listen no matter how depressed I am whenever this post shows up on my dash I fucking lose it I just laugh so hard, it’s such a good post. The way it’s presented? Soap on a sink nozzle, okay clearly this is some sort of handwashing appliance. Then there’s just water going everywhere no further explanation it’s so good I’m so happy
So I started a fun lil thing, idk what i’m gonna do with this atm, but i like it. Some spoilers for Harumasa’s story quest btw, if u haven’t played it yet you’ce been warned. Thinking of calling this Cat & the Canary if i do continue it.
Seth needs an apartment.
He’s been on the force for over half a year now and mostly he’s hopped back and forth from the precinct to his parents place. Which is fine for him! He doesn’t mind it. He’s never been a guy who really needed much personal space, honestly he doesn’t really know what he’d do with most of it given the opportunity. But as he’s once again pulled aside by Zhu Yuan he’s reminded.
“Officer Seth, how are you settling in?” They’re standing in a mostly empty hall, two officers on the far end having a friendly conversation about their weekends.
“Same as last week Captain,” Seth briefly notices that her posture is a little stiff and her smile seems a little worried. “Can’t really complain. You and all the other officers have been taking care of me well! Why do you ask?”
The captain sighs, deflating slightly, “Seth, I know I’ve said it before, but you really should get your own apartment. Qingyi has noted that you sleep here between 3-4 nights a week on average. I’m just worried is all.”
Zhu Yuan and Qingyi have been suggesting this to him for about a month now, albeit more subtly on Qingyi’s part. Seth was beginning to think they make a decent point. He doesn’t mind the barracks, and the lack of a commute is certainly nice, but he doesn’t really have a place to put things, or take his friends to hang out. He just doesn’t know how he’d manage his own apartment… it’s intimidating.
Zhu Yuan’s hand found its way, now resting on Seth’s shoulder as she met his eyes directly. “Promise me you’ll think about it at least?”
“Promise, I will.” He gave her a lopsided smile in return.
Which is why he now found himself sitting on his bed in the barracks. Thinking about it. It’s certainly not like he couldn’t afford a place if he really wanted to, his parents give him plenty in his weekly allowance that he keeps saved up. He just doesn’t wanna live off his parents’ money for the rest of his life. He’s got a decent amount saved up from his salary, so he could probably afford a smaller place for a while.
He pulls out his phone and readjusts his pillow to get marginally more comfortable on his maybe 4 inch mattress. He starts scrolling through some apartment listings. What neighborhoods should he look at though… It’d be nice to live near some friends, have someone to hang out with nearby. He opens a new interknot tab and looks at Zhu Yuan’s neighborhood and wOAH! That’s certainly a bit expensive for what he can afford right now, damn cap, good for you. Hm… who else. Qingyi lives in the precinct because she’s technically government property. Oh, Jane! Wait… where does Jane live? Huh.
Well that’s fine! He’s got other friends outside of work. Like… uh… Oh! Like the managers! Sixth street is pretty nice, and Wise & Belle are always inviting him to eat at General Chop’s, so at least he’d be closer to that. He’s pretty sure he remembers seeing an apartment complex across the street from Random Play. Seth rushes to open a tab and see if there are any open rentals in the building. Luckily there are a couple! Unluckily they’re all 2 bedrooms. Uff, he doesn’t need a 2 bedroom, he barely knows what he’d do with all the space in a 1 bedroom. It’d be so much easier if someone else could decorate the space and help him with all these application processes he knows literally nothing about.
Wait a minute. Seth, you’re a genius! A roommate! ‘Great thinking Seth.’ ‘Thank you Seth, I appreciate that.’
Maybe he does need to get out more…
Hmmmmmmm, a roommate. Does he know anyone who’s looking for an apartment? It’d certainly be easier if he did. Finding someone new to move in with him sounds kinda exhausting. Think Seth, think!
Seth gets up and walks over to the bathrooms to start brushing his teeth as he thinks. He’s so sure he heard someone he knows is looking for a place. He doesn’t think he imagined it.
Ooh! He does know someone looking for an apartment! Or at least he’s pretty sure he does. Didn’t the Captain bring up that Asaba Harumasa was looking for an apartment too? He’s like 83% sure she was talking with Executive Officer Hoshimi about it the other day. He’ll have to ask her tomorrow to make sure.
He excitedly skips back to his bed, earning a few odd looks from other officers trying to sleep in the barracks.
Seth and Harumasa haven’t always seen eye to eye in everything. Harumasa seemed to assume a lot of things about Seth and tended to steer clear of him most of the time while they were at the academy, but when they did talk he was snarky, a little but of an ass, and a lot of what he said tended to go over Seth’s head. But then, just last month they’d had that weird conversation at Port Elpis. Seth had thought they were arguing, Harumasa had said that awful thing about people with Ether Aptitude Regression Syndrome, but then when Seth had yelled at him about it he’d seemed to soften. He’d said “Seth Lowell, you’re an honest man. You’re going to make an excellent public security officer.”
Seth found his tail raising slightly at the memory. It had been such an odd interaction, another strange conversation with Harumasa that seemingly went over his head. His colleague had thought Harumasa was making fun of him, but Seth disagreed. He sounded so… genuine, so sure.
Ahem anyway.
So maybe it wouldn’t be so awful if he asked Harumasa to be his roommate. Worst case scenario if they didn’t get along he knew they could at least be civil, not like they’d really see each other all the time either with the odd hours their jobs could have. Really just weekends, and they would potentially have separate rooms.
Yeah, it was all coming together now. Seth got under the thin sheets of his cot and smiled to himself, committing to ask Zhu Yuan if he was remembering correctly when he sees her in the morning. Though he didn’t have many blankets, Seth felt pleasantly warm as he fell asleep, the memory of Harumasa’s words on his mind.
•••••
Asaba Harumasa is having a fucking rough couple of months.
Sitting at his desk, he thinks over how insanely busy Section 6 has been. First they start going traipsing through Hollow Zero because the Chief wants to obliterate all evil. A noble goal, but it’s hard to slack off while ethereals are actively trying to kill you. Technically this isn’t really the bad part, just his regular job, but still. Then they’re suddenly famous for some reason and he’s got people all over him trying to get his signature, some even trying to find where he lives (looking at you t-shirt guy)! Then of course they were trapped in the VR system at the HIA with a hacker trying to make his ass braindead for real. And as if all that wasn’t enough they got dragged into a fucking conspiracy with a proxy and had to kill the acting-commander of the Janus Quarter because he was committing treason and then corrupted himself into an ethereal. Not to mention last month Asaba had, with the help of the formerly mentioned proxy, gone on a suicide mission to stop his former master’s assistant from harvesting children’s spinal fluid for drugs, then nearly died in a hollow after killing his ether corrupted master. So yeah, bad couple of months.
The cherry on top of it all was that he was being evicted at the end of the month. Some PTA mom had reported him to the land lord. She must’ve either saw his scars at some point or seen him taking his meds or pain killers and assumed he was a junkie. Technically could he fight it? Yeah, but that was so much work for an apartment he barely liked. So fuck it, he’ll get a new one with less nosey neighbors.
Would getting a new apartment be hard? Probably. It certainly wouldn’t be easy now that he was donating a hefty chunk of his paycheck to the EARS kids that Kirishima was experimenting on, but it was worth it. He’d get a roommate. Two birds with one stone on that one, since Yanagi had been bugging him about it. She was concerned about him since the rest of Section 6 had found out about his condition. He gets it, he’s gotten himself a reputation for being a slacker and pretty unserious at work, add that to his recent close call and he doesn’t really blame Yanagi for getting worried. She was specifically worried that he was forgetting to take his meds some days, which was of course ridiculous, he was like 76% sure that he wasn’t. That’s a pretty high percentage! Anyway, because of that concern she wanted him to get a roommate to make sure he remembered his meds. It was a little annoying that she was inserting herself into his care, but he was trying to be understanding for the aforementioned reasons.
Even if the Deputy Chief’s concerns were annoying, Harumasa had to admit that given his current circumstances a roommate wasn’t an awful idea. He wasn’t gonna turn them into his personal nurse or anything, probably wouldn’t even tell them about his condition. Though a nurse had been another suggestion of Yanagi’s. Like he could afford that shit on a government salary. Ha!
Even though getting a roommate was his only option right now, he wasn’t thrilled about it… He didn’t need some stranger getting all in his business. He also didn’t really wanna risk bothering anyone with his night terrors, or worry about them seeing his scars. It’d be a bit of a hassle. Harumasa lays his head down in his arms onto the paperwork he’s supposed to be filing. He doesn’t wanna be perceived as frail or weak or sickly. What he really needs is someone unobservant enough or polite enough not to pry into his life.
The regular sounds of hustle and bustle in the office are briefly interrupted by his phone’s ringer, alerting him to a notification. Harumasa musters all his energy to look up at his phone screen. A text from Seth Lowell? What does he want?
Harumasa will admit he wasn’t a huge fan of the Lowell family in general. Was that fair? Maybe not, but Seth’s older brother left a bad taste in Asaba’s mouth. When he had started at the academy the elder Lowell brother had been in his final year, and he had a bit of a reputation for riding on the coattails of his family name, aiming for a cushy job. He didn’t work particularly hard or care particularly much and it just rubbed Harumasa the wrong way, so the next year when Seth came to the academy he steered clear. Now Seth was a pub sec rookie and his brother was a big wig behind desk who hadn’t worked a day in the field to earn it. It confused and frustrated him. He didn’t talk to Seth much but had assumed he’d be like a mini-me of his brother. He was proven wrong though, he was big enough to admit that to himself. When Harumasa had confronted and pushed at Seth at Port Elpis he’d snapped back that just because the EARS kids were sick, they were not worth sacrificing for drug research that may better New Eridu. Nice to know the Lowell’s had produced one good kid. Maybe he’d be worth getting to know.
Anyway, he opened the text to a somewhat surprising sight. “Hey senior Asaba, I heard through the grapevine that you were in the market for a new apartment! I’m also looking for a new living situation and was wondering if you’d wanna possibly be roommates? I’m currently looking at a couple 2 bedroom places on sixth street, right near Wise and Belle’s place.”
Well. That’s wildly convenient. Someone both polite and oblivious enough not to pry into his life? Fuckin ding ding ding. Harumasa started typing his response.
Uff all this thinking is making him tired. He needs a nap. He’s sure the Deputy Chief won’t mind heheh.
Thanks for reading btw guys, hope u like it. Lmk if you guys like it or have any notes, i’m more than happy to chat about this weird lil thing i thought up lol. Also i probably need name suggestions for Seth’s brother bc i think he has no canon name? And Harumasa’s cat.
I took a bus to a conference today and the bus driver fully stopped the bus to identify and chastise a person who was playing music out loud on their phone. That is how you get me to actually complete the customer service survey specifically so I can give you top ratings
It's days later and I'm still thinking about this man. Full ass bus pulled over to the side of a state highway with the hazards on, stalking down the center aisle intoning "ALL RIGHT. WHO'S GOT IT. YOU CAN'T HAVE IT ON SPEAKER." I want to commission a statue of him. a hero. a king.
you can kinda tell when a writer has spent a lot of time around kids bc they avoid most of the pitfalls that come with writing children. namely, not giving them a too cutesy or twee voice but making them sound more like extremely weird little adults. kids playing pretend will almost never cutely slot into some romantic scenario for the adults' benefit bc the adults are usually too busy cleaning up or wondering what the fuck is wrong with their child. kids also have surprisingly stringent hangups ranging from very petty grievances to downright chauvinist gender roles, more often than not the result of a tragic education but sometimes far surpassing what they were taught in intensity. what im saying is there's nothing inherently wrong with treating fictional kids as stock characters but it's always quite nice to see when they aren't
It's extremely common for very young children to suddenly say something extremely cogent and articulate, that's jarringly inconsistent with their normal speech. This is usually something that they heard an adult say recently. A kid will spend ten minutes telling you a story about how they fought a wolf yesterday using simple sentences of fifty cent words, then nibble a snack, wrinkle their nose and say something like "I feel like Mum was overenthusiastic with the salt today, and not for the first time either" before going back to their clumsy story. (They do understand what they're saying when they do this. Kids' communication is usually held back by their vocabulary and pronunciation, not their understanding.)
Young kids are also a lot more socially aware than people give them credit for. Young children are perfectly aware that adults don't take them seriously. They know when their parents don't actually like them. They listen and remember when adults talk about them while they're in the room. Kids will develop basic abilities to charm etc. from babyhood and will begin experimenting with social norms and concepts of deception, appropriate information, and acceptable language and attitudes in toddlerhood. By the time a kid is five or six, they have solid social strategies for relating to adults and separate ones fr relating to their peers, that they'll continue to refine for the rest of their lives. They will also say completely off the wall shit because they don't have the context to know what is and isn't considered super fucked up yet.
By the time a kid is eight or nine, their main difference from adults is in experience, interests, and ability for long-term focus. An eight year old can think as intelligently and coherently as a thirty year old, they just have less experience and information to draw from, and are likely interested in very different things. They're also likely still slightly hamstrung by vocabulary and literacy, though much less so than a younger kid.
Teens will behave like adults who have little power (a teen is often at the mercy of their parents and the state and rarely taken seriously, which is extremely frustrating) and who are high stress and mid-crisis, because they're going through a transitory period where their bodies and moods are changing and are having to constantly learn and adjust; a fourteen year old in a stable situation will act pretty much like a thirty year old with an oppressive boss who's just left a tumultuous relationship.
#oh is *that* why i feel 14 again after my fiance broke things off with me and i had to move halfway across the continent back in with my ma?
Yeah that's just what humans feel and act like when they're unmoored and powerless and unpredictably changing. Teenagers are pretty much constantly unmoored and powerless and unpredictably changing, and react reasonably to those circumstances.
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