Stephanie was nervous but more than anything she was excited. The party at Sid's had been nice, really nice. Her friends were funny and she could easily see her friends getting along if not competing for who could roast each other better. She had forgotten what it was like to have a crush on someone who also liked you. Who you knew what it was like to kiss and be close to. Almost every night this week she had gone back to lying on Sid's stomach in her head. But Thursday was here and their reservation in an hour and Steph was still driving Eve crazy about picking an outfit. But she finally decided on an outfit and got in her car, arriving at the restaurant a little early. She had just reached into her purse for her phone when she felt someone coming closer. A smile spread easily on her lips and as she took Sid in, she knew she had it bad. "Hey, softie, you are looking...so fucking good," she breathed out, stepped closer to her to kiss her cheek. "Not sure your view on PDA but if it's okay with you, I'd love to kiss you right now." @smokingaceschw
OCs: Donovan Reid, his wife Emma, and their son Sid
Setting: locality space, specifically the island of Aephar on the planet Rade
Words: 415
Content warnings: minor mentions of blood/a wound
Notes: Sid is six here.
nä-ˈneb
noun
lit. stone
a term of endearment used in the local language of Liepes, Rade. Similar to “honey” but most commonly used between adults and children.
The branch Donovan had just snipped from the courtyard’s kaesuri tree dropped to the ground right as he heard someone start crying. When he looked down, no one was in the midst of his pile of branches, so he turned back to the tree.
“Don,” Emma said in a half-warning tone behind him. He turned on his little stepladder and found her standing there with one hand on Sid’s shoulder and the other hovering in front of her mouth as she didn’t quite look at him. Sid’s face was streaked with tears and his knee was streaked with blood. Ah, that explained it. He stepped to the ground and locked his two-handed pruners shut, trading them to Emma in exchange for Sid, who he ushered back into the house.
In the bathroom, he washed his hands, then found Sid still standing there looking pitiful.
“Sit down,” Donovan said as he pulled a washrag from the rack next to the shower. After he wet it with some warm water in the sink, he turned around to Sid perched on the closed lid of the toilet.
Donovan knelt down, only realizing as he put his knee on the floor that he had tracked in a bunch of dirt, and ignored that to start wiping the half-dried blood off Sid’s knee. The scrape underneath was pretty gnarly-looking, but didn’t seem to be actively bleeding too much.
“You’ll need a big band-aid for this one,” he said. That only made Sid look more upset. “It looks worse than it is,” he added, “but we have to make sure the whole thing gets covered.”
He found an appropriately big band-aid in the box in the medicine cabinet, then got down on the floor again. Peeling the band-aid, he carefully angled it over the scrape so hopefully it wouldn’t stick to any of the painful edges.
“There you go, naneb,” he said, putting a gentle hand on the back of Sid’s head to bring him in for a kiss on the forehead. “Good as new.” He patted Sid on the back. “Go find your friends again.”
Sid scrubbed his hands over his eyes, then disappeared out the door. Oh, Sid’s shoes had been a mess, too. Donovan sighed. Was there any chance he could get rid of this dirt before Emma yelled at him…?
On Gregory’s scale - today wasn’t a terrible day. There was still a spot of snow coating the ground, he’d opened for Ruff to Fluff and now he’d gotten a coffee from Hatters, said hello to Pip and was on his way to spend a bit of time decompressing in the forest. It was basically his schedule these days.
It was a way to relax, after all. The walk there was nice - and the time spent parked beneath the Willow the forest led him to was always unbeatable. Today though... his walk had gone a little different. Today as he rounded the corner from Main Street and was walking towards Enchantra he almost had to do a double take when he noticed a younger man nearby with some of the birds. At first, he figured the man was just feeding them - as most people would. Though he did worry about it being bread or something they couldn’t digest, but as Gregory glanced over again to double check he noticed the teen wasn’t feeding them at all.
No.
The man was instead throwing things at them. Were those...was it rocks? Honestly Gregory couldn’t be too sure, but what he did know was that his irritation burned bright almost immediately. The disrespect for a living creature and the intent to harm upsetting him deeply as he turned on his heel and sped up the best he could with a still healing wound.
“...Hey.” Gregory called out when he got a little closer, his tone wavering slightly even if his intention was firm. “Leave the bloody things alone, would you? What’s wrong with you - they’re living animals. Have a little respect.” The man chided, brows furrowing deeply in discontent as he shook his head in disgust.
Steph had to bite back the smile when she saw Sid's invitation on her phone. She had already spent an hour at the social but she had only gone because her father had designed some dresses for the pageant. Which meant she needed to be on standby to pick up whatever he needed. Which she did and when she was finally free, she put in the address that Sid gave her and made her way to that side of town. She had thought about bringing Eve or Des with her but decided against it, wanting to see what her solo experience would be like with Sid's friend group. She had just stepped into the house when she spotted Sid on one of the couches. "And here I thought there'd be someone at the door to inspect me for Strawberry things." @smokingaceschw
Taking another tag from @ink-flavored - thank you! Have an excerpt from Avis and Sid's escape back to Rade.
On his external screen, a round space of nothingness opened up behind Christina’s ship, only obvious because of the rim of kaleidoscopic colors around it, and the way it blocked out the distant stars. Her black-silver ship disappeared into it and Avis eased them forward to follow. He could see the warp coming up on them, but he felt their entrance more than saw it, like he was grass in a field being rippled by the wind, like the stomach-dropping feeling of going over a hill too fast, like the sudden wall of scent and steam when he stepped into a kitchen where he was cooking, except it squeezed the air out of his lungs for half a second and left his brain trailing behind, trying to catch up with their rising trajectory inside the tunnel of angry endless colors.
“What is she doing…?” Avis murmured.
He hadn’t been in the bridge for the original transit to Ensaum, and he remembered it being kind of uncomfortable even with the screen-windows off, but it hadn’t felt like this. The readout said they were going a normal speed, maybe ten dots faster than they had for launch, but his stomach and his display said they were whipping around corners, taking too-sharp turns that shouldn’t be there, winding through in-between space in a way that didn’t feel possible.
Hot off the presses, traumatized dudes Sid and Colin break up for a year and then try getting back together and it goes. questionably. Nothing explicit in this one but it's basically Sid getting his buttons unintentionally pressed and writing it gave me anxiety so I am putting it under a cut lmao
---
Colin stopped pacing to press the sides of his hands to his forehead like he was too angry to even look at Sid. Anxiety flooded the pit of Sid’s stomach, overriding his low-level fear with the feeling of bracing for impact.
“Why is this so fucking hard?” Colin’s hands snapped down in front of him for emphasis, and then he started pacing again. “Why is it always like this?”
Sid stared at the floor, squeezing his hands together too hard in his lap. What he wanted to say is that it wouldn’t be like this if Colin wasn’t always like this. So angry. So...scary, honestly. Which felt ridiculous to think when he was a full head taller than Colin, and all Colin ever did to be upsetting was give dirty looks and yell and walk away in the middle of conversations. It shouldn’t hurt the way it did. Colin wasn’t his fucking parents. And yet...he really did sound like them.
Colin paused to look back at him. “Why don’t you ever say anything?” The anger in his voice had turned into a wildness, a desperation, and even worse, an exasperation.
Sid tried to make the words come together honestly. Because it wasn’t true anymore that he didn’t have anything to say—he just couldn’t fathom how to phrase his feelings in a way that wouldn’t make everything worse. No matter what, he wouldn’t be expressing what he really meant, or he would sound too mean, or Colin would jump down his throat about it. Just imagining all the possible results made him want to cry, but he couldn’t even do that, because then he’d also get yelled at. So he stared and felt his breath shudder as he tried to keep himself together. Because he wasn’t allowed to just walk out of the conversation. There was no way he could make his legs do that.
Colin was silent for way too long, but Sid didn’t dare to look at him. Then it would be obvious that there were tears starting to pool in Sid’s eyes despite his best efforts. If Sid just stayed quiet for long enough, this conversion would finally end and he could stop pretending that he didn’t want to bury his face in his pillow and sob.
Colin’s weight settled next to him on the edge of the bed, then a hand appeared on his shoulder.
“Hey,” Colin said, his voice still tense as hell but his tone a lot more gentle.
“Hi,” Sid managed, eyes on the floor.
“Are you okay?”
This would probably be over faster if he just said he was. “No.”
“Well, we have that in common.”
Sid looked over. Colin wasn’t almost crying, but his face was crinkled into something like regret.
“I don’t know why this shit pisses me off so bad,” Colin continued. “I just...I don’t know how to talk to you, it’s just...”
“I don’t know how to talk to you either,” Sid said in that low, neutral voice that always sounded mean and sullen when he used it, but in his body just felt like fear.
“Can you try?” Colin’s sideways look said he wasn’t totally sure he wanted to hear it, but he didn’t say anything else.
Sid weighed his wording options again. “Can you not yell like that?” Something about Colin seemed to pull away and he scrambled to explain. “It just—it stresses me out. It’s hard to talk to somebody if you don’t know whether they’re going to yell.”
“I can try. But you gotta actually talk to me.”
Sid’s heart sank, even though that was the obvious thing for Colin to want. “Okay.”
After a couple seconds of nothing, Colin sighed. “Do you even want to do this? Us?”
Maybe it wasn’t his heart sinking. Maybe it was his entire being. “Why are you asking me that?”
“Because we just can’t seem to get this right,” Colin said without looking at him. “This is at least the second time, the second town, the second planet—and we’re still just...is this even fun anymore? I feel like I’m turning into my fucking mom.”
Sid almost wanted to laugh. “Which one?”
Colin gave him half a smile. “Both of them. So fuck me, I guess.”
---
Pinging the AOM taglist because this happens in the sequel: @vacantgodling @writernopal @multi-lefaiye
@theskeletonprior @vacantgodling I'm doing it finally! I haven't stopped making heroforges (it's great to do while I'm in class on Zoom) but here's a collection of my combo poses for AOM. They're a bit challenging to do because I have no control over their lower body pose, so I'm building all of these from preexisting poses and upper body adjustments. Hero Forge is also generally better for vibes than details but I think these turned out pretty well.
Avis & Leon
or: "Captain!" "Yeah, yeah."
Avis & Sorian
Leon & Edith
Sid & Horatio
or: "Have you met my best friend, Brooding JoJo Character?"
Donovan & Sid
or: we don't talk anymore
Emma & Sid
or, as @kk7-rbs put it: yoink (morally questionable)
Thank you for the tag (and the new game!), @ink-flavored!
Rules: rank your characters’ spice tolerance from 🌶 to 🌶🌶🌶🌶🌶 (or from 1 to 5, if you don’t want to use emojis). Feel free to add more detail, and then tag others to play next!
For some of the AOM cast:
Sid: 🌶🌶🌶 (3), but he often doesn't go that spicy, mostly because of cooking for his mom.
Emma: 🌶 (1). Does it really HAVE to be spicy...
Donovan: 🌶🌶🌶🌶 (4). He occasionally has Sid make him a spicier version of something, but he also has discovered the Ensaum version of Goron spice from Breath of the Wild and will just dump that on stuff if he feels like it.
Avis: 🌶🌶🌶🌶🌶 (5), at least. She loves spicy stuff, especially the spicy noodles at this one place on Eas. There's always a stockpile of hot sauces in her house/boat.
Sorian: 🌶🌶 (2). He's been tempted many a time by whatever Avis is eating, because it doesn't smell that spicy, and then regretted trying it as soon as it touched his tongue.
Horatio: 🌶🌶🌶 (3). He's expanding it because he thinks this is weak, but he's comparing himself to Celia.
Celia: 🌶🌶🌶🌶🌶 (5). She says it's a ferasca thing that she's always had a high spice tolerance. She's only a little bit right.
Colin: 🌶🌶🌶🌶 (4), just barely. He'll say he can withstand a 5, and he can, for a value of withstand that is "tears streaming down his face, full of remorse for his hubris".
Palmyra: 🌶🌶 (2). Honestly she doesn't really like spicy food.
I'll tag @kahvilahuhut, @kk7-rbs, and @sarahlizziewrites plus whoever else wants to join in!
