Work Text:
Andromeda has a particular problem, and that problem is known as her brain. It will make an arbitrary rule with a set of moral values: like, for instance, that romantic confessions must be performed on Valentine’s Day, and not confessing on Valentine’s Day demonstrates a lack of affection for the unwillingness to wait or plan adequately. And then it will proceed to latch onto something, with a ferocity that demands she contradict the arbitrary rule: for instance, a crippling crush on Gauri, who sits behind her in their shared core history module, which demands that she speak up now, because what if she waits too long and they’re not sharing a module together, or Gauri gets with someone else?
The simple answer, of course, would be to abandon the arbitrary rule at that point, which is adding nothing to her life but unnecessary stress.
But no. Andromeda’s brain is not so easily reasoned with.
On the bright side, this fact has made Andromeda extremely practiced at finding creative workarounds to problems that are created entirely by her own mind.
In this case, a quick Google helps.
Andromeda, who watches anime and reads manhwa in addition to a steady diet of local English-language media, has long-held the impression that Valentine’s day is more or less universal.
Google tells her she’s wrong.
All around the world, from Wales to China to Brazil, there are different days around the calendar when people celebrate love.
There is still a problem, in that the list that Andromeda finds only has one entry for autumn. Love and Friendship Day in Colombia is September 20th. Which is today.
The next day on the list isn’t until January.
Love and Friendship Day isn’t a perfect equivalent to Valentine’s Day, given that there are a few articles that claim it leans more toward the friendship side, but Andromeda doesn’t know enough about the culture and traditions of Colombia for that to be much of a concern.
What she needs is a loophole to convince her brain that this is a good idea, and the loophole says that it is today.
Of course, she has to do something event-related, or else her brain will never let her forget that she confessed on an ordinary day with none of the fanfare that she has always envisioned for a romantic confession.
Because the truth is that Andromeda has never confessed her love to anyone before.
She’s always been far too scared, and she promised herself that now that she lives away from home, she will show more initiative.
Andromeda checks her watch. She has half an hour before her first class, and then two more classes before her class with Gauri.
She leaves her dorm and hops onto a bus to the store. She can cut a class or two. This is once in a lifetime, after all.
*
It’s September, so of course the Christmas decorations are beginning to overtake the Halloween decorations in the events aisle, but Andromeda doesn’t have that much in the way of space or funds, so she gets a pack of paper pumpkins and some orange-and-red decorations that look like paper leaves bound together with string.
With decoration, it’s more about how you do it than what you have.
The bus schedule is shit, so even though she barely spends five minutes in the store, her first class is nearly over by the time she returns to her dorm.
She arranges her furniture so that all her daily messiness is just a little less conspicuous, and arranges the leaf danglies just inside the doorway so that they fall just above eye level.
She is going to write, “Gauri I like you” on one pumpkin, and something along the lines of “Will you be my boy/girlfriend?” on the other, but she pauses when she realizes she doesn’t actually know which Gauri is. They haven’t shared pronouns, and Gauri has masculine energy, but they could easily be a butch girl.
Andromeda tries Googling the name.
Most of the results are women, and she perks up, thinking she has found her answer.
Then she remembers the definitely-male Kelly in her calculus class, and immediately deflates.
There has to be a way to ask the question without gendering them.
“Will you go out with me?” is a little more old-school than Andromeda generally would ask, but it suits her purposes, so she goes with that. She has turned the entryway into a narrow corridor using her wardrobe, so she tapes the pumpkins with her confession and question to the wardrobe.
She looks around the room.
It’s nice enough, but missing something.
She only has half an hour until the class she shares with Gauri, so she reaches under her bed to the box of stress-art supply (as in art supplies she can turn to when she gets stressed, not art supplies that cause her stress) and makes a quick papier-mâché poppy, because that’s the one thing she knows she can make fast, after almost single-handedly making enough poppies to call a field for the set of her high school’s production of The Wizard of Oz her senior year.
With the one poppy lying on her desk, she runs to class and makes it just before the cut-off.
She’s panting and a little sweaty as she takes her seat, but Gauri smiles at her anyway. Andromeda grins back.
The TA surely teaches them things worth learning, but Andromeda doesn’t retain a single word that day.
“Hey,” she says when the clock hits ten minutes to the hour and people are beginning to get up and leave, even though the TA is still rattling off the assignments due next week. Gauri pauses in the middle of packing their bag. “Would you happen to have time to have dinner together?”
Gauri frowns, and Andromeda backpedals.
“I mean, it doesn’t have to be dinner, I just wondered if I could—have five minutes to talk to you?”
Gauri relaxes.
“Five minutes sounds okay.”
“Great!” says Andromeda, kicking herself mentally for not realizing that Gauri would have plans. “Would you mind, maybe, coming to my dorm room? I kind of had something I wanted to give you.”
It sounds so cheesy, but Gauri just cocks their head curiously.
“Me?” they ask.
“Yeah,” Andromeda says, but has nothing else to add, and an awkward silence stretches between them. For a moment, she wonders if this whole thing was a bad idea and she ought to abandon the idea entirely—but no, that’s her brain being mean again, deciding nothing can happen unless it happens just so, even though that’s not how anything works in real life.
“Exciting plans tonight?” she asks as she hoists up the bag whose contents she has not touched.
“I wish,” says Gauri with a sigh. “I still live at home, and have two little brothers to look after. My dad works full time, so weeknights when I don’t have class too late, I’m on dinner duty.”
“Oh,” Andromeda blinks. “Do you like cooking?”
“Hm,” hums Gauri. “I’m not sure. I think I would like it if I chose to do it, you know? But I don’t choose it, it’s just like, curse of the eldest daughter in a single-parent household, and so mostly I make pasta.”
Daughter, Andromeda registers, and her heart flutters. She’s learning so much about Gauri just in this one conversation, and her brain is floating with it.
Her brain isn’t all bad. It’s just excitable and very stubborn.
“Pasta’s great,” says Andromeda.
“I mean, yeah,” laughs Gauri. “It’s fast and easy and there are so many different sauces you can make that it’s easy to build different flavor profiles day to day without putting that much effort in. But my brothers do complain, and I get it. Even I get sick of it sometimes.”
“Then what do you make?”
“Usually I’m too tired to actually vary the menu, so I just tell my brothers to suck it up until the weekend when our dad can cook, and I do the same. But when I have the energy and leftover rice, I make a decent vegetable fried rice. And when there isn’t any leftover rice, I make dal and rice.”
“One of those sounds way more involved than the other.”
“Which do you think is more involved?” grins Gauri.
“Well, dal is lentils, right? Don’t those take, like, ages to cook?”
“Depends on which lentil you use. I use those shelled red ones you get in any old grocery store, and they cook so fast you don’t even need to use a pressure cooker. Plus, we have a rice cooker. So actually, the veggie fried rice is usually a little more involved, depending on how many veggies I put in. But since that’s up to the cook, usually I pull out a bunch of veggies, prep a few until I’m tired of it, then shove the rest back into the fridge.”
“Huh,” says Andromeda. “I don’t think I’ve ever cooked. I mean, unless you count toasting bread.”
Gauri frowns at her. “Didn’t you have home ec in your school?”
“Not one that involved cooking.”
“Huh,” says Gauri this time. “If you’re interested in learning, I could teach you one of these days. Maybe we can make something more interesting than pasta.”
“Really?” Andromeda perks up.
They are entering the dorm complex, and Andromeda’s pulse grows faster.
The thing is, Gauri has always been a distant crush.
She’s had nothing to lose by confessing her crush.
But now, in this one walk, they seem to have become…if not friends, then solidly on their way to being friends.
And Andromeda might be about to ruin everything. There really is no rush. There never has been. Talk to your crush, become friends, hang out a bit, confess—this is a perfectly respectable trajectory, and probably far more sensible than whatever imaginary rules Andromeda’s brain made up.
But there is no way out. She’s told Gauri she wants to give her something. She’s written the questions on pumpkins taped to the wall. She cannot think of an excuse to now lead Gauri out of the dorm complex that would not make her seem incredibly flakey and weird.
“Andromeda?” calls Gauri, and even as Andromeda’s brain thrills—Gauri knows her name!—she realizes that she’s frozen in place.
She swallows. Luckily, the area is deserted.
“The thing is,” Andromeda says quickly before she can second-guess herself, “I wanted to ask you out.”
“Oh!” says Gauri, looking surprised—and then she frowns. “Wait. Wanted?”
“I still do! But I mean—if you don’t want to go out, I am totally okay with that and I would still like to be friends with you if…if that isn’t weird. I’m just in a bit of a weird state right now because when we started this walk you were just a classmate I had a crush on, and now I feel like…I could absolutely be getting ahead of myself, but I feel like we’re almost friends? And asking you out now might ruin that, which I don’t want.”
Gauri stares at her.
“So in summary,” she says slowly, “you are asking me if it’s okay if you ask me out, and if the answer is no, you are asking me if I will still be your friend.”
“Yes.” Andromeda wants to curl into herself and disappear.
Gauri gives this some thought.
“The thing is,” she says at last, “I’ve never really dated. And since we don’t know each other that well, I would like the certainty of a friendship. But…if you ask me out, I’ll say yes. And I’d just ask that if you do ask me out, maybe we try to prioritize keeping the friendship, however things work out or don’t after that?”
“Yes,” says Andromeda, so relieved she feels weak in the knees. “I—I would like to ask you, then.”
“Haven’t you already?” asks Gauri with a smile.
“I actually.” Andromeda clears her throat. “Maybe made a bit of a Thing of it. Which is something I do.”
“Oh, well, in that case, lead the way.”
Andromeda leads Gauri to her room, opens the door, and slips in ahead of Gauri. She picks up the paper poppy on her desk and turns to see Gauri looking up at the leaves. She gets to watch as Gauri notices, then reads the pumpkins taped to the back of the wardrobe. She gets to watch Gauri’s smile grow and grow and grow.
Andromeda clears her throat and hands out the flower in both hands.
“Will you be my girlfriend, Gauri?” she asks.
Gauri takes the flower, and their fingers brush. Tingles go up Andromeda’s fingers all the way up to her shoulders.
“I will,” says Gauri. She shifts the flower to one hand, and reaches out with the other, palm up between them like an offering.
Andromeda places her hand in Gauri’s, feeling the warmth of her skin, the way their fingers curl around each other, sealing the claim.
When she looks up at Gauri’s face again, Gauri is looking back at her. Her eyes are as bright as their future.