This doesn’t really follow the prompt and is kinda sorta based on an old idea of mine?? I dunno. anyway prepare for tooth-rotting fluff and also I hope you like it!!
Finding the other wearing their clothes
Pidge was tired of “losing” her socks.
If the Green Lion shrunk to the size of a housecat, shewould suspect her of stealing andhiding them, and if Allura’s mice were bigger and more prone to overt mischief, they would be likelyculprits. But instead, Pidge resorted to scrutinizing her teammates assuspects, though first she needed to know if this was a serial crime.
“So…” Pidge said one – relative – day to Keith when he tooka break from training. “Got all of your socks?”
Keith blinked at her as he dismissed his bayard. “Not withme,” he said.
“I meant are you missing any?” she asked, narrowing her eyesat him suspiciously.
(Not that Keith was capable of pulling a prank, at least notwithout someone else to encourage or provokehim.)
“I don’t think so,” he told her. “Why?”
“Because someone’s been taking mine,” Pidge complained, “andI need to find out who.”
She ruled Coran out quickly, since, as goofy as he sometimesseemed, she doubted he went around stealing anyone else’s socks as a bizarreprank, or that any of the others would dare to victimize him and steal his socks.
“How many pairs of socks do you have?” she asked Hunk once,after breakfast and before training.
Hunk glanced sideways at her, a confused twist to hiseyebrows. “One for every day of the week,” he said. Then he chuckled. “Assuminga seven-day week.” And he frowned. “Assuming a twenty-four-hour day.”
“And a sixty-minute hour?” Pidge suggested, amused.
“Yeah, exactly!”
Well, she decided Hunk was a bust: neither a victim, and, like Keith, unlikelyto be a perpetrator unless he had a partner in crime. And since Shiro andAllura could be eliminated – with the exception of Keith, they all tended towalk in awe and in fear of both of them – Pidge narrowed her focus onto Lance.
“Those new socks?” Pidge asked Lance once when he lounged inthe common room, entirely barefoot except for a pair of striped blue-and-whitesocks.
Lance wiggled his toes. “Yes,” he said, grinning. “I gotthem from the space mall.”
Pidge slid a little closer. “Got socks from anywhere else?”
He met her eyes. “Earth?”
She rolled her eyes. “From anyone else?” she said, smiling hopefully at him.
His eyes were wide with innocent confusion when he said, “Ithink I have a pair that was a gift from my nephew?”
Pidge crossed her arms, frustrated. Of course Lance would be immune to her line of questioning; thenagain, her mission at the Garrison ran into many a dead end because she didn’tknow how to enact an effective interrogation. So perhaps it was her technique that required refining.
Or maybe she needed to changeher tactics.
Pidge made enough of a study of her teammates’ habits thatshe knew exactly when and where to expect them. Which meant she did not fearLance walking in on her snooping in his room.
She pushed aside any guilt she might’ve felt by remindingherself that this was an investigation and Lance was her primary suspect in acrime for which she was the wrongedparty. So perfectly all right.
(She contemplated asking Allura if she might have a ‘warrant’,at least until she realized that would lead to a whole other line of questioning that Pidge, unpracticed interrogator and interrogation subject that she was, was not at allprepared for.)
That still didn’t stop her from feeling like she was beingwatched…or that the mice lurked in the vents, reporting on her every move tothe very princess she should’ve asked for a quiznaking warrant.
Lance’s room was surprisingly neat, though the mess ofelectronics and wires – also rightfully hers,or at the very least theirs – along onewall made a tantalizing distraction. Perhapsone round—no, I’m here for a reason!
Pidge set to searching: in the drawer under the bed, inside the closet, in the bedside table, inthe bathroom cabinets. She finally found his selection of socks in a makeshiftdrawer in the closet, stuffed away in the same space as a spare set of pajamas.
Not a single pair resembled one of hers.
“What the quiznak,” she muttered. Could Lance not be the culprit? Could it be one ofthe others after all and she was too hasty in her dismissal of them?
With a sigh, Pidge backed out of Lance’s room after makingsure everything was in its rightful place – except for that gaming system,obviously. She focused so much on making sure no one followed her that she bumpedstraight into the very person she most wanted to avoid.
“Lance?” she said. She stepped backwards, barely recoveringher balance as she stared at him in shock. It was approximately halfway throughthe daytime cycle, and a varga until lunch, which he usually spent hanging outwith Hunk either in the kitchen or down in the Yellow Lion’s hangar, andtherefore nowhere near the residential hallway.
And therefore nowhere near her.
But what really gave her pause was Lance’s wide-eyedstare, like he was caught in themiddle of pulling some…prank. “Pidge?” he said, smiling so quickly she thoughtshe imagined his moment of unguarded surprise. “What’re you doing out of yourden?”
“My den?” she asked, blinking at him.
“Yeah, your den.” He waved a hand. “Your lab?”
“Oh!” she said, finally understanding. “I, uh, decided totake a break. And nap.”
Lance raised a skeptical eyebrow at her. “You?” he said. “Napping?” He smirked. “I don’t believeyou.” He leaned towards her, close enough that she could feel his warm breathon her face. “You need Shiro to threaten to lock you in your room before youtake a nap.”
Pidge felt a sly, involuntary smile curl her lips. “Allright, fine,” she said, crossing her arms. “But I could ask you the samequestion?”
To her surprise and awe, Lance flushed, and he rapidlyleaned away from her. “Maybe I wanteda nap?”
“Try again.” Her smile didn’t falter as the pieces startedto connect in her head.
“Then here’s the deal,” said Lance thoughtfully. “I won’task if you don’t.”
Pidge forced her expression into something flatter and moreneutral. “Fine,” she said, all while thinking gotcha.
They shook on it.
Pidge gave Lance some time to make his devious plans, whateverthey were, since she had yet to solve the mystery of where the quiznak hermissing socks were. Not that it stopped her from staring at him with narrowedeyes during meals, especially because she enjoyed unnerving him.
(Since when could she manageto fluster him? Of course she had to take advantage! Who knew how long it wouldlast?)
Things came to a strange sort of stalemate when Pidge wokeup early a few day cycles after her excursion into Lance’s room. She brushedher teeth and dressed while still half-asleep, and despite knowing that all hersocks had disappeared, she was absentminded enough to open her sock drawer.
The sight that met her eyes woke her like nothing short of agong could.
“What. The. Quiznak.”
Colorful and cartoony socks she had never seen filled thedrawer in different fabrics. Some thick and fuzzy like slippers, others smoothand thin like dress socks. She grabbed a pair at random and pulled the individualsapart to see they were blue with red Superman symbols, and another pair wasblack with green alien heads. All the socks were unfamiliar, shediscovered as she sifted through them, and all the socks seemed marked withsomething that distinctly made them of Earth.
A wonderful, pleasant warmth filled Pidge’s chest as sheselected and pulled on a green pair striped in white zeros and ones, of allthings. She wiggled her toes inside them, grinning and wondering what she didto deserve this.
She could forgive Lance for stealing all her socks if this was the outcome.
“Some prank,” she muttered.
She didn’t bother putting on shoes when she left her roomand headed straight to the dining room for breakfast. As usual, she was thelast one there – thanks to her rotten sleeping schedule – but a seat next toLance remained empty.
“Is this taken?” she asked him with a smile.
“Yeah, by you,” he replied, his eyes flicking down to herfeet before returning to her face.
Pidge sat in the chair and, heedless of their audience, shehugged him from the side, her arms slipping under his as she pressed herforehead to his shoulder. “Thank you,” she said, voice low so that no one –except perhaps the mice – could hear her. “How did you know I like weird socks?”
“I remembered you getting a demerit for those snazzy GreenLantern socks at the Garrison,” he replied just as softly. One arm wrappedaround her, pulling her just a bit closer. “Also, I owe you for letting meborrow your headphones all the time.”
Pidge rolled her eyes and pulled away. “Okay, first of all,I didn’t let you borrow them,” shesaid, scowling. “You stole them.”
“Semantics,” Lance said with a hand wave.
“Oh, not this again,” Hunk groaned.
“And second of all—”
Everyone else suddenly decided they had somewhere else to beand cleared out of the dining room, thanking Hunk for the meal and mumblingsomething about training or planning or reading.
Which left Pidge alone with Lance, which, judging from thesoft smile on his face, was perfect for both of them.
ur only 19?? i never read ur bio i guess?? and for some reason i just assumed u were like 20-23 maybe. i’m not exactly sure why (i hope u don’t get like offended that i thought u were older than u are or anything i’m not sure if that’s something you wouldn’t like said or not sorry!)
just popping in to say i love your art!!! especially your pjo/hoo ones! they capture the characters so well and make them all so beautiful especially piper and jason and leo and basically all of them aaa your art is beautiful sksjsh okay that's all bye!
thank you so much !! and thanks for complimenting my leo! i fight whenever i draw him - idk why haha you're very sweet <3
32: Talk about a place you remember from your childhood.
when i was a kid, my parents would always take me to this playground, and for some reason spy kids 2 was my favorite movie as a child, so i would always play spy kids there. i remember turning the wheel on the playground and pretending i was opening a hatch like that one scene in spy kids 2. it was nice.
38: Talk about songs that remind you of certain people.
when i was in seventh grade, i was really into the song “she keeps me warm” by mary lambert? it was my first gay song. and i would always listen to it and think of the girl i liked, the first girl i ever liked. it’s a very bittersweet song for me, because she didn’t like me back and to this day, i still struggle with the question of “am i really bi, or am i just faking it for attention, and do i deserve this sweet gay song?”
