Happy (early) birthday, @vexic929!!
I wrote you a little gift fic with your OCs Mihael and Alex!! It's not quite pure fluff, there's a bit of character study in there (god I hope I did it right... lol), but there are some sweet moments in there regardless :D
____ Bittersweet
Word Count: 1.8k Content Warnings: Mentions of disordered eating, mentions of medical treatment, brief mentions of violence/injury
____
He was just walking out from the lecture hall when his phone pinged twice in rapid succession. Mihael steered himself away from the crowds, using the marble pillars of the building behind him to shield his body from the bitter wind, and fished his phone out of the pocket of his jacket. There were two notifications waiting for him, both from Alex.
The first was a text: coffee and a bagel from the student union café :) you survived midterms!!
The second was a Venmo - erring on the side of generous for something as simple as drip coffee and a bagel with cream cheese, but that was just how Alex was.
Mihael’s first impulse was to cram the phone back into his pocket and keep trudging back towards his dorm. Even with his last midterm now officially in the books, he was stressed, and stress had a habit of amputating his already meager appetite. The thought of food raised a strange paradox within him: his stomach growled and clenched with need, and yet a faint nausea swirled behind his eyes.
His second impulse, perhaps a bit more cerebral than the first, was to pause and think things through. Alex knew about his little… eccentricities when it came to food. That was probably why he’d sent over the money in the first place: a treat, a surprise reward for making it through his exams, but also because he’d known Mihael hadn’t eaten in two days. This last midterm had been the one he’d been dreading the most, and fervent studying had overwhelmed any hunger.
Alex was smart, and damn observant. Mihael knew he wouldn’t demand a picture of the food or anything nearly that controlling, but he also knew the money was more than just a spur-of-the-moment gift.
It would be wrong not to at least try, he thought. For Alex’s sake.
Mihael turned on his heel and made for the student union.
As he walked, tucking the collar of his coat up to shield his shivering frame from the wind, his thoughts continued to turn.
Alex did this sort of thing a lot. Not so much that it became obtrusive, sure, but enough that the pattern was clear. He’d invite Mihael over to his place, and there almost always was a bakery box on the counter or a half-empty pizza box in the fridge. He had microwave popcorn when they watched movies, bowls of nuts and chocolates and dried fruit on the coffee table whenever Mihael came over after his classes, chips and drinks and filler-food for the weekly DnD sessions.
Felt like something special this morning. Those chocolate croissants are to die for, though - you should try one.
Roommate and I didn’t feel like cooking last night. Reheats pretty well, though. There’s a couple slices still in there, if you’re hungry.
Check these out: chocolate amaretto pecans. Bought them from this little shop across town. They’re killer with the dried apricots, too.
Those were nice enough. His intentions were crystal-clear, and he was sure Alex knew it, but it was at least a more nuanced ploy than simply shoving food onto him. It was… a gentler approach. More unobtrusive.
Much as Mihael loved his mother, or the others in his family who wanted so badly to help him, their methods didn’t work. Not usually. Even if he could manage to choke down a few bites, the old “you’re too skinny, you need to eat something” play was infinitely more likely to make his pride and stomach both shrivel to the size of a kidney bean. He knew he had a problem. He knew they knew he had a problem. But there was a level of… mental trickery, cauterization of memory, that he could only achieve with the subtler play.
Appeasing his hunger was like trying to catch a wild hare. If he looked right at it, if he moved too fast, it would bound away before he could ever hope to snag it. Instead it took nuance, misdirection, a way to look at his hunger only out of the furthest corner of his eye and snatch it only at the most unexpected of times.
Mihael hopped up the steps to the student union and banked a swift right towards the café. There was a line out the door and then some. Apparently half the collegiates on campus had also decided to celebrate the end of their exams the same way, or at least decided to grab a quick refuel before the next one.
His nose crinkled at the sight, and he nearly bowed out there, but he propelled himself diligently towards the end of the queue. He was already in it now, he thought. He’d walked all the way here, and it wasn’t as if he had another class to get to. And the smell of roasting coffee beans drifting from the door of the café did make his mouth water.
Besides, it gave him more time to think.
Alex had taken up cooking. That, too, he seemed to attack with more nuance than Mihael would have expected.
That comfort food you like… rarebit? Will you show me how to make it?
He presented it as an act of love, an interest in Mihael’s past and his culture that happened to overlap with crafting something he might be willing to eat. Once again, Alex’s intentions were obvious, but Mihael could pretend they weren’t. It was a kid’s Halloween costume, a Party City disguise, but that was good enough.
There was one little ploy, Mihael thought, that had been particularly clever.
He moved a few paces up the line, now close enough to see the baristas flurrying about behind the counter, and turned his attention back towards those thoughts. It felt disingenuous to call anything Alex did a ploy, as if everything was purely logic and cunning and not the tricky acts of love he knew they were, but… that one had been a ploy. And sometimes the ploys were necessary things.
Got called away for a few days. Mind watching my apartment while I’m gone? I’ve got those ferns that need watering, and the food in the fridge’ll spoil if it’s not used.
That alone didn’t seem all that clever, Mihael thought. Not Alex clever, at least. That was the sort of thing another of his friends would have said, someone with pure intentions but much lesser knowledge into the workings of Mihael’s brain, and Alex was usually so much trickier than that. But in any case, he’d agreed to watch the apartment, and had even made a promise to himself to eat something out of the fridge.
It had seemed an impossible task at first. Alex had started that new job - that confidential job, the one that meant he was sent away and nearly impossible to contact for days or weeks on end, the one that meant he came home all battered and bruised like an amateur boxer - and Mihael’s stress over that had twisted his stomach into knots. He wasn’t fond of Alex’s new job, and especially in the early days.
The cleverness of the ploy came when he’d opened the fridge. There, among half-empty condiments and three-day leftovers, was a Tupperware container with a note on it.
Eat on Tuesday - we’ll share dinner :)
-A
There was the real genius of it all. It came from love, and the desire to share a meal with his partner even when they were miles apart. And in a way it came from luck- some irrational feeling that if he didn’t share that meal with Alex, something might go wrong. Mihael had never been especially driven by superstition, but that was the tick over the edge he needed.
Mihael finally reached the counter and ordered his coffee and bagel- and then, on a whim, a brownie from behind the pastry counter. It was practically dripping with chocolate, and brought him a pang of hunger that was shockingly pure, untainted by his mind. Alex’s Venmo was easily enough to cover all three, and Mihael wondered if that too was all by design. It wouldn’t be the first time, he thought. Alex was so smart it almost scared him, and he’d been able to read Mihael like a book from almost the day they met. Somehow, he found that sweet rather than strange. It was nice to be known, when so few people were able to look into his head in that way.
He collected his order and wandered until he found a seat within the student union. His first bite was forced, like it almost always was, but the snake wrapped around his mind seemed to loosen its grip after that much. Before long, he was looking at an empty wrapper, marred only by a few dark crumbs and a smear of frosting.
Mihael decided not to consider that a victory. Calling it a victory would just place it on a pedestal in his mind, would make it harder to climb back up to that again. It wasn’t a victory. It was breakfast. Whether or not it was the first breakfast he’d been able to keep down in weeks was beside the point.
Maybe he could meet Alex for lunch. Today was a better day, or had at least turned out to be a better day, and maybe he could mesh his present victory (not a victory, this is breakfast) with his desire to see Alex again before he shipped off to his next mission. Maybe he could manage another good meal today. He’d learned to ride that high while it lasted.
Mihael’s last doctor’s appointment told him he’d gained six pounds since the start of the semester. That might not have seemed like much, to another person, but to him it was a colossal victory - and a victory that he could consider a victory, because it represented a larger goal than being able to stomach a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon in the morning.
Part of that was the medical practices, he knew it: the nutrition supplements, the weekly therapy sessions, the various meal-planning and scheduling strategies he’d been implementing to make food seem like a less daunting task. Part of it was his family, and that wider support net: his mother who called him every evening with enough conversation to distract him through his supper, his cousins who sent him care packages filled with snacks and delights from back home, his uncles who worked in town and invited him out to lunch most weekends.
But part of it- most of it- was Alex. Alex with his little tricks, Alex who always had a snack on the counter, Alex who seemed to steady him like nobody else could. Alex who wanted to see him healthy, Alex who knew how to help without overstepping, Alex who could distract Mihael from the darkest corners of his mind like nobody else could.
Yes, Mihael thought, already reaching for his phone. He’d ask Alex out to lunch.
