Chapter Text
Something crashes downstairs.
Yone ignores it. There are demon foxes hitting the griddy behind his eyelids to Paranoia’s bass track.
Another series of crashes follows. Yone mumbles, “hrrghghmf,” groggily blinks away the scary little creatures, and fumbles for his phone. He knocks over his glasses instead.
Well, shit.
The sound of K’Sante trying to catch the two monkeys drifts up. Yone finally manages to find his glasses and the world blurs into focus long enough for him to find his phone. Wow, would you look at that, it’s on the floor. He grabs it, rolls on his back and barely makes out the number on the screen before his fingers give up their pathetic attempt at holding his phone up and promptly drop it onto his face. It joins his glasses in the uncharted wilds of the blankets.
It’s—
11 in the morning?
Fuck.
The sun, quite suddenly and quite irritatingly, agrees that Yone has slept enough and makes its presence known by blinding him. In retaliation— or maybe to defend his barely-functional eyesight— Yone throws his arm across his eyes. Whoever had decided that out of all the vast pleasantries of life he simply had to retain the ability to drink himself absolutely stupid? Yeah, that motherfucker needs to learn what a sword in the gut feels like. Or two. Solid one star out of five; Yone knows from first-hand experience.
Maybe the sun would stop poking needles into his eyelids if he chucked a sword at it too— although right now he doesn’t think that he could even lift a kitten. Oh, who is he kidding, he can’t even hold his phone. Groaning, he considers the merits of staying in his blankets. On one hand, they’re swallowing him whole— he’s about to become a Yone-burrito monstrosity— but it sure is comfortable. He’d happily merge with the fabric.
On the other hand, he can hear a troubling amount of raucous laughter punctuated by the occasional shriek and howl (he swears up and down that Kayn and Ezreal have to be at least 70% monkey with the havoc they wreak). It’s probably best not to leave that unchecked. Probably.
Yone mourns the imminent loss of his burrito for all of three seconds before he rallies his troops and gives in to the urge to wrangle some sense of order into their resident hooligans. Mothering urge, Kayn calls it. Responsible grandpa here to beat some logic into you.
Ugh. He doesn’t have enough brain juice to unravel any of Kayn’s varyingly . . . unique remarks right now.
Yone allows himself two more precious seconds with his comfy nest before he sighs, resigned to his fate, and rolls out, grabbing a pair of sweatpants and his phone from where it’s slowly being consumed by the blanket. He fumbles his glasses when he tries to put them back on. They fall onto his bedside drawer and glint up at him, as disgruntled as an inanimate hunk of glass and metal can possibly be.
Fingers. Damn them.
-–—–-
Gods, what has his life come to?
“What?” Yone demands. “Would you like to explain how the hell you thought trying to lob the toaster at Ez was a good idea?”
Ezreal coughs, ducking his head and scratching sheepishly at the back of his neck. “I mean . . . I’m fine?”
“The house would not have been if I had not stopped you,” K’Sante says pointedly.
Kayn is hunched against the hallway and he is glaring mutinously at the floor with intensity enough to bore a hole right through the hardwood, arms crossed. He’s arguing with Rhaast, if the scowl on his face is anything to go by. Yone hears a mumbled, “Yeah, you don’t say, you big asshole,” before K’Sante sighs and drags a hand over his face.
“I cannot believe I am talking to two grown men like they are children,” K’Sante mutters. “You want to throw anything around, do it outside. Not inside.”
Common sense, he doesn’t add.
Ezreal, eyes suspiciously innocent and wide, says, “Okay.”
Yone lets him go. K’Sante goes poof. For such a big man, he sure moves very silently.
Kayn kicks his foot back and forth, back and forth. He finally lifts his head to meet Yone’s gaze, still very much sullen. Rhaast glares out of his left eye. Yone is the first to break the stubborn silence.
Yone raises an eyebrow. “A toaster? Seriously?”
“Hey, he threw a pillow at me first,” Kayn says defensively.
“Yes, because throwing a toaster back is the logical progression,” Yone replies, gamely.
“Yes ,” Rhaast says, a petulant growl. “ Better a toaster than a knife.”
What―
“Knives,” Yone says flatly. Rhaast— or Kayn, or both; probably both of them— nods. Gods above, help him. “Rhaast, no throwing knives. No throwing anything at anyone, no matter how annoying they are; and especially not Ezreal.”
He sees the way Rhaast grins, sharper and more feral than Kayn’s cocky attitude, and braces himself for the spectacularly random bullshit that tends to grace the air when Rhaast is in control. “I don’t know, Kayn seems like he’d sure like to throw himself at y―”
Kayn slaps a hand over his own mouth, his regular eye wide, which would be incredibly funny in any other situation; except now he’s looking like he wants to phase straight into the floor and never emerge again, which would be . . . suboptimal. (By that he means that it would be very very bad, both for the band and Yone’s own tenuous grasp on sanity, mostly only held together by his pretty much 24/7 supply of coffee. Which he doesn’t have with him right now, hence his current nonfunctional brain).
Yone’s brain is still trying to recover from its momentary overheating. Yone knocks his hand to his forehead. It stalls and sputters and dies out, so he goes fully manual and before he can really think about what he’s saying (oh wait, he forgot; he can’t), “Kayn, have you ever considered just asking?” is already halfway out his mouth—
Aaaaaaand shit. Yone never does things in halves, except things that actually do need swords to slice them in half like bad guys and evil manipulators and his own stomach, according to Yasuo, apparently; but that’s besides the point. Now he’s seriously reconsidering that commitment. And seriously considering his own retirement to go live as a hermit in the woods where his non-functional brain can’t go and say things like— like that. Society would be so much better off.
Well, it’s impossible to bag the cat now that it’s out of the bag; Yone closes his eyes, counts to ten, and wearily prays to the gods for a cup of coffee and possibly some sort of miracle medicine to fix his brain, please and thank you. He opens his eyes to see Kayn staring at him, possibly a little bit alarmed, quite probably mildly panicked, and definitely contemplating how best to escape the palpable awkwardness that sits on both their shoulders like the world’s most uncomfortable parrot. Claws, beaks, bird shit and all.
“. . . guh,” Kayn says. Eloquent. His eyes stay wide. Very, very wide.
“Guh,” Yone repeats, nodding slowly. Fuck, now he’s the parrot. He clears his throat, out of embarrassment and also partially because there is mucus stuck in it and now he can’t talk. Wonderful.
Kayn bolts for the staircase, hastily remembers to at least take his hands down from his mouth, and then four seconds later Yone hears Kayn’s door slam shut.
Wow, that went well. Yone cuts his losses; he scrapes together what’s left of his dignity and heads to the kitchen to make himself some coffee, time of day be screwed.
Not even a minute later, he hears a resounding thud.
Please don’t let Kayn get stuck in the wall again.
. . . Well, maybe he’ll go make himself a sandwich or something.
-–—–-
Aphelios is quite possibly Yone’s bane of existence— in a completely affectionate way, of course, because Yone doesn’t actually have an existence for him to bane, back from the dead and whatnot, but that’s also besides the point; the little shit messages him at seven in the evening, after he’s already firmly resolute on ignoring the headache he can feel slowly creeping up on him from the tedious process of organizing all the activities Heartsteel has scheduled ahead of them. Even with Alune’s frankly uncanny ability to predict the outcome of the various meetings and negotiations they find themselves stuck with, people are still . . . people. And at the end of the day, Yone finds himself with twelve different proposals that are quite blatantly trying to exploit their small band’s unforeseen success for whatever the hell million dollar entertainment companies get up to when they’re not expanding the fuck out of the economy. They’re not even subtle about it. It’s so ridiculous. He really wants to punch something. Or slice something.
Really, really wants to.
The whole point of building a band from the ground up was so he didn’t have to deal with shitheads in business suits all day long anymore, and oh, look, they’ve somehow struck gold and made a name for themselves, and now they’re back. Fuck them. Yone thinks that they have a lot in common with like dandelions or some sort of shitty weed like that. Dandelions weeds in dandelion suits.
Alune’s bubblegum-pink hair shifts around on his monitor as she gives him a serene smile through the screen. Aphelios has the same tiny smug smirk as his sister. Alune’s surely just as tired as Yone after dealing with those corporate dandelion shitheads, but she hides it a lot better than Yone, who’s frowning viciously at the black text blinking up at him on his monitor as she waves at someone offscreen, bows and says something in Korean or possibly English, patchily background-noise-removed out, that Yone doesn’t have the heart to translate, and begins her drive home. Alune tells him sternly to go rest up. He gets the distinct feeling that she’s either laughing at him or giving him the digital equivalent of a pat on the head.
Yeah, no, actually, maybe both.
He replies almost without thinking, which seems to be a common theme today. It’s kinda shitty now that he thinks about it; he asks his brain to actually function because that would be really nice, thanks. “Keep your eyes on the road. It wouldn’t do for you to die on us.”
She breezily waves him off. “Ah, it’ll be fine, I drive here all the time. Oh, by the way, can you say hi to Phel for me? Tell him to come visit me sometime, there’s a new supermarket that just opened and they have some of his little snacks that he loves. Also some new limited edition Choncc plushies, he should be able to bribe Sett with those. Look, it’s right over there.”
The phone camera is shakily grabbed and rotated so that he can see the bright colorful lights of the store and oh holy sweet mother of jesus his eyes—
Alune drops her phone back into her cup holder and Yone lets the pained grunt he had been holding in whistle out through his nose.
He doesn’t comment on the fact that Alune and Aphelios are constantly in touch, never one without the other even if it’s only through their phones. Instead he nods. “I will. Take care, Alune.”
“Mn. Go get some rest, Yone.” Alune drops off the discord call and Yone follows right after.
Ah, the sweet, sweet pain of a not-quite-hungover headache.
Yone fucking hates it.
He takes his glasses off and slumps onto his arms, his brain fizzling out into little sparks as he contemplates the merits of just falling asleep at the desk.
So.
Pros: he can just . . . not deal with any of this shit and go to sleep. While alcohol doesn’t affect him the same way it used to before he― well, before he died― it still does a number on his head, as evidenced by the not all that great pain poking gleefully at his temples.
Cons: his back is going to kill him. Viciously, with teeth and fangs and salt in wounds and all that jazz. Also he doesn’t really trust Ezreal to not accidentally start an oil fire again.
. . . Ugh, the pains of being the only one able to cook. Yone still doesn’t get up, because his head is busy lighting itself on fire.
Then Aphelios, of course, decides to take the decision from him; Yone hears his discord ping, which means usually either someone’s dying or trolling the fuck out of everyone else. He groans and lifts his head, and the first thing that greets his eyes after they adjust to the light of his monitor is―
― a blurry line of non legible squiggles, because he’s a dumbass and forgot to put on his glasses. Again.
Phel has typed out another five messages by the time he rectifies that particular problem.
[https://tenor.com/view/animate-me-app-animate-me-meme-face-happy-excited-face-gif-24124999]
hey mom ya good there
we’re all going out to get some groceries, im hoping they dont burn the place down cuz then we cant get any more dumplings :(
waiting on you whenever your meeting ends . . .
[https://tenor.com/view/chicken-como-coming-gif-26051522]
bud you want some painkillers or something i can hear your pain from here
No, I’m good.
Go without me.
are you absolutely sure
sett says he can hear the headache too
see
great minds hear alike
Jesus. Aphelios is a stubborn bastard. Phenomenal at the magic he wrings from his instruments, but still a bastard.
Yes, I’m sure.
I’m fine.
I’ll just . . . sleep it away.
Or something.
Actually, can you get an iced coffee for me?
Please?
dude it is
seven
at night
caffeine takes like ten hours to get out of the body yknow
His discord pings again. Alune’s pink-haired profile picture pops up; she’s sent him a message as well: Go relax, you stupid butthole.
I thought you told me to go rest.
Okay
Well
Go do that after you appease your family, Mr. Mother Hen.
:D
The twins truly make a scarily efficient tag-team. Yone gives up. Futile effort and all that.
Ugh.
Stop telling Alune to yell at me :(
(:
Okay fine, I’m coming.
:(
yay
[https://tenor.com/view/lo-l-kayn-caramell-dansen-league-of-legends-gif-14875142]
What the FUCK IS THAT
APHELIOS
(;
just get out here already old man
Yone despairs.
-–―–-
Dinner is not as much of an ordeal as Yone had thought it would be, because even the greatest of men don’t have the mental capacity to feel awkward when it’s late enough that the sky has been pitch dark for three hours and there are six different stomachs yelling in six different ways for sustenance. Alas, it doesn’t prevent Phel from causing mischief; Yone sees him sneaking a chunk of rib off of Sett’s plate and replacing it with a piece of cartilage out of the corner of his eye. Aphelios winks at him.
Sett, engrossed in some sort of discussion with K’Sante about workout shit Yone doesn’t understand a word of, absentmindedly crunches it without faltering. Aphelios makes a heehee noise and pats him on the head. Sett’s ears flick back at him. K’Sante continues his rant about something something protein mix something; Yone thinks he catches the words “facilitated diffusion activation” somewhere in there, which, if he’s remembering correctly, has something to do with . . . cells. He thinks. (No, that can’t be right . . . can it?)
Ezreal squabbles with Kayn, par the norm; today it seems Ezreal is trying to convince Kayn to dye his hair robin egg blue and get a sidecut. Yone shivers at the mental monstrosity and is inordinately grateful when Rhaast vehemently disagrees on behalf of both of them. Ezreal pouts, sticks his tongue out, and makes a phlbftbth sound. Kayn phbfhlths right back.
Aphelios sends Yone a message halfway through with a link to a video of two monkeys fighting each other. Caught off guard by the monkeys’ shrieks and their general, well, monkeying, Yone snorts when he sees them wrestling around. Quite the accurate depiction of the two. Aphelios wiggles his eyebrows pointedly at Ezreal and lifts his phone; Ezreal peers over Kayn’s shoulder, grins brightly, and makes a face at the camera. Kayn chokes on his rice.
Yone reaches over and gives him a couple solid thumps on the back. Kayn sputters. His face turns an alarming shade of purple-red, which of course is exactly when Aphelios decides to raise his phone and take another picture, smiling beatifically all the while. Yone turns his disapproving patented-by-Kayn “mom glare” on him. Aphelios raises his hands in surrender.
The relative peace, predictably, does not last long. All hell breaks loose after Kayn takes a bite of Walmart brownies and promptly spits it right the fuck back out onto his plate. Yone ends up narrowly avoiding Kayn’s elbow in his face and a foot in his stomach, but his hair still manages to whip some regret into him for not tying it up when it invades his mouth in a hairy white tangle. Yuck. Aphelios makes a funny sort of snorting noise and bolts up the stairs two at a time when Kayn lunges for him; Kayn, being the very mature adult (read: petty child) he is, immediately gives chase.
“Aphelios,” he snarls, “get back here!”
“Oh,” Sett says. The dishes rattle on the table from the force of Kayn’s destructive personality and also from his attempted pounce. “Huh, I thought those smelled funny. Bit like dish soap.”
“Phel put dish soap on the brownies?” K’Sante’s face looks constipated. Yone tries not to laugh. He’s not really successful, but thankfully Kayn’s muffled roars are distracting enough that nobody notices.
Ezreal scrambles to check the rest of the package. “No, just the one Kayn took. Seems fair to me.”
“So . . . who wants to stop them from wrecking the house this time?”
“You mean stop Kayn,” Ezreal corrects. “Aphelios is as harmless as a hamster. I vote mom.”
What―
“I think he should too,” Sett says. “Also Phel could probably kill a hamster with that glare.” His ears twitch. “Hot.”
“No,” Yone groans, covering his ears, just as Ezreal trips and flails and yelps, “Gaaaaaaaahhh, no, please gods no. Stop, Sett, you don’t need to go into that much detail. La la-la la la my innocent ears are not hearing this extreme thirst―”
K’Sante mumbles something along the lines of, “Gross,” and forcefully pushes Sett towards the stairs, who has a shit-eating grin plastered on his face and looking altogether far too pleased with himself. “Just for that, you are getting the very bad, no-good tall monkey. You can go do whatever you want with Phel as long as you two are in a room and please not where we can hear it.”
Sett’s ears perk up.
Yone heaves a sigh of relief. Thank the gods for Sett’s eagerness to please whenever Aphelios is mentioned. Aphelios can always be counted on as effective motivation for Sett.
Wow. He’d never thought he’d say― or, he amends, think― those words. At least he doesn’t have to go beat order into anyone tonight.
(He might be avoiding Kayn. Yone decides not to think about it too much. Best to preserve what’s left of his sanity.)