirmation of the fact that Lup and the Grim Reaper are on a first name basis, and Barry just nods like this is all perfectly reasonable. “Okay. Kravitz. Sure. Go on.”
Lup rolls her eyes. “So Kravitz shows up and gives his speech, and then we play a couple rounds of poker for Barry’s soul. He’s really bad at cards and, you know, I cheat. So last time we were playing I was asking him how the Raven Queen was doing—”
“You fucking what?” Taako sputters.
“Can I finish?” Lup gives him a dirty look. “She’s like his mom. It’s fine. You can ask people how their parents are doing, Taako. So I asked him how she was doing and how death was treating him. You know, the usual, and he said she’s been trying to set him up with a bunch of emissaries for other gods and it’s not going well, so he told her he’d been seeing someone and she wouldn’t know them because they were mortal, but now she wants to meet him except this fictional mortal boyfriend is fictional. And all I had in my hand was a pair of threes.”
