For the 55 More Random Dialogue Prompts; number 3. or 4. for TSW!Chris and TSW!Mychae.
((Get you a writer who can do both.))
The more-or-less ‘secret’ world in which the Qiin-White family lived meant that occasionally they were sent on separate missions ... this largely because the Templar Order avoided sending Chris on any mission involving the technology or technomancy that was Mychae’s speciality, since his natural response was to stab it and no one got any decent intel that way. That tended to mean that when his angel was away, Chris ‘Fableweaver’ Qiin-White occasionally had to make his own missions.
Which was why, when Mychae ‘Cantina Rat’ Qiin-White came home, with a rucksack full of parts and a big rawhide shoe for Chewie (their big, dumb, loveable floof of a Newfoundland), she found Chris sat on the sofa, grinning as he gestured towards a somewhat battered and oil-stained cardboard box. Mychae looked at it with vaguely wary curiosity. “I know that look. What did you do?”
“Look in the box and see,” was all Chris would say, making another expansive gesture at the box.
Mychae being a very intelligent individual, she threw the rawhide shoe to Chewie and put her rucksack of parts away before she peeked into the cardboard box. After a moment of stunned silence, she pulled out two items - a carefully crafted rendition of a TIE fighter made largely out of old auto parts and a high school yearbook. Eventually, she asked, “Where did you even get that? And how? I thought my parents threw this away!”
“Not a bit of it.” Chris’ grin just got wider. “They stuffed it all in a storage area at the back of your father’s work area. You recall that colony of blajini I ... encouraged to move near to the scrapyard by your parents’ home?” When Mychae nodded, still looking a little nonplussed, he went on: “I mentioned to them that it might be a good time for them to approach your father with their manifesto again. While all the yelling was going on, I went on ... let’s leave it at ‘a little raid’. Some of those bits they were hiding were too good to let sit and gather dust in the home of someone who doesn’t appreciate them.”
Mychae looked at her husband for a long moment. While she was forthright about most things, for the first year or so, Mychae’s family had only been conspicuous in her life by their absence. When she finally admitted, through asides and offhand comments, that her family had been sexist jerks who had refused to support their daughter’s intellectual pursuits in any way and ignored her almost completely when she refused to even attempt to fit the ‘trophy wife’ mould ... well. Chris admired his wife and supported everything she was and everything she did, and he made it a point to troll her abusive parents in subtle but long-term ways. Hence the blajini colony across the junkyard from their house. His raid was another part of that ... though mostly it was because he wanted to see, and to provide her with reminders of, what she had overcome to get to where she was now.
Rather than address any of what she saw in his face directly, Mychae told Chris, “...Okay, but this isn’t fair. Your parents brought out the baby pictures but not the high school pictures. There’s no reciprocation here!” The tone of her voice and the expression on her face was gentler than the words themselves; her own quiet thanks for the thought at least, despite the complicated emotions that the production of those bits of her childhood produced.
Chris had anticipated Mychae’s reaction, and come prepared to both derail some of the less pleasant emotions he saw in her face and offer reciprocation. He rolled his eyes in mock resignation and brought out a photo album. “All right; in the spirit of fair play, I’ll let you go through this first.”
Mychae sat down next to Chris as he opened the photo album to a random page, which unfortunately was one of him at sixteen, all elbows and knees and braces on his teeth, and a school uniform in an unfortunate shade of maroon. Confronted with how her beloved cuisinart had looked as a teenager, compared with the rather attractive man he had become, she froze for another moment. Finally, she said, “...I can’t believe this is what you looked like in high school. I was picturing you as being Prom King, but I was clearly way off base.”
Chris blushed at the first comment, but the second brought a wave of curiosity that doused the blush for a moment. “What’s a ‘prom king’?” he asked, bewildered. “I mean, the Proms are the summer season at the Royal Albert Hall--”
“Okay, let me show you what a prom is in my weird-ass birth country,” Mychae told him with a chuckle, flipping over to the Senior Prom spread in the yearbook she’d pulled out. “I didn’t technically go to my senior prom, but I think they actually got a shot of me crashing the party - and the DJ booth - in Otomachi Una cosplay.”
With that, they settled down for a long evening of anecdotes and snack food.
