i participated in @sesecretsanta for funsies and i got a prompt for anime reboot chrona.. their design is kind of already perfect to me so i tried more to see if i could capture what made it appealing but with modern design trends :> my recipient was terrorontheice on twitter
I had many gifts to finish up this holiday and I'm happy to get this one finished on Christmas!
House Sitting!
“There! Last one!”
Patty smacked her hand a few times against the side of the bookcase, causing Soul to tense up his shoulders. They had just spent the better part of two hours trying to repair the now somewhat awkwardly balanced fixture. They hadn’t even figured out how they were going to get the books back into the order they were in before the bookcase fell.
“Think she’s going to notice?”
The young woman leaned sideways towards Soul, peering up at him from under the brim of her hat. Her large, happy eyes made him want to say that maybe perhaps no, Maka wouldn’t notice. Though, the severe damage to the right side of the bookcase screamed otherwise. His lips curled upward into an anxious smile, crimson eyes darting away from hers and back at their rather sloppy handiwork.
“... Oh yeah, without a doubt.” He cleared his throat with a slight cough, trying to buy himself a little time to get his thoughts in order. “They’re never going to let us house-sit again. You know that, right?”
Patty knelt down to one of the many stacks of books on the floor and began to sift through them. After a long minute or two of silence she picked up a red book from the stack.
“Weeeeeell, we better get them back up on the shelf. Start picking up the red ones, those go at the top!”
Soul watched her and responded with a slow blink, his head tilting to one side ever so slightly as if to hear her better the second time. “What do you mean the red ones go at the top?”
“The red ones go at the top. They’re first in the rainbow.” Patty replied nonchalantly as she continued her search for all of the books with red covers.
Soul sat there for a moment, processing what was said to him before opening his mouth to speak. “I think it’s supposed to be in alphabetical order, not color order.”
Patty snorted through her nose and began to place the red books onto the top shelf. “That’s silly, where would the ones that start with numbers go?”
“They’d be first.” Soul replied, picking up a book off of one of the many stacks. The title ‘101 Ways to organize your home’ in bold letters had caught his eye when he was originally searching the pile. “See, this one starts with a one, so this goes first.”
“Yeah but the number one is spelt first letter O, so shouldn’t it go in the O’s?” Patty didn’t skip a beat before continuing. “That book is yellow anyway, so it comes after orange.”
“Why would I put it there?” Soul asked, a hint of exasperation leaking into his voice. “The numbers either go first or last…”
He trailed off as he glanced through one of the stacks that had predominantly number led titles, some of them using roman numerals and others using the more common arabic numerals. Did the roman numeral ones go with the rest of the numbers or was patty right, should some of these go where their respective letters are? Would most of these go into the ‘I’ category?
Patty was almost done sorting through all of the red books on the shelf when he finally looked back at what she was doing. They were going in ascending size height wise but not width wise. Was that important? What was he even doing thinking about it this hard? He had lived with Maka for years when they were still students at the Academy, so why couldn’t he remember how she organized her books?
He simply never paid it much attention. It wasn’t like he was taking anything off of the shelves in what used to be their old apartment’s living room. He had kept any and all books that he was interested in on a smaller set of shelves in his room.
“Uh oh.” Patty’s voice inflected upwards as she spoke the words, like she wasn’t as bothered about this mishap as Soul was. “Would this go in with the white? Or the pink? What do you think?” The young woman held up a book with what could be best described as a tie-dye cover containing white, pink, yellow, and green.
The book was mostly pink? It was hard to tell. He shook his head a little as if trying to get the thoughts out of his mind all together. Why was he humoring her? Alphabetical made the most sense.
“That doesn’t matter, what letter does the title start with?” Soul asked reaching out to shuffle around a few of the books that Patty already got on the top shelf.
“It’s called ‘III Fashion of the ‘aughts’.” She read off the title with a grimace.
Soul paused, trying to figure out where he himself would have placed it on his own. With the numbers, right? Or with the ‘I’s? He didn’t get much time to think about the idea when a sound from the front door had the pair freeze in place.
“What time is it?” Patty asked, deciding to just shove the rest of the books onto the shelf as the door-knob jiggled. Someone outside was likely also struggling to use the key in the lock.
“Like, seven, I thought their plane didn’t get in until eight.” He joined her in the frantic task of getting all of the books off of the floor. They could at least buy some time by moving them back.
Soul heard Patty giggle from behind him, it was times like these he hated that he couldn’t tell if it was something she did out of nerves or not.
“We’re so screwed.” She shoved the last of the books onto a shelf, fiddling around and moving one of them to fit on another just as the door had forced its way open.
A victorious Black Star bounded into his apartment with Maka trailing close behind him.
“I’m here~!” Black Star dropped his bags behind the couch and moved to remove the jacket and scarf Maka had forced him to wear when they landed. A Star like him could always handle the cold but it wasn’t really worth the argument, not when he could simply not wear it out next time when she was at work.
He was so happy to be back after what only he could deem a boring trip that he hadn’t yet noticed the tight smiles on Soul and Patty’s faces, nor the slight mess that still resided in his living room as he bounded his way to the kitchen for a glass of water.
Maka, on the other hand, had stood behind the couch for a bit longer and very easily pieced together what she believed had happened. She shot Soul a look that he thought was unreadable and followed her Fiance into their Kitchen.
“Wait.” Black Star had gently grabbed Maka by the shoulders so he could get past her. He had been staring at the other two while taking his drink of water and things were starting to click in his mind.
“They’re all in the wrong places?!” He lamented, grabbing the back of his head in exasperation. “That’s not the order I left them in, Maka, I swear, I fixed it all up and placed everything back where it belonged before I left.”
He rushed forward and grabbed Soul by the collar of his shirt melodramatically. “What happened here? How? My hard work… of all people to lay it to waste, someone so close to me…”
Soul’s eyebrow twitched, not too happy with how suddenly his personal space had been invaded but not entirely sure what to say about the situation either. He looked to Maka for a little help, in the hopes she’d call him back a bit, but instead she seemed rather focused with something on the counter.
“We were playing Tekken and he beat me, so I got up and told him that it didn’t matter because I could do a cartwheel and he couldn’t-” Patty mimicked the events out with her hands, doing a rolling motion with them and then a ‘Boom!’ “My foot hit the side of the bookcase a little hard and it totally exploded, just everything came crashing down.”
The blue-haired young-man deflated as he heard Patty tell the story, already preparing himself for an evening of fixing their mistake himself. “I can’t believe this would happen, I figured you’d both be perfect for this job.”
Black Star picked up a few books from the shelf that was at his eye-level and collected them in his arms so he could rearrange them. “You had it in the wrong order, it's a weird pink cover first, green, green, blue, yellow…”
Patty nodded her head intently as he listed off the order the books should have been in. If she was actually taking proper note of what he was saying was truly unknown but she took down what could be believed to be notes on her arm in the glitter pen she always kept in her pocket.
Soul inched away from the now distraught Black Star and into the kitchen where Maka was still focused on something. He cleared his throat awkwardly to get her attention and once her gaze was directed at him, he felt even more uncomfortable about everything.
“Listen,” he started. “Uh, I can come back tomorrow and fix it in the right order, or we can buy you a new shelf, it seems pretty…” Soul trailed off, bobbing his head side to side as he came up with the words he wanted.
“He forgot to put in at least six screws.” Maka commented as her hands lifted up a small paper dixie cup with said screws in it. “We bought it secondhand and it was missing some, so we bought some from the hardware store. They look different than the original so I think in his panic to not miss our flight, he thought they went to something else.”
Soul nodded, taking the information in. It would explain why an otherwise sturdy looking piece of furniture would just crumple to the ground with not much force applied to it.
“I’ll take you up to the new bookcase though. It’s been knocked over a few times in the last few months anyway, with it being so cold outside. Black Star has been doing some of his exercising in the living room and you know how he gets.” Maka set the cup down with a chuckle.
“Honestly, there hasn’t been a proper order to those books since before the first time he managed to knock it all over. I’ve just been letting him put things back where he thinks they go. He gets so upset each time it happens that I don’t think I have the heart to tell him otherwise. The effort to fix it and try his best to reorganize has been enough.”
Soul chuckled, relief filling his entire being as he listened to his meister. “Yeah, we’ll either buy it for you then or pay you back for it. I know we should have texted but we both panicked. Kinda uncool, that was the knee jerk reaction.”
Maka opened her mouth to reply but before they got the chance to, the bookcase that Black Star and Patty were in the process of rearranging fell to pieces once again. In silent defeat, Black Star dropped to his knees and held his head in his hands.
Patty looked back at the pair in the kitchen grinned sheepishly. “Oops! Maybe the eight volume Encyclopedia should have gone on the bottom shelf.”
