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“...He looks ridiculous.”
“Adorable though, right?”
“The answer to your original query is still no.”
“But if we stop there, the others will make fun of him…”
“Then you should have thought twice before putting him in this ludicrous accouterment in the first place.”
Aventurine pouts. “C’mon, doc… do you really think so little of my fashion choices?” he begins, and Ratio sweeps his gaze up and down Aventurine’s attire with a look like he’s selecting some choice words.
Aventurine makes a face at him. “...Don’t answer that.”
They both look down at the little catcake perched on the kitchen counter in front of them, and it peers back at them with big, round eyes. It’s the smallest of the three—Chip—and it is, for lack of a better phrase, decorated.
Earlier that day, Aventurine had spent far longer than he should have creating a ‘costume’ for Chip, which was essentially just a length of emerald-green gift box ribbon that wrapped around the catcake from underneath and tied together in an extravagant bow on top of it. The length of the ribbon was carefully embellished with tiny diamante snowflakes, edged with ruffles of tinsel, and emblazoned with a silvery ‘MERRY’ on one side and ‘CHIPMAS’ on the other. The bow itself had a variety of additional decorations attached to it, including (but not limited to) further diamante snowflakes, two little silver antlers fashioned out of tinfoil and spite, a heavy dusting of glitter, and finally a ring of holly leaves nestled around a single silver bell—right in the middle, so whenever Chip hopped around, it would jingle delightfully.
Looking at it now, Aventurine has no idea why Ratio is so unimpressed. He’s basically turned Chip into a work of art. He thought Ratio appreciated art? “Well, what would you have done, then? Put it in a little stone case to match your bust?” he huffs, folding his accidentally glitter-dusted forearms. He’d only realized his mistake AFTER he’d picked Chip up to put him on the counter.
Ratio side-eyes him. “I wouldn’t have put him in anything in the first place, gambler. They’re all full of holiday cheer enough as it is.” Ratio’s stern words are betrayed by a microscopically softer tone of voice than usual. Ah, so this is ‘mild disapproval’, then, and not ‘outright scorn’. Excellent. Aventurine still has a chance.
“Okay, well however you view it, it still comes down to this: we leave only Chip decorated, and Roulette and Blackjack make fun of him—which would be just awful of us as his loving family—or we decorate the other two, so they’ll at least all look equally—”
“Garish?”
“—glamorous.”
One of the other catcakes jumps up onto the counter: it’s Roulette, denoted by her elegant wobble and the way she immediately pushes the nearest object (thankfully just one of Aventurine’s dice) off the counter. She hops daintily over to where Chip is still sitting surprisingly obediently in front of his ‘dads’, and blinks at him. Then, she pokes him with one paw. The bell on Chip’s ribbon jingles, and Roulette makes a drawn-out, wavering meow that sounds rather suspiciously like a laugh.
It draws the attention of Blackjack from across the room, who stops scratching up the couch to look over at them, echoing the noise in his own scraggly voice with his fiery amber eyes narrowed in glee.
Chip makes his own miserable meow, looking very pathetic and only half-heartedly trying to stop Roulette’s poking, allowing the bell to jingle sadly as she wobbles him.
He and Aventurine both look back up at Ratio with pitiful gazes. Aventurine leans his head against the taller man's shoulder. “See? Told you they'd be mean to him,” he whines, and reaches out to block Roulette’s next swipe at Chip’s side with a gently-scolding ‘psshh’. “I thought doctors were supposed to make people feel better…” he wheedles, with a glint in his eye as he slowly chips away at Ratio’s stony defense.
“My job involves fixing fractures, not fashion-related felonies.”
“That’s a lot of ‘F’s.”
“It was all the ones I had left to give,” Ratio says, sardonically.
“Not even a small one? Just between the two of us?” Aventurine replies with a coy little smile and a wink.
“No, unless you’re implying the grade I might have given you for this violation of aesthetics.”
“...Touché.”
Ratio is silent for a long moment. Then, he inhales deeply through his nose, closing his eyes—and Aventurine knows that he’s won the game. Not that he doubted himself, of course. He always wins their games.
Ratio lets out his sigh of exasperation. “Fine. But I’m not helping you.”
♠ ♥ ♣ ♦
Ratio helps Aventurine to decorate the other catcakes, begrudgingly settling down next to him on one of the gambler’s many, many floor cushions. He puts down the gold bow that he’s been dutifully curling into a bouquet of Fibonacci spirals and glances outside for a moment, through the large window on the far wall and into the evening sky beyond.
Although Pier Point doesn’t experience snow, he had helped Aventurine to alter the window’s hologram display (which usually acted as shutters, a wall clock, or sometimes a makeshift TV when Aventurine couldn’t be bothered to get up and move to the real one) so that it would show a simulation of snowflakes swirling down outside.
He looks back again when he feels Aventurine’s weight against his shoulder, the smaller man leaning over to hold up a length of red velvet ribbon that he’d just finished bedazzling with black diamante rectangles every couple of inches, then little gold snowflakes instead of where the roulette-wheel-ribbon’s numbers would be. “What do you think?”
“For Roulette?” Ratio glances over to where the catcake in question is idly snoozing on the arm of the couch.
“Who else?”
Aventurine smiles at him, then, and it’s such a genuine, carefree smile that he can’t help but smile back, wrapping an arm around his partner’s shoulders and pulling him closer for a warm, glitter-dusted hug.
Neither of them celebrates the cosmos' current iteration of 'Christmas', exactly—Ratio just isn't inclined, and Aventurine has his own traditions, which they’d been slowly trying to unearth more of together, but… if it's like this—with Ratio, his gambler, and their three catcakes—he thinks he could get used to it.
“...It’s beautiful.”