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“Okay,” Ralsei says. “I think that’s the last one.”
Lancer scans the list again. He hesitates for a moment near the start, then begins to count under his breath. Once he gets to the end, he nods decisively. “Looks like it!”
Ralsei gives the room a once-over. They have a few big stacks of Valentines on the tables (one for nearly every Darkner in Castle Town) and scraps of paper on the floor. “You’re fast on your bike, aren’t you? Maybe you could start delivering these and I could clean up?”
He’d send Susie out with Lancer, but she left a few hours ago, something about the school locking up at night. Perhaps it’s for the best—she and Lancer have caused quite a bit of chaos today already, and that’s with only Ralsei to terrorize. He at least finds them funny, and he can’t guarantee everyone else in Castle Town feels the same.
“Sure,” Lancer says, already stuffing some of the cards into his vest.
Well… it’s not as if he has a bike basket (though it might make a good gift), he doesn’t seem to be crumpling them as he does it, and Ralsei’s not sure he even has sweat glands. It’s probably fine.
He starts to pick some paper up off the floor while Lancer gets ready to head off. “Um,” he says. “Thanks for all the help today. I don’t think I’d have finished it all in time without you and Susie.”
“Any time, you charming little cherimoya!” Lancer says, putting up his kickstand (despite Ralsei’s pleas, he continues to bring his bike indoors—unfortunately, Ralsei can’t disagree about it looking cool). “It was fun hanging out.”
“Happy Valentine’s Day,” Ralsei says. “In a few hours, anyway.”
“Happy soon-to-be-Valentine’s Day,” Lancer responds in kind. “See you tomorrow, toothpaste boy!”
And with that, Ralsei is left on his own. He gets down to cleaning.
The longer he works, the more he feels something nagging at him, but he can’t tell what. He hasn’t missed anything cleaning, Lancer said they’d made a Valentine for everyone, he thanked Susie for her help before she left and Lancer before he went on his delivery route… but there’s still a sense that’s something’s wrong.
He tries to go back over his memories of the day—Lancer stopped by briefly on his way to get breakfast and came back an hour later once he’d eaten (with Susie arriving not too long after that). He made a few Valentines of his own (one of which he gave to Ralsei, though he spent more time making himself a new fake mustache out of paper than Ralsei thinks he did on the actual card) before helping Ralsei out making copies of the more generic ones (even used his wavy scissors for some of them). He joined in on Susie’s joke about “smoking”, and…
He had seemed a bit put out earlier, now that Ralsei thinks about it. Not too much, but Ralsei’d called him over to look at the note, and he’d asked (genuine, at first, much quieter than when it became part of the joke and he’d started yelling) if it was a Valentine for him. When Ralsei wrote that it wasn’t, he’d looked a bit disappointed, just for a moment. Ralsei had thought at the time that it was part of the joke, too, but now he’s not so sure.
Earlier Lancer had been the one to go back over the list, and he’d hesitated at the start—Ralsei knows he put Lancer’s name on there, up at the top, but he also now realizes he never actually made one for him.
He had planned to. It’s just that it’s a bit hard to condense all of what he has to say to him into one card, and it’s distracting when he’s right there while Ralsei’s trying to write. So he’d planned to do it once Lancer left for the day and drop it off for him to see in the morning. It must’ve slipped his mind to come back to it, since he’d done all of the other people at the top of his list first thing.
Oh, Lancer must think he forgot entirely. He must not have wanted to make it into a big deal.
Well, Ralsei decides, taking a piece of paper out of the recycling, that won’t do. He still has time to pull off his original plan now that he’s remembered.
He takes Lancer’s wavy scissors—note to self, return those in the morning—and, first folding the paper in half, cuts it into a heart shape. The edges are a bit jagged, but Lancer isn’t the type to mind. Then he takes a pen and writes.
It’s a bit mushy, frankly. He talks about what he loves about Lancer (his bravery, his candor, how he can light up a room, he could go on for a while but the space of the paper limits him) and how nice it’s been to have a friend in Castle Town, and at the end says:
“I would be honored to be your Valentine this year. Ralsei”
Kris and Susie had said that Valentine’s Day cards are not necessarily romantic. Case in point: they spent the day today making dozens upon dozens to give out to just about every Darkner in Castle Town. Kris and Susie had also said, however, that they could be. Ralsei reads the note over a few times and can’t tell how it reads—he’s not even really sure how he wants Lancer to read it.
He does decide he doesn’t particularly want to make it any less mushy. Susie might be embarrassed by this sort of card (actually, he wrote a more mildly mushy card for her earlier and she certainly was, though she was a bit distracted by the candy), but Lancer’s never shown any particular disdain for sentimentality, at least in front of Ralsei (outside of calling him “kindboy”, which Ralsei has still not been able to categorize as an insult or compliment).
By the time Ralsei’s done cleaning up, it’s nearly midnight, meaning there’s no real doubt in his mind that Lancer’s asleep. He’s usually in bed by something like 9:00. So Ralsei tacks the card to Lancer’s door on his way up to his own bedroom and hopes he’ll see it in the morning.
Lancer still finds opening his bedroom door in the morning a bit of a novel experience, given the empty frame he had back home (Ralsei really did go all out), but even more novel is the card pinned to it today.
He takes it down and gives it a look over. It’s made with the same paper as the cards from yesterday, though he could’ve sworn there was little enough left Ralsei was just planning on recycling it. This makes significantly more sense when he opens it to find Ralsei’s handwriting.
“Dear Lancer,” it starts. “This is a Valentine.”
Oh! He’d figured Ralsei must’ve forgotten—it was a bit disappointing since he’d made one for everyone else, yeah, but with all the work they did yesterday, he wasn’t going to make it a big deal he forgot just one person. And yet here it is: a Valentine addressed to him.
It’s probably the sweetest thing he’s ever read. Maybe a bit mushy at points, but it’s Ralsei and that’s part of his charm. It’s still a bit hard to imagine someone like Ralsei might think so highly of him, but with the way he lays it out (a bit like an essay, with an introduction, backing evidence of what he likes about Lancer to support the point that he’d be happy to be his Valentine this year, and a conclusion), it seems pretty objective.
It also makes Lancer feel like he should probably make Ralsei a better card than the joke one he gave him yesterday.
The first place he checks for supplies is, naturally, the room they’d been working in yesterday. He does find his scissors in there, but Ralsei must’ve taken the recycling out before he went to bed last night, so there’s no paper. He’s a really thorough cleaner, after all.
So, next, he decides to stop by the Seap. By his estimation, Seam must have a bit of just about everything.
“Seam!” Lancer says. “Hey, do you have any extra paper? Ralsei already cleaned up everything we had out yesterday.”
Seam hums, ducking beneath the counter for a moment before resurfacing and handing him a sheet. “Matter of fact, I do. What has you in such a good mood?”
“He made me a Valentine,” he says. He folds the paper in half and creases it. “And it was a really nice one, so I figure I owe him better than what I gave him yesterday.”
Seam laughs a bit. “Ah, he’s the sort to love whatever you make him.”
“Well, it’s good you think so, ‘cause he put away most of the fancy decoration stuff, too, so it won’t be pretty,” Lancer says, tucking the paper into his vest. “I’d ask Lesser Dad if I could use some of his calligraphy ink, but I’m sort of in a rush.”
“You best hurry if you want it done before he’s up and about,” Seam says. “Come by again tomorrow and tell me what he thought.”
Lancer grins. Seam does appreciate a good story. “Sure,” he agrees, before leaving the Seap and heading back to the castle.
Now that he’s got paper, he’s got it covered—it’s not like Ralsei put the pens in the recycling, after all. They’re tidied up, sorted by color, but they’re still in the room they were working in yesterday. Lancer carefully surveys the options available to him and decides on a green gel pen—the paper Seam had was white, so it’s a bit of a toothpaste-y combination, just like Ralsei.
He cuts the paper into a heart—the edges are a bit jagged from his wavy scissors, but so were the edges on Ralsei’s card for him—and addresses it to Ralsei.
Lancer has never claimed to have Ralsei’s academic prowess (he’s probably the smartest person Lancer knows), so he doesn’t structure it like an essay. He just says what he thinks—Ralsei is one of the most amazing people he’s ever met. He’s genius, for one, and kind despite it. Lancer might irritate him sometimes, yeah, but Ralsei doesn’t treat him like he’s nothing but an annoyance. It was a bit shocking to hear he didn’t already have a Valentine when he’s got all that going for him and he’s pretty to boot.
Most of this isn’t stuff he hasn’t already said, necessarily. It’s just that sometimes it was part of a joke, and sometimes Ralsei seemed to assume it was part of a joke. So it feels prudent to make it clear these are all things he really thinks, too.
He also makes sure to be crystal clear that he would absolutely love to be Ralsei’s Valentine this year.
He doesn’t put too much effort into giving it a proper conclusion, but he does sign it. Then he sneaks upstairs (the stairs are a bit creaky, and he doesn’t want to wake him up early) and tapes it to Ralsei’s door.
Ralsei’s card was nice to wake up to. While he doesn’t know what the future holds for them in general, he can at least hope his card is nice to wake up to, too.
While Lancer goes to bed earlier than Ralsei usually does, it also means Ralsei tends to wake up later. He’s generally expecting there to have been some sort of goings-on since the night before. Today that comes in the form of an unadorned Valentine falling from his door when he leaves his room to start the day. On the front, in Lancer’s distinctive handwriting, it says “To Ralsei”.
He picks up the card, peeling off the tape that must have held it to the door, then reads it. It’s not quite as structured or quite as longwinded as Ralsei’s was—it is by Lancer, after all, and that’s not quite his style—but it does have some very notable things to say. For example, at the end:
“I’d love to be your Valentine this year! I’d assumed a pretty boy like you would already have one. Signed, Lancer”
Lancer has called Ralsei pretty before. Once, he did it in front of Susie, Kris, and an entire construction crew. Ralsei is still proud of himself for not getting distracted from the construction project they’d apparently neglected to inform him of. But he’d still sort of thought that maybe he was joking, or making fun, because, well…
It’s hard to imagine, that someone might find Ralsei pretty. Let alone consider it as obvious as Lancer seems to. He likes to dress up, sure, but it doesn’t seem like the right term for a Darkner. And Lancer does like to joke around, even if Ralsei couldn’t actually figure out what the joke would be in calling him pretty.
But, then, Lancer has always been strange, and he’s a Darkner too. So maybe it’s not so farfetched he might like someone like Ralsei.
He doesn’t know what it means yet—if it’s just because it’s Valentine’s, or if Lancer might ever want something else—but it still puts a spring in his step. At the very least, it’s a nice way to start the day.