Work Text:
Hypnos closed his car door and the driver pulled out almost immediately after.
Dig could feel his face getting red, and his brother's eyes on him.
"Dude???"
"Hold on." Dig pulled out his tie and undid his ponytail.
Sailor was leaning against Fathom, staring at Dig and holding her hearing aids in her hands. She signed something to her boyfriend, and he signed back.
"Tell me everything." Fathom asked, signing as he spoke. Dig knew how this went - he'd sign both parts of the conversation, because an exhausted and overwhelmed Sailor still wanted to know everything .
"Okay, so." he dragged his hands across his face, resting his chin on them. "He brought me to the astronomy tower, it was very beautiful, but I could only think about how he sacrificed his whole hair… for me." he sighed. It was a bit too much emotion, but he needed to share it or else he felt he would explode. "So I just kissed him on impulse."
" You kissed him first!?" Fathom asked, surprised. Then he paused for a second, and hands began flying again. "Actually, that makes sense."
Dig rubbed his eyes. "And then we talked, he pulled me onto his lap , he started calling me Romeo, and talked about stealing me away from everyone."
"...Did you kiss more?"
"We kissed more." Dig could feel his face getting warmer.
He wasn't going to tell the part where Hypnos suddenly got possessive, and called him "good boy", and how that just made him want him more. They… didn't need to know that.
" At the party, huh? You're getting bolder, bro." Fathom smirked. "To think you didn't even want to be seen with him…"
"Yeah, yeah, I know. I just… like him a lot." He paused. "A lot , a lot."
"He does look great with the new hair. And hey, mom and dad don't even bother him anymore! They like him now!"
"At some point, this'll all come out and they'll get bad again, you know this."
"Pessimistic, pessimistic. Enjoy the time you have in secret with the beefcake." he leaned closer. "You might have to get over your jealousy, too, because not only is your boy in high demand, but Kyioshi's sibling is about to become our sibling-in-law."
"I know, I know." he muttered. "I still don't like how he knows him so intimately and just… seems to not care about how much that matters."
"You can fix that." Fathom smirked.
" No ! Not… soon. Stop that."
Dig was arguing, but he smiled as his face flushed. He felt like he was walking on clouds ever since their rendezvous on the astronomy tower. It didn't feel like he deserved any of this happiness at all.
"What did he mean when he asked you 'remember what I said'?"
"It's, ahh… the thing about stealing me away. He'll make our parents trust him, and then he'll backstab them and steal me and the business."
"Sexy."
"Shut up."
Fathom giggled to himself. “I’ll quit bothering you now, but you have to help me get as much information out of Ebb as possible.”
“As if she won’t just scream it at us when she has the chance.”
The younger brother tilted his head, conceding it to him.
━━━✦❘༻ 岩谷 ༺❘✦━━━
Dig undressed with a tired smile on his face. Lately, any time he was in his quarters, he couldn’t stop imagining Hypnos there. Sitting on an armchair, looking at his books, keeping him company in his office as he worked, sitting on his dresser, laying shirtless on his bed, naked in his tub-
He shook his head. Stop it. You’ve had enough inappropriate thoughts for the night.
“Only I can see you look like such a mess and only I can make you look like this, got it?”
“Good boy.”
Stop it.
He dove into his bed, the cool covers helping him unwind and drive the thoughts away.
He knew now that it wasn’t bad that he had them, but he still felt a bit uncomfortable giving into them. So, he buried his face in the pillow, hugging it, and pretending it was his Juliet.
━━━✦❘༻ 岩谷 ༺❘✦━━━
The next morning, Dig and Fathom stood on Ebb’s doorway as she flitted about, putting stuff away and picking other things up seemingly at random, putting on music through her Bluetooth speakers and skipping through all of them, nervously chatting about nothing.
“Just come in and close the goddamn door already, I don’t want them to listen in!” she hissed.
They did so.
“Sit on the poofs, I’ll tell you everything but I’ll record it for my girls because I don’t want to repeat myself.”
They did so.
“Okay, okay.” she sat on a poof, but changed her mind and sat on her bed instead. Her older brothers shared a look they’d had for the ten minutes since they showed up at her door.
“SO. They stole me from you guys, right, and we just started doing small talk. They were being very nice, like, in the polite way, but then we started talking about normal people stuff and then it went to flowers, I don’t know why, and they offered to take me out to the gardens. AND THEN. When I was looking at a very tall bush of some very pretty flowers, they just kept looking at me with this look??? And I was like, hey, what’s up, is there something on my face, like, hello, whyy are you staring? And they said oh it’s nothing, the flowers match you, and I was like uh, no way? I’m wearing all blue and these are yellow, what are you talking about, and they were like no, it’s because.” she paused to take a breath for dramatic impact “It’s because you’re both very pretty, and I lost my mind a little bit but like quietly because You Know.”
Her brothers just stared. When Ebb got started, they would rather not interrupt, except by changing facial expressions.
“And then I tried to be smooth and be like oh, so we’re talking about this now, and I don’t know if it worked? Because I’ve never flirted with non-boys before, or flirted seriously anyway, because I get like twelve hundred times more nervous but apparently it did work because they smiled at me and they were like what are we talking about? And then we were just flirting for like hours after that and I got their number and yeah that’s about it.”
She paused the recording on her phone, and looked expectantly to the boys.
“You can talk now.”
“Did you kiss them?” Fathom asked first, as he always did.
“No! Not… on the lips. On the cheek, as a goodbye. They kissed my hand like a gentleman.” she paused. “Gentle...them?”
Fathom just looked at the eldest brother. “I can’t believe she’s telling me the same exact shit you told me like a week ago.”
“Hey. Kiss on the cheek is classy, not too intimate. Good call, Ebb.”
Ebb put a fist under her chin. “Thaaanks.”
Fathom rolled his eyes.
“Are you two planning on going out?” Dig asked, expertly deflecting the attention from himself.
“I don’t know! I… I wanna, though.” she blushed. “Just not around any lame adults that make them use the wrong name and pronouns and all that.”
“Are you calling us not lame adults? That’s a first.”
“Dig, you think business meetings are cool. Shut up.” she scoffed. “You’re not like, transphobic lame, but you’re still lame. Anyway. Do you have any more questions or can we go to the most important relationship development??” she asked, looking straight at Dig.
“Oh no.” he said, at the same time Fathom exclaimed “Let’s fucking go !”