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Another round, another series of annoyingly quick kills. Sonnellino was no stranger to bloodshed, both before this realm and during it, but there was something so…boring about the way it was right now. Sometimes he’d get so bored that a kill that was supposed to be clean and quick was unfortunately done sloppily, which is what he was currently dealing with right now, a downed gambler at his feet, their hand and arm mangled from their gun exploding in their grasp.
Coughing, Chance flipped over to stare up at Sonne, that stupid grin plastered on their face.
“Any last words?” Sonne pointed the tip of his sword to the gambler’s throat. There was a truce, sure, but Sonne couldn’t help but admit that sometimes, it was still fun to just toy with Chance.
Somehow, Chance’s grin grew even wider, and Sonne braced himself for whatever stupid thing was about to come out of his mouth.
“A question–” he coughed, interrupting himself, “A question, actually.”
“Shoot for it, Luckyshot,” Sonne pinched the bridge of his nose, “We don’t have all day.”
“How do my leftovers taste?”
Sonne choked on air at the statement, wheezing and coughing as he tried to get his bearings back, “Pardon?!”
“I said, how do my–”
“I HEARD YOU THE FIRST TIME YOU RAT!” Sonne interrupted him, “I just–listen, what I’m doing is none of your–”
Chance interrupted him with a loud cackling laugh that tumbled into violent coughing, then quiet groans of pain. He took a few breaths to steady himself, nudging Sonne’s sword away from his throat, which Sonne sort of…just let him do, focusing now on trying to hide how embarrassed he was.
“You’ve gotta be kidding me, Donnie!” Chance rolled back over onto his stomach, clearly trying to get up before Sonne knocked him back down. Being knocked back down didn’t stop that stupid laugh he was doing, continuing his rambling, “How long have you been pining, huh? How long have you been looking at him and wanting him to be yours, huh?”
“Shut up now and I’ll actually consider not drawing your death ou–”
Sonne abruptly shouted in pain as he felt the unfortunately familiar pain of a dagger slipping its way into his spine. He fell to his knees just in time to witness Elliot sprint in and scoop up Chance, quickly followed by the culprit of the attack, Two Time. Sonnellino grit his teeth in anger, especially as Chance stuck his tongue out and flipped him off.
Without enough time on the clock to chase them down, Sonne simply let out a snarling shout, thinking up the first thing he could say: “I’M TELLING AZURE YOU PLAY DIRTY!”
He nearly immediately slapped his face with his hand, realizing he had just threatened to tattle on them like a spoiled rotten child on a playground. He was going to blame that slip-up on how unfortunately flustered he was over Chance’s teasing.
…Speaking of things that were unfortunate, Chance was unfortunately right.
Ugh.
That would be something to tackle later.
‘Later’ came sooner than he wanted when after the rounds and after dinner, everyone else dispersed, leaving Sonnellino cleaning up the kitchen with, of all people, Azure and ITrapped.
In the middle of doing…something, Azure suddenly dramatically groaned, waving his hands, “No, no, you’re both doing it wrong.”
“Doing it wrong?” Trap looked puzzled, “Azure, I’m just wiping down the counters!”
“And you’re doing it wrong!” Azure insisted, then turning his gaze to where Sonne was cleaning the table, “And you too, Foxglove! You’re both doing it wrong, and I’m annoyed and want you out of my kitchen!”
Without a moment to protest, Sonne abruptly found himself being pushed out the back door of the cabin onto the back porch, Trap being grabbed with a tendril along the way to be taken outside as well. Sonne just barely caught the angered whisper of “don’t do this to me” from Trap, clearly aimed at Azure. Before he knew it, Sonne was shoved out of the door, Trap placed down next to him.
“And don’t come back for–” Azure seemed to think for a minute, “At least an hour!”
“An hour?! Azu–” Trap’s protest was cut off by a tendril being held up to his mouth like a finger, shushing him.
“I don’t wanna hear a single complaint!” Azure seemed quite serious, like he actually was angry at some perceived slight, “Now you two, leave! Go somewhere else!”
And with that, he shut the door in their faces.
Sonne stood there, blinking in surprise. Neither he nor Trap said anything for a long, long moment.
Abruptly, he thought about what Chance had taunted him with earlier in the day. Leftovers. Ugh. The reason Sonnellino hadn’t acted on his stupid feelings was simple: he didn’t know if Trap even did like him back. For one, he was quite a bit older than Trap [though not that that mattered much, considering the exploiter was in his 30s, but still], and secondly, Sonne seemed so wildly out of the range that he knew Trap liked.
See, Sonnellino was nothing like Chance.
While Chance was mostly jokes and games, Sonne found himself on the more serious side of things. He tried to treat everything like a business, to the point where sometimes he felt like he didn’t know where he ended and his professional persona began.
However…there was something strange about the circumstances of Sonne finding himself out on the porch, kicked out of the cabin he lived in. Azure seemed so eager to find an excuse to kick the two of them out, and notably it seemed like he was planning something, considering Trap’s whisper to not do “this” to him, whatever “this” was.
But certainly Azure wouldn’t be playing wingman, right? Would he even know how to do that?
Sonne was snapped out of his thoughts by Trap scoffing and stepping off the porch, walking towards the woods. After a moment of walking, he looked over his shoulder at Sonnellino.
“I’m going to the river, care to join me?”
At the invitation, Sonne was very firmly reminded of how bad his feelings were when his heart fluttered and he quickly followed in Trap’s footsteps. There was an implacable look on Trap’s face when he saw how quickly Sonne followed, and that look alone caused the rabbit hybrid to purposefully slow his footsteps back into his calm and professional pace, folding his hands behind his back and nodding for Trap to continue walking.
The walk through the forest to get to the river was pleasant, as it always was. It was quiet, giving Sonnellino time to think things over. Without knowing if Trap liked him back, every interaction with the exploiter felt like an interrogation, his own feelings like a bucket of ice-cold water being thrown on him whenever he stumbled over his words. It was making Sonne want to rip his hair out in pure annoyance. He was the head of a mafia family, and here he was, fawning over some pretty man who may or may not have felt the same way he did.
Screw it, he was gonna do it.
Trap stopped as the two came up to the river, staring out over it. Sonne’s breath was caught in his throat at the simple sight of him standing there, backed by the moonlight scattered across the water. He looked so elegant without ever meaning to. His air of beauty was seemingly completely effortless, and he just looked good, no matter what.
Sonnellino really had been gotten bad, hadn’t he?
“I’ve been meaning to speak to you about something–” both Trap and Sonne spoke at the same time, both stopping to blink at each other. Sonne grit his teeth for a moment before he nodded and waved a hand, motioning for Trap to speak first.
“I…was presented with an observation,” Trap began after clearing his throat, motioning a hand, “In which a…certain gardener who likes to stick his nose into business that doesn’t belong to him told me about…what certain rabbit behaviors and noises mean.”
There was now a very rapidly growing pit in Sonnellino’s stomach.
“And he came to a conclusion of–” Trap laughed, seemingly nervously, “Of the possibility of you…having a crush on me.”
“You don’t have to reciprocate–” Sonne spoke before he could think, then quickly realized he had admitted to something he most likely could have talked his way out of, which went against every instinct ingrained into him since he was very young.
Trap paused for a long moment, and every second of silence left Sonne wishing more and more that this place had a cliff for him to throw himself clean off of.
“You didn’t let me finish,” Trap made an awkward grin, tugging at his hair, “Because that thought’s been festering for…around a month, if I recall, and I came to the conclusion a few nights ago that…I think I do reciprocate.”
Unthinkingly, Sonne made that stupid huffing sort of noise that he had been trying to stop himself from making around the exploiter in front of him, silently cursing the fact that he was a rabbit hybrid. His embarrassment faded when Trap’s awkward grin turned into a genuine smile and he laughed. He laughed and the noise brought the same wonder as the first snowfall because it was at Sonnellino. Not at him in a nasty taunting way, but at him in a way where it was nearly crystal clear that Trap had found his actions cute.
Cute.
That was usually a word rabbit hybrids hated, especially lops like Sonnellino himself was. It was usually used to horribly demean them, passing them off as nothing more than a word that usually meant harmless.
But standing there, Sonne was struck by the realization that he wouldn’t mind being called cute, just so long as it was Trap doing it.
A part of him was disgusted by himself, knowing he was supposed to be the giant scary head of a mafia family, but another part of him was so endeared by the man in front of him that he simply couldn’t care less.
“So what does that make us?” he asked unthinkingly, wholeheartedly giving up control for once in his life, “What do you want that to make us?”
“A thing, I suppose,” Trap adjusted his coat, then silently reached down to pluck a feather from his hip-wing, holding it out to Sonne, “As long as that’s alright with you.”
Sonnellino stared for a moment before he grabbed the feather, tucking it right into his tie, carefully against his chest. He looked back at Trap with a grin on his face that he knew looked stupid, but he couldn’t care.
“Now let’s go tell Azure off for getting into our business,” Sonnellino nodded.
With a devious grin and laugh, Trap suddenly took off back towards the cabin, leaving Sonne to sprint to catch up. If it was anyone else he had to be chasing down, he would have been annoyed beyond belief, but perhaps annoyingly on its own, he was quite pleased with the outcome of the situation.
Trap was the first up the steps, nearly slamming open the door. Sonne watched as Azure nearly fell out of a chair he was sitting in, quickly scrambling to put on an angry look.
“I said an hour! It hasn’t been an–”
Azure stopped in their tracks, and Sonnellino quickly realized they had spotted the white feather now tucked into his tie. Azure’s look of anger quickly faded into a grin. Sonne immediately decided to play up the whole deal.
“Y’know, Azure,” he started, “You really shouldn’t be picking on the partner of the head of a mafia family.”
Azure quickly devolved into laughter, and Trap caught on to the joke that was being created here.
“Awww,” Trap whined, looking up at Sonne, “Don’t hurt them, Sonne! They really did mean well, honest!”
“Say the thing, say the thing–” Azure wheezed out between strings of laughter, leaving Sonne a bit puzzled as to what ‘the thing’ was until he slowly realized.
“Fine,” he put on his best intimidating scowl, “But I don’t care how good of a friend of yours he is, Trap. If he messes with you again, I’ve gotta deal with him.”
He pointed a finger at Azure, pushing a snarl into his voice.
“So if you mess with my partner again, gardener, I’ll have you sleeping with the fishies.”
Clearly amused, Azure immediately cheered. Sonne couldn’t help but start laughing, Trap quickly following suit.
“Consider that payment for actually pushing the both of us to confess,” Sonne explained as he settled his laughter, “So we’re even. You don’t get to call in a favor.”
“Understood, understood,” Azure grinned, “But honestly, getting you two to stop being pathetic was payment enough!”
Sonne narrowed his eyes, letting a bit of disdain at the word pathetic leak into his tone, “Jokes aside, watch how you speak to me.”
“Understood,” Azure raised his hands in a sort of ‘my bad’ gesture.
Despite being made fun of…multiple times in one day, Sonnellino couldn’t bring himself to be annoyed. His hope of persistence had been renewed.