“Do you want me to say that the prospect of my family being dead makes me happy?” he asked, point-blank, shuddering with the revulsion of it all. “It doesn’t.” It’s said with conviction, with purpose; the words carry weight.

He looked down at his hands in Alex’s, head tilted, frowning. Alex’s hands were warm compared to his own, which was… a shock. An impossibility.

“I… I suppose I could try,” he allowed, settling into something less agitated, more sad. “But I don’t even know if they’d reply. I’m already as good as dead to my parents. They made sure of that.”

By limiting his options. By beating him. By making sure no one in the community would offer him assistance, leaving him cold and hungry and on his own.

“I’m not on my own, anymore,” he says, quietly, like in a dream, something that he has to verbally remind himself of because it feels like something his mind has made up.

Alexei Ivanov
autumn's ominous wind

☉

“Seven,” Memo corrected, voice mock-scolding as he clicked his tongue. “Forgot about Ovejita. For shame.”

Of course, his little lamb was a part of the family. Their family.

He forced himself to look back at the pumpkin. It was a dizzying thought-- one that made him so happy he might cry. So, instead, he focused down the enemy and steeled his expression into resolve.

“Oh, you’ve never carved a pumpkin before?” Memo asked, expression breaking into something softer and curious. It wasn’t something he’d done in a long time but, given Alex’s predisposition towards bleeding out, he imagined activities centralized on sharp objects weren’t very prevalent during his childhood.

“Yeah, that’s exactly what we do,” Memo said, face going a little pale as he mentally said a prayer and plunged the knife into the pumpkin.

Despite the strangeness of, you know, stabbing something, this part wasn’t too bad. Carefully, he carved a circle around the pumpkin’s stem, about three-quarters as wide as the gourd. As he retracted the blade, the dreaded sticky orange guts clung to the knife.

“And then we, you know,” he said, already cringing at the smell, “gut it.”

The pumpkin top came off, revealing the goop and seeds inside.

Alexei Ivanov
the guillermo/ceej anti pumpkin carving experience is REAL
tricking or treating

☉

Making Alex laugh was going to be one of the best joys of the rest of his life. Sometimes, he felt that as long as he could manage to drive his partner to giggles, he would be satisfied.

Most of the time, though, he also wanted to drive his partner to other things.

“Okaaaaaay,” he said, in a beleaguered sigh as he pressed himself up from his seat, “sounds like a plan. Just… don’t abandon me for all your friends, okay?”

He pushed the door to the bedroom open.

“Thy chariot awaits, your grace.”

Alexei Ivanov
this song has been stuck in my head since this mission came around

☉

I’m here, he says, aiming to soothe Memo’s hurts, to bandage his psychological wounds. I’m herep, he says, even as he winces at the touch.

Guillermo recoils, pushing gently against the hug, not wanting to cause Alex any more harm than he already had.

“You almost weren’t,” he says, half a sob, “you almost died.”

It isn’t fair that Alex is the one damaged and hurt and Memo came through everything fine. It isn’t fair that Alex is the one that keeps getting hurt. And it’s Memo’s fault.

“Out of my control,” he parrots, warbly and tear-stained, as a sardonic smile curls across his face, “meaning I wasn’t strong enough to prevent anything that happened.”

His hands stay open in Alex’s clutches, afraid he’ll hurt him more, but also as a self-imposed punishment for self-perceived failures.

My nightmares are real and they’re all my fault, he doesn’t say.

[attr="class","mintag"] Alexei Ivanov

He spun the comb in his hand with the deft fingers of a well-practiced artisan: this was not his first goat rodeo. Growing up, his mothers and aunts had not been the most gentle of souls-- in a surprising twist, it wasn’t out of an innate cruelty, just, quite simply, they all had lots of children who needed their hair attended to.

“It just… no hace lo que se le dice. It doesn’t do what it’s told.”

There was something to be said about the connection between his hair, his childhood, and his culture, the way he lapsed back into the language of his childhood in moments like this. Like no matter how hard he cut or bit or pulled, he would never completely break free of it.

And, sometimes, that was all right.

“Kinda like me, right?”

He started to work through his hair, one thick twist at a time. It was slow going, and he frequently had to stop to pull on small tangles. One by one, the strands began to separate.

And, as promised, they would spring up and fall down, errant, uncontrolled.

Alexei Ivanov

Memo snorted. “You are such a dork.” But it was said with affection, the smile curling its way back across his face.

He shifted to wrap one arm around Alex’s waist, leaning back against him.

“But you’re my dork, now.”

Alexei Ivanov
hot summer nights

☉

Memo cocked his head as he listened to his boyfriend, grin growing across his face.

“I didn’t realize I was dating such a socialite,” he teased, leaning into his accent and really clipping his consonants, driving it up into the high-society mockery that Alex would be familiar with from movies and TV. “Did you learn you skills from your first season, my lady?”

Ah, there it was. No matter what else happened that night, the red flushing over Alex’s cheeks and down his throat would be a victory.

“’Already’,” he parrots, “as though I don’t always want you.”

Still. The clock was ticking. “I guess the sooner we get there, the sooner we can leave.”

Alexei Ivanov
this song has been stuck in my head since this mission came around

☉

“Yes!” he says, a few octaves below an excited squee and two seconds away from clapping his hands together. He exhaled. Take her down a notch, bud. “Or… we could do them all a different costume but in the same theme! Like… Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, or something.”

Memo was lost in visions of a platoon of lambs in costumes. He wasn’t even paying attention to the drunk gummy bears Alex was making (thought if he had noticed he would have made a face about you’re just using plain vodka?)

Alex kind of shook him out of his idyllic daydreams.

“Yeah,” he said, in a long, measured exhale, as he reached for the box of nitrile gloves he’d bought so he didn’t have to… touch the stuff inside. “Yeah. I can do this. But… you go first?”

Alexei Ivanov
tricking or treating

☉

“I. Of course not.” He said, though the words were like rocks in his mouth, thorns in his throat. The idea that he even had to explain this to himself… it was a strange dissonance, not knowing the person who resided inside your body.

It was exhausting.

“I could never be happy about the suffering of others, no matter how cruel and unaccepting they were.”

That part he knew for sure. That was a certainty.

“But I also don’t feel panicked about not knowing if they’re alive or not. And that… that bothers me. I think I should be worried. They’re my family, after all, and Necrozma’s destruction was… awful.”

Maldacena’s screen flashes before his eyes once more. His eyes glaze a bit.

Alexei Ivanov
autumn's ominous wind

☉

“Shut up!” Praxidike screamed, while she worked to carry out his (admittedly very solid) plan. She struck at the Primal Queen’s face with a slash, using her left arm, as her right one hung limply at her side.

Kyouya’s final aerial ace hacked through the Primal Queen’s jaw on the diagonal. One-half of her mandibles remained attached to her jaw-- the other half, along with the rest of her head, went flying off, to splatter wetly to the floor.

Finally-- finally the Primal Queen stilled. The last third of her still airborne slumped and tumbled. The half-formed swarm immediately became aimless, milling around harmlessly as the confused newborns they were. Some of them began to bump curiously into Praxi, asking if she was their new queen.

Outside, the swarm was greatly diminished; their drive to attack also faded, now that the Primal Queen’s hivemind had been silenced. The survivors began to peel away. Others that had been injured gave up and died. Such was the nature of bees.

Sibella pulled one sticky claw off the side of the hive, wincing at the noise of the stretching sugar.

“I believe it’s over,” she said, feeling safe enough to let her ears lift from where they’d been flattened against her neck.

Memo echoed the sentiment.

“I think… I think it’s over.”

And he started running towards the hive.

Alexei Ivanov
my pokemon's speech colors changing? more likely than you think

☉