Memo blinked at him. “Sénon Game is my cousin. On my mother’s side. He’s the one that suggested I come to Hoenn and enlist.”

Alex got a little bit sad for the next bit, mentioning a dear friend, and Memo had a horrible feeling that dear friend wasn’t around anymore. Which, for some reason, only succeeded in making him more angry, because that was another faultless crime that Alex was going to internalize and blame himself for and--

Memo exhaled a steady one, two, three four. He was letting his bitterness at talking of home color his other thoughts and feelings.

“Glimwood Tangle?” he said, instead, trying to recover some of his natural positivity (the kind Galar had tried so hard to beat out of him). “Yeah, it’s nice. Most of the non-city parts of Galar are nice.”

He returned Alex’s grin with a knowing one of his own and a wink.

“Absolutely. They’ll come home with a whole flock.”

Alexei Ivanov
hot summer nights

☉

He leaned in closer to Alex to see his phone screen, curious. He wondered if anything anyone else in the world could ever show him would ever restructure his view of his home region. Probably not. But it was Alex, so he was prepared to humor him, no matter what.

Alex scrolled all the way back to a bunch of shots with him and a pink-haired girl-- and Will, of course, was there. They were all different variations on a theme, and the theme was Alex being super fucking cute.

“You are so cute,” Memo said, without thinking, and the warmth in his voice was real and he meant it.

There was one particularly damning piece of evidence of Will with his tongue ¾ of the way to licking a mushroom. Memo had to laugh.

“Yeah, that checks out.” He leaned back a bit. “Most of us do, at some point.”

Alexei Ivanov
hot summer nights

☉

The way Alex sat up and looked at him made Memo grin, like the kid stuck with his hand in the cookie jar.

“Yeah, we kind of… all do,” he said, with a shrug, like it was the most innocent thing in the world. “Everyone except Ester. Mira did it on a dare from her class, and then she dared Oli, and Oli dared me, and so on and so forth.”

He ran a hand over his hair, heat rising in his own face. “We all dared other kids, and by the end of our adolescence, basically, everyone’s licked the mushrooms at least once.” It was like a right of passage, a hazing ritual. He doesn't remember much from the experience, to be honest. Probably for a number of reasons, but mostly because he was quite young.

His eyes flash back to Alex. “Did you guys not have any weird, embarrassing Unovan traditions? Like, you know, sticking your tongue to a flag pole in winter on a dare? Nothing like that?”

Alexei Ivanov
hot summer nights

☉

“I guess that’s true,” Memo said with a shrug, peering in closer at Alex’s phone. “My sisters are just… very chaotic. I got absorbed into a lot of their stuff. At least until Leo was born.” He rolls his eyes.

A bark of laughter escapes him at the picture of Will being quote-unquote a gigachad.

“It’s-- it’s a psychedelic, so, generally, they enhance your mood?” He shrugged again, trying to remember what his experience had been like. “So if you’re planning on being crazy and unruly anyway they tend to just make it worse. I think I just got the giggles. It was actually kind of fun. Tasted awful, though."

That he definitely remembers-- like bitter dirt.

Alexei Ivanov
hot summer nights

☉

“Aw, for all your complaining, you love him,” Memo said, laughing at the exasperation rolling off of Alex in waves. “Will brought us together, you know.” Will and Smokey and the little Wooloo, all images on Alex’s phone, just like they were doing now.

Memo set his cheek against Alex’s shoulder. “Smokey had a child with someone else. He has absolutely no room to talk.” And that was a point he would never concede, not on his life. He was, for all intents and purposes, permanently in Will’s corner.

“Who is Ruby Walker?” he aked, tilting his head to look up at Alex, tone curious. He liked finding out about Alex’s friends-- his pre-Memo life-- but he also sometimes dreaded it. Like he was still waiting for Alex’s Seven Evil Exes to pop up and duel him in the street.

Alexei Ivanov
hot summer nights

☉

“It’s kind of a big thing,” Memo said, voice muffled from where his cheek was pressed into Alex’s shoulder. For all it had kind of come and gone, Smokey’s wandering eye would always be a big thing, for him. He valued loyalty above a lot of other shit, and when it came down to choosing between Will’s weirdness and Smokey’s potential for unfaithfulness, he’d go with Will any day of the week.

“I know that, you goof,” he snickered, “but I wanna know more about… you know, your people. Your friends. The people you hung out with before you started spending all your time with me.” He punctuates this last sentence with a wink and a grin, the tone a fake sort of haughty to hint at the joke.

He hadn’t been here for the explosion at the Slateport-- the Ultra Beast attack that caused so much damage, hurt so many. He’d still been listlessly wandering faraway lands, surviving on dumpster diving and--

--sometimes he didn’t know if it was actually worse than what had been happening in Hoenn.

“She sounds nice.”

Alexei Ivanov
hot summer nights

☉