He hesitates, worrying, again, that speaking it out loud will either make it disappear or bring all sorts of bad ju-ju down on his head. Because this is kinda serious, you know? He’s basically admitting to going out of his way to change his life to be closer to Alex. That’s a big thing. And he hadn’t exactly talked about it with him before.

“I might be… up for a promotion soon,” he finally said, voice a cross between dreamy-hopeful and hesitant. “And-- and onions and ice cream are not the same thing.” Obviously, Guillermo, you stupid-head. He tried again. “Just because I put an extra onion in a recipe, I’m still only eating the one recipe. Not 62 different ice-cream bars.” It was said with achildlike petulance, and he fake-pouted for good measure.

He laid the doe-eyes on real thick. “You know my whole story. My parents were awful so I ran away and then I came here.” He shrugged, because it wasn’t a lie. There was a lot he was leaving out, of course, but it wasn’t a lie. “I’m not exciting.”

Alexei Ivanov
hot summer nights

☉

Honestly it would all have been worth it to see Alex’s face light up like it just did. Holy shit, Guillermo realized as he basked in its glow, I would burn down the world to keep this man happy.

It was a sobering thought, and he had to rapidly blink himself out of his stupor.

“Yeah,” he allowed, more of a breath than anything else, because Alex was right, he could celebrate this. He could be happy about this. All his hard work was coming to fruition, and end of the world aside, it was something to be proud of.

Another sobering thought. How long has it been since he’d had something real to be proud of?

This one broke with laughter. “One blooming onion, not sixty-four.” He grinned. “And fried or baked. I’m not picky.”

He was, in fact, going to say oh, you know, just drifting, but then Alex said the d-word (details) and Memo stopped breathing, for a second. “Um.” Because there was a lot to unpack there. “I mean. I did sort of, just do that?” Wandered without a home, without a purpose. Sleeping under bus stops and scrounging for recyclables. Trading certain skills for amenities. Occasional drug use.

“I buzzed around Galar for a bit ‘till I ran out of bridges and then went to Sinnoh, next.” His thumb has been working nervous circles on the back of Alex’s hand since he started talking, eyes unfocused on the blanket. He cracks a smile, a stray beam of sunlight through the darkness that settled over him. “I had this-- stupid idea to go back to Paldea to rediscover my roots. Dumb. I was just broke and dumb in a different region.”

Alexei Ivanov
hot summer nights

☉

He leans embarrassingly into the cold contact at his forehead while he tries to get his swimming thoughts in order. There had to be a happy medium-- just enough information given to satiate Alex’s curiosity without being like well, sweetheart, for a while I sucked dick for food money.

“I did go to Alola. It was actually the last place I went before I came here.” He swallowed, mouth dry. “I was doing… community service work, sort of? And living at a hostel.” There, that didn’t sound too bad. It was a very nice spin on homelessness and scrounging up scraps on the beach for pennies.

“I was in sort of a bad spot and then Sénon texted me about-- about Cait and the baby and, hey, cousin, I hear you’re down on your luck, come to Hoenn, we always need able hands. Then I got here, Littleroot was literally on fire the next day, and the rest is history.”

Alexei Ivanov
hot summer nights

☉

Memo laughs. “Well, no. But-- the thing about my family, especially my mother’s family, is we don’t always stay in contact. But the baby-- that’s a big thing, right? So that’s why he reached out to me.” His mother’s side of the family had multiple branches and outlets and looked like a very confusing roadmap on paper (he’d had to do a family tree once for primary school).

“So we got to talking and--,” and, he assumed, his mother had told Sénon that Guillermo had been promptly and thoroughly cut off, for being a wicked, homosexual, degenerate (or something of the sort)-- “he said that he heard that I was kind of… on my own and if I needed a job I should go to Hoenn and enlist. So I did.”

And it was turning out to be the best thing he’d ever done.

“Yeah, it was a whole thing. Xerneas was there. I got stuck in a-- cage of fire, basically.” He helped himself to a cold drink, skin crawling as it remembered the feeling of the flames. “I was pretty much useless, me and my three Pokemon plus Shivani. Did fuck all.” He shrugged. “It was an interesting introduction to the region.”

Alexei Ivanov
hot summer nights

☉

He nodded, unable to stop himself from rolling his eyes. Yeah, both Sénon AND Lars had freaked out about that part, too. They’d grilled him on it multiple times. “Yeah, yeah. Xerneas, huzzah.”

Memo pretty much thought if he ever met the stupid deer in real life he’d just punch it in the face.

Shrugging, he tried to remember. “I don’t recall much else outside of the flaming cage of fire. There was a lot going on.”

Alexei Ivanov
hot summer nights

☉

Memo frowned. “Another tree? Ugh. Littleroot has too many weird fucking trees.” He snagged an icecream bar from the cooler (before Alex could Gulpin them all down) and schucked the packaging, folding the sticky side down as he slid the chocolate-glazed sweet between his lips. “Yeah, wild pretty much describes it.”

He laughed. “Is your AC ever not on full blast?” he asked, genuinely curious. “We don’t really have AC in Galar. And also, I’m half Paldean. The heat is in my blood.”

Alexei Ivanov
hot summer nights

☉

Memo joined Alex in the eye-rolling, knowing it wasn’t just Littleroot that had its fair share of supremely weird bullshit heaped on it. What Hoenn lacked in seasons it made up for in sheer nonsense.

“Lars did try to warn me when I signed on that shit got weird around here,” Memo said, taking another bite of his ice cream bar. Of course, that had been before the man himself had manifested some weird ice powers and jumped in front of a bullet for him. Pot, meet kettle.

“Galar doesn’t really get… cold, necessarily. Just windy and rainy and gray and wet.” He shrugged. “It gets super hot for like, three weeks a year and everyone just collectively suffers because we all live in old ass stone houses barely modernized enough to have indoor plumbing, and we’re all fucking poor.” He doesn’t mean for his voice to get so venomous, it just happens; he does manage to soften the edges out of it when he looks at Alex.

“I’d love to see it.”

He noticeably does not return the offer.

Alexei Ivanov
hot summer nights

☉