Chapter Text
“Guess what?” Stella thrust her phone in Ashen Eye’s face, narrowly avoiding clocking them on the head.
“Hmm?” Her inscrutable flat-mate – or freeloader, if she was being honest with herself – leaned against the wall across from her, both pairs of spindly gray arms obscured underneath their cloak, a drab, shadowy presence in her festive flat. Color ate away at their faded appearance, the lights from the small tree in her living room dancing across their hood, painting the white stripes of their scarf in a wash of pinks and greens. She’d tried replacing the ratty old thing with tinsel earlier in the evening, but their enjoyment of pranks seemed to end when they were the butt of one.
She shook her head and grinned. “Elias snogged Chise today! And,” she whispered, hopping down from the countertop she perched upon to stand beside them, “she said he used his tongue for the first time!” Which was quite a lot of tongue, according to Chise, along with more saliva than she could handle, she’d texted in a self-conscious, but eager tone. Of course, Stella was over the moon for them, but at the same time she couldn’t help but steal a glance at Ashen Eye’s fluttery facial covering, wondering if their mouth was the same in this form as their larger one, or if there was anything more inside their gaping maw that they’d yet to reveal. Before she let herself think too hard about it, she brazenly plunged her hand into their cloak to fish out one of their arms, wrapping herself around them as she waited for a response.
“Oh? How droll.” They did not react to her revelatory news, their gaze dark and shrouded as ever, their head not so much as angling towards her phone. And, she noticed with the usual disappointment, they did not react to her either – not her hand threading between their bracelets to circle their wrist, not her body pressing into theirs, her lips almost brushing their facial covering. She knew it was foolish to have expected any different, though. After all, kissing and cuddling and anything remotely romantic, devoid of conflict or lessons to be taught, were all terribly boring to them.
She sighed. Just her luck that they were the one she wanted to do all those things with. She wasn’t quite sure when it had happened, if something about seeing Chise and Elias together had awakened her own latent feelings for prickly, shadowy things that were oblivious in their own utterly different ways to the efforts of the unlucky mortals who wooed them, or maybe their constant presence beside her had simply become so all-encompassing that there was no longer any feeling she could imagine having that didn’t involve them.
She squirmed a little, her body hot and a tad sensitive when she leaned into their cloak, even underneath her comfy knit dress and tights. Yeah, she was definitely blaming Chise’s overly enthusiastic descriptions of her own monstrous partner for getting her all worked up over this mummified dust bunny.
Stella rolled her eyes. “For someone who loves to eavesdrop you’re pretty picky about what you actually want to listen to.” She understood that there were vast differences between the two of them and accepted that they were never going to be drawn to the same things as her, but it certainly made her current predicament all the more frustrating. Sure, she could just tell them how she felt; she’d never had an issue expressing such things, but she had this nagging sense that it would be a fool’s errand. That any suggestion that she might desire their bond to be any more loving than the bickering and snarky power struggles it was currently built upon would only signal to them that she no longer held the spark that drew their interest to her, and would move on, casting her aside.
No, she had to do this in a way that aligned with how they viewed the world. As much as it peeved her, she had to find a middle ground – or, as she was coming to realize, a ground very, very close to theirs. Hence her plan tonight. With further confirmation of their disinterest elicited from Chise’s text, she made up her mind.
“If I were to absorb every word spouted from mortal lips over the last few millennia that I could even move would be a wonder,” Ashen Eye was saying, withdrawing a few more hands to wave about in enigmatic motions.
The Christmas lights were reflected in their bracelets, a rainbow winking in and out of existence between the soft clinks they made against each other. Flailing, she reached out to capture another arm with her remaining hand, and was deftly evaded as they dipped all unencumbered limbs into their cloak once more. She frowned. “Okay, but surely snogging isn’t the most boring thing in the world.”
“A fair point,” they admitted. “I can concede that such an activity is often the culmination of fervent desires given wings to grace the world as truths, though I far prefer observing the strife before the sweet conclusion. And there are many activities lower than even that; I strive to avoid such doldrums no matter how frequent they appear in the increasingly monotonous cycles your kind continues to tread.”
She pressed onwards, grasping onto that thin ray of hope buried in their long-winded musings. “So, if I started chatting you up about say, the Christmas light trail Chise and Elias walked last weekend, you’d start wandering off.”
They peered at her, a flash of silvery rings glinting underneath their hood. “Was there any conflict?”
“It’s a light trail; the biggest conflict they had was deciding whether to see the snowflake walk or the fire garden first.”
“Then you interpret correctly.”
Stella dropped their arm and spun around, twining her hands together behind her back as she looked up, already imagining the snow falling around her, the soft chatter of people as they observed the decorations. “Well, I find it delightful!” she declared. “I was going to go tonight, actually, but everyone’s busy.”
Ashen Eye tutted at her. “Then simply–”
“Go alone, I know, I know.” She shrugged. “I’ve gone alone for the past three years now. What’s wrong with wanting a change of pace? It’s an entirely different experience seeing lights with someone, you know; when I’m alone the only opinions I get to hear are my own, and it gets quite tedious after a while.”
“Alas, it appears you must toil along the same path once more.” They mimicked her, lifting their hands up pityingly. “How unlucky.”
How utterly oblivious indeed. Stella smirked. “I think you mean lucky. It turns out I don’t have anything to be disappointed about after all.”
“Pardon?”
She pointed at them, stabbing them in the chest with her finger. “Because you’re coming with me!”
Ashen Eye stared at her, their head tilting at her proclamation. “I just stated I have little interest in such pastimes.”
“Oh, and you have something better to do?” she retorted. Their cloak ties brushed against her finger, that single point of contact between them tying her to something dizzying, breathtaking. She gave into the spiraling urge a little, though she wanted nothing more than to continue snapping back at them. After all, her changing feelings didn’t mean she was suddenly going to start biting her tongue, after all. She dropped her hand, falling towards them until she was buried in their cloak once more, her words muffled by the fabric. “You’ve been alive for millennia before me and will be for many more after, so what’s the harm in humoring a silly mortal for an evening, huh?”
“I have plans,” they hissed, though the scrabbling of their limbs within their cloak seemed a bit frantic to her. “I was going to seek out those who speak flippantly without comprehension of the consequences and enlighten them–”
“So torment helpless chaps like you do every night, got it.” She gripped their scarf, tugging it open. Her gaze met theirs, a flash clinging to life in the scuffed, leaden pan of their omniscient torpor. “Look. I know we aren’t the same, but surely at some point you must realize that doing the same thing over and over again, even if it’s fun for you, is going to wear it thin eventually. You insist that my life is boring, but I can’t fathom how mind-numbingly dreary yours must be if you turn your nose up at breaking from your path the slightest bit.”
Her breath left her as dry, warm flesh met her chin, and she blinked, her face tilted towards theirs in their bony grasp.
“Hmm.” They studied her, their eyes roving across her flushed face. After a moment, they released her, though her chin remained tilted at the angle they left it, as if she could still feel their hand cupping her so long as she did not move from where they’d positioned her. “I suppose,” they said, crossing their lower arms over each other, “that a brief deviation is tolerable.”
Stella bit back a smile and sprung away from them, hurrying to the door to grab her bag before they changed their mind. “’Kay,” she said. “Now are we going to take the tube, adding at least another thirty minutes to our ‘boring’ outing each way, or are you going to be a good giant scorpion and carry me there?”
Ashen Eye grumbled under their breath as they transformed.