CHAPTER 17!!!!! they're my silly billies (you are ignoring that dick doesn't exactly look like himself here that's because i was pushing through art block when i drew the first image)
The second date shouldâve felt more awkward. It didnât.
Alex had picked a science museum of all placesânot exactly romantic on paper, but the look on his face when he pointed out the replica Mars rover was too earnest to judge. He had this habit where his whole face would light up like a lightbulb the moment before he got excited about something, and Y/N had already learned to clock it like a warning siren.
âSo, technically,â he was saying, hands jammed in his jacket pockets as they strolled past a massive display on deep-sea robotics, âthe algorithms used for this submersibleâs sensor mapping were adapted from AI software developed for self-driving cars.â
âTechnically,â she echoed, teasing, âyou should probably just work here.â
He looked sideways at her with a crooked grin. âI applied when I was sixteen. They didnât take me.â
âTheyâre clearly still recovering from that mistake.â
He tried to play it off cool, but she caught the slight flush of his ears.
She liked him more than she expected to. Not in the way you decide to like someoneâmore like how you step outside one day and realize the air smells like rain and suddenly, youâre soft and open and all the windows are down. He was like that: unexpected and quiet and warm around the edges.
They made their way through the rest of the exhibits in no particular order, weaving between dwindling crowds of families and groups of students on field trips, neither of them in a hurry. He let her take her time at the forensic anthropology section, where she ran her fingers along the raised edges of a reconstructed skull, and she let him lose himself in the physics wing, where he explained, with ridiculous enthusiasm, why the double pendulum was so cool. It was there that the nickname Professor Albon was born.
At some point, he took her hand. It wasnât a big deal. He just did it naturally, without hesitation, like it had already been a habit, and for a moment, that simple touch made her feel warm all over.
"Okay," Alex said, tapping the eraser end of his pencil against the page. "Eight-letter word for âilluminates or clarifiesâ?"
As she took a moment to think it over, Alex watched in his periphery as she counted off the letters of her word on her fingers. "âExplainsâ fits," she mused, popping a purple skittle into her mouth.
"Hmm." He scribbled it in. "Not bad. Maybe I should keep you around."
"Yeah, yeah," she nudged his knee with hers, grinning. "You just like me for my crossword skills."
"Wrong. I like you for your crossword skills and your terrible puns."
âMy puns are great, thank you very much.â She rolled her eyes, but she was smiling.
And in the days that followed, it stayed easy. He texted her every night.
alex:
Made the Mars rover jealous. Canât stop thinking about you.
Y/N:
did you just say that unironically.
because I might have to stop seeing you on principle.
alex:
Too late, Iâve already added you to my will.
You get the Lego Technic collection.
Y/N:
wait nvm iâm back in
They made time. Even when they both shouldnât have.
Heâd bring her coffee before her classâsomething with cinnamon and oat milk in it. Heâd scrawl dumb physics jokes on the lid just to make her roll her eyes. She started keeping his schedule in her head without meaning to. She knew which nights he had his advanced systems class and which ones he spent buried in the lab. Heâd text her when his simulations crashed at 3AM. Sheâd send him memes about courtroom drama tropes in return.
He had an engineerâs sense of humorâdry, sneaky, often deeply specific. It took a while to catch on, but once she did, it felt like discovering hidden easter eggs in his sentences.
âYou know,â heâd murmur as they lay back in the grass near campus, watching clouds roll over like they werenât chilly out here in the autumn breeze, âyou statistically reduce your lifespan by two minutes every time you eat instant ramen.â
âCool. So Iâll be dying a noble, sodium-rich death then.â
He turned his head toward her, smiling with closed eyes. âHmm, a martyr.â
âA hero.â
âBuried with your books and MSG packets.â
She shoved his shoulder. He let her.
On Thursdays, sheâd sit outside his lab, cross-legged on the cold tile floor with flashcards in her lap, quizzing him on his presentation slides about failure analysis and impact resistance.
âOkay, explain to me like Iâm fiveâwhat is a stress-strain curve and why should I care?â
âBecause,â heâd say, crouching in front of her with a smirk, âit tells you how close something is to breaking.â
âAnd thatâs relevant to your researchâŠ?â
He gave her a confused look, until it turned sheepish as he scratched the back of his neck. âIâm⊠not entirely sure about that bit, actually.â
She started looking forward to the moments in betweenâthe walks across campus, the shared bag of chips while sitting on the hood of her car, the ridiculous voice memos he sent when he was overtired and delirious.
They kissed in stairwells and library corners and once,perhaps ill-advisedly, on a park bench in the middle of a thunderstorm. The rain had soaked through their clothes, cold and unrelenting, but he had just looked at her and said, "I think we should be stupid about this," right before he leaned in. It was impulsive and dramatic and made her laugh until she had to cover her mouth, their faces inches apart. Her hair was soaked, his glasses fogged up, and they almost dropped his backpack in a puddle, but the moment stuckâsharp and golden and untouchable.
They talked about future dates like thereâd be dozens of themâbookstores they wanted to browse together, a tiny Thai place he swore by, a stargazing night he promised would be âscientifically optimized for romanceâ depending on the cloud cover. She rolled her eyes at that one, but her heart still fluttered.
They were still in the sweet spotâthe space between maybe and more, where everything felt bright and possible.Â
It wasnât perfect â but it was promising.
The third date was dinnerâsome hole-in-the-wall Thai place with flickering neon signage and laminated menus stained with old curry thumbprints. Heâd gotten lost on the way and sent a flurry of frantic texts.
alex :) :
I passed the restaurant. Twice.
Thereâs a cat staring at me through a laundromat window.
I think itâs judging me.
Y/N:
be strong. you can beat the cat.
alex :) :
Negative, Sargeant. Itâs very confident.
Heâd arrived breathless, slightly damp from a drizzle, and holding a single packet of Skittles âfor your efforts,â heâd said solemnly. She called him an idiot. He looked delighted.
That night, they talked about things that didnât matterâTV shows neither of them had finished, foods they pretended to like for the aesthetic, the sheer horror of Alexâs undergraduate group project from hell (âWe had a guy who thought duct tape was a structural solutionâ).Â
And then, slowly, they talked about the things that did matter.
Like how she used to want to be a journalist when she was little, because she thought it meant you got to ask as many questions as you wanted and never had to apologize.
Or how he still wasnât sure what kind of engineer he wanted to beâjust that he wanted to make things that didnât break when people needed them most.
âYou know,â he said, nudging his glass in slow circles across the table, âyouâre not what I expected.â
Y/N looked up. âIs that a good thing or, like, a 'youâre secretly a serial killer' kind of a thing?â
He smiled. âItâs a good thing. Really, really good.â
By the fourth week, they had a rhythm. It wasnât just dates anymoreâit was Hey, want to walk home together? and I saved you the last chocolate chip muffin, but only because I like you more than I like muffins. But barely.
It was him reaching for her hand without thinking, her resting her head against his shoulder on the bus when she was too tired to hold it up.
It was a shared Spotify playlist for when studying is ur 13th reason.
It was early Saturday morning sun filtering into her apartment while they quietly read their own books, his socked foot nudging hers on the side of the couch almost every ten minutes.
It was good.
But between the sleepy smiles and the shared muffins and the texts that kept getting longer instead of shorter, the truth was that they both had dreams. Big ones. All-consuming ones.
And no matter how much you wanted somethingâor someoneâthere were only so many hours in the day.
a/n: one of my more favorite chapters! an unfortunate lack of lando though :/
what did you think of it?
As I pull him backwards into the dark house by the hand, Peeta's eyes flit from my face to our joined fingers then back again with a wonder and adoration that's so unbearably beautiful I start kissing him as soon as the door clicks shut behind us. His chest swells and his hands find my body easily in the dark. Outside the window, there's moonlight and fireflies, shimmering and blinking in the fresh twilight, but in here there's only the low red glow of the coal stove. Good thing Peeta doesn't need the light to touch me.
If the star crossed lovers from district 12 never went into the games, if they were never pitted against each other, doomed to fight and kill each other, if their stars werenât crossed at all, what would have happened anyway?
Keeping Katniss's family fed without tesserae is not easy and Peeta's parents are pushing him to marry a merchant girl as soon as possible. The best way to escape starvation and a prison of a marriage is to marry each other, but that would require Katniss to let go of a promise she made to herself a long time ago, to never marry anyone.
Tanaka on the death of a butler, grief of the master
When talking to Soma about the disappearance of his servant Mina, Ciel's response is very cold. He tells Soma that any despair he would feel "wouldn't amount to much", and that he regards the loss of a servant as "trivial".
This is one of those self-protective things Ciel does to give the appearance of invulnerability, to harden himself and keep others at a distance. But Ciel may also be emulating what he has been told to do as a member of house Phantomhive.
Following Sebastian's "death" in the Murder arc, Tanaka says something consistent with how Ciel behaved with Soma, regarding an expectation for a master to refrain from showing emotion in response to the death of a mere servant. "A trifle".
It's interesting to think about this when considered alongside something Sebastian says later, which is that a butler is not permitted to die before his master. Something that Tanaka apparently taught Sebastian.
So according to Tanaka's words, repeated through Ciel and Sebastian: a butler is not permitted to die before their master, and if the butler does die, it is to be considered a trivial occurrence, and the master is not permitted to show any grief over it.
