Kepler was unsure as to how he felt about a giant, prehistoric bug making his food-- but then he realized that he’d not wanted to help and decided to stop being such a pretentious dick about it.

The way the Kabutops slices and dices, Kepler thinks, is not nearly as interesting as when Ashley does it.

He tilts his head, feeling the Carvahna reference going right over his head. Thankfully, Ash fills him in, and his eyes go a little wide at almost bled out.

“That’s terrifying,” he says, frank and honest. He looks back at Isaac. “He seems to make a habit of saving people.”

They have to bring up the food poisoning thing again and Kepler sighs, waving the idea away with a flick of his wrist.

“This isn’t what I pictured when you first pitched the idea,” he said, allowing himself the half-admission of being wrong. “I was thinking, like, campfire. Sticks. A whole ass fish.”

Not a nice meal in a cozy kitchen.

Isaac Merlo Ashley Shepard

☉

Kepler is starting to realize he has to re-consider a few crucial tenets of his life, namely that only old people had silver hair. And that it didn’t look good. Because it was usually on old people. Wow, how closed-minded had he been, up until this moment?

Merc and the little Scorbunny get to-- doing that thing that rabbits do when they’re happy, which is jumping spastically up in the air.

“Binkying,” Kepler says, unprompted and out of nowhere. His face flushes when he realizes it, because, it probably sounds dumb as hell. “That’s what-- it’s called. What rabbits do when they're happy.”

Ashley says the d-word-- date-- and Kepler freezes midstep, one foot hovering in the air. “Um.” Suddenly he’s forgotten how old he is. Suddenly he’s forgotten everything except for the fact that he’s apparently on a date.

He’s got two broken-brained seconds until Ash grabs his hand and he’s being propelled forward by the sheer power of shock and something bubbly in his stomach that he thinks maybe is what Disney princesses feel when they see the prince of the movie.

His hand shifts ever so slightly and their fingers lace together like they were meant to be that way.

“T-twenty three,” he stutters, face red as blood, “I’m twenty-three.” He can hold Ash’s hand but he can’t look at him because he might die.

They pause on the porch and Ash asks if they should take the whole thing. And, for a second, Kepler, feels his feet beneath him.

“Of course,” he says, in typical Kep brusqueness, “if they didn’t want us to take the whole thing they shouldn’t have been so lazy.” Every word he speaks brings him a little confidence, and he holds his pillowcase out and finally-- finally-- looks up at Ash.

“Bottoms up?”

Ashley Shepard

☉

No one had ever called Kepler cute before, never in his whole life. Never, in his entire existence, had anyone even suggested a hint of anything positive about his appearance. He was too scrawny for sports; too pale, too gaunt.

No one in the history of the world has ever called Kepler cute and done it in such an embarrassing, stupid, sexy accent.

It makes him have whiplash. It is so at odds from the voice he has associated with Ash. It is so corny. It is, in the same breath, somehow, very much doing it for him. Which is astronomical in and of itself! How did he even come to this conclusion!

Say something back, you numbskull.

He doesn’t need to because Ashley is giggling apart in front of him. Kepler cracks a smile.

“Thank god,” he says, without thinking, “I’m not sure I would have made it through the night.” He blinks, then adds, “W-without laughing,” and it sounds convincing enough to make it seem like it was a complete, coherent thought.

Ash asks him if he likes his hair and Kepler tilts his head. “The grey suited you,” he said, conjuring fond memories of the lilac-tinged locks he thought of when he thought about Ash, “but the black is nice, too.”

He’d spoken without thinking. His tone was genuine. But he was terrified that he’d fucked up, because he’d kind of just told Ash that he liked his old hair better? Which wasn’t. That wasn’t what he meant!

“It’s nice,” he adds in haste, because it is. It does look nice. It’s just… different.

His own hair was tied back in his characteristic braids, the teal at their tips freshly touched up.

Mercury pointed at the Scorbunny in Ash’s jacket pocket, getting outrageously excited.

“Y-yeah,” Kep says, falling into step beside Ashley. “Um, aren’t you worried people are going to think we’re too old?” He looks down at his boots, adding (again, without thinking) “Well. You, maybe. I still look like a preteen.”

Ashley Shepard

☉

Honestly, reading the reports of what had happened in the digital world had left Kepler dazed and confused. He’d accuse them all of lying, or being on drugs, if there hadn’t been so fucking many people. A sample size that large left little room for denial.

“The origin of the end,” he says, voice half-skeptical, half-dreamy. It was a dark and romantic thought. Believing it gave them some power simply by existing in this damned timeline, this guillotine of a universe.

Phobos and Deimos spook up a Starmie from a little, decorative pond, dazing it with a psybeam. Phobos constricts around it and drags the dizzy star over to Kepler, who catches it; the two little troublemakers go back about their mischief.

“Was it everything you hoped it’d be?” he asks, still not sure how much of all of this he was willing to believe. That wasn’t a discredit to Mars, but to-- look. This was all… incredibly ridiculous on an astronomical scale. What the actual fuck, you know?

Martín del Mar
ghost/psychic
catch attempt starmie

☉

Kepler rarely ever got text messages. In fact, it was so exceedingly uncommon that whenever his phone did go off he always imagined it was to reveal something terrible. His text tone became a harbinger of doom, Pavlov’ing him into summoning dread at the sound of a bell.

He was hunched over a series of calculations that Lulu Flint ’d tossed his way about traveling to the Meteor. Atmospheric pressures, enthalpy figures, what time they’d have to bounce before they were obliterated. His was only a small portion of the mathematics, of course; all the bright minds were working on it, and they’d all come together to hextuple check their figurings before any plans were made.

His phone dinged and he froze, certain that was going to be Lulu saying you know what, never mind, you’re not needed anyway. It took a long time for him to force his muscles to reach out and drag the device back from where it was facedown on the lab table. He flipped it over and squinted at the screen.

The message takes its sweet time orienting in his brain. He doesn’t recognize it as an invite, at first. Actually, his initial, kneejerk impression is he must have sent this to the wrong person. The next one was, just, panic. Excitement? Panic. The last time he’d gone trick-or-treating he’d ended up covered in eggs and water balloons full of piss.

Panic.

But he was learning to work through his panic. He panicked his way through a halfhearted response (Sure, why not?) that was not nearly as revealing as to how he felt. He panicked his way through a costume that he overthought to an umpeenth degree. He panicked his way through the teleport as he and Mercury stepped out into the warm, Slateport night. Panicked his way through the directions in the dark, nervous and jumpy and certain someone was going to leap out at him at every possible junction.

His thoughts were a churning mire of what are we doing? Why are we doing this? What are we doing? as he clutched his pillowcase in white knuckles, boots a timid beat on the concrete. It was only when he finally saw Ashley standing under the streetlight that his brain reached a lovely homeostasis of blank static, like all the panic and stress had reached a tipping point and he was flatlining.

His costume was a buttoned lab coat and goggles, and a pair of black combat boots he’d bought for… some reason. Mercury had a headband with large screws glued to the sides and the characteristic Frankenstein’s monster hairline painted on his forehead.

“You dyed your hair,” is the first thing out of Kepler’s mouth. Not hey, hi, hello, or anything, you know, normal. “I almost don’t even recognize you.”

Ashley Shepard

☉

It was a POG Bank charity ball. The Halloween theme was smacked everywhere from the snack table to the staircase for people to pose in their costumes and get their pictures taken.

Kepler wished he could tug himself further down into his cat ears, stuck somewhere in the middle between being sad he hadn’t put more effort into his costume and, just, really, really, really not wanting to be there.

But the general consensus was he needed to get out more. Actually, Mars had said that to him, once. Or, maybe, just looked at him in such a way that it conveyed it. Either way. No one was going to hurt him at a charity event… right?

Martín del Mar
we stan a genderfluid monarch

☉

Kepler can vouch all he wants for the laws of physics but the fact that they can teleport literally anywhere in the world truly, honestly shoots the shit out of mostly any science. Actually, the fact that teleportation exists and they’re still at risk of being destroyed by the thing that killed the dinosaurs a billion years ago really says a lot about humanity as a whole, he thinks.

It was a weird feeling, not altogether unpleasant, but definitely something that might make you sick if you do it quite frequently. Like riding rollercoasters or skydiving.

One second the floor beneath his tennis shoes was white plasteen tiles and the next it was purple carpet, threadbare and pilling and peeling up from the backing at the edges. He looked up (sandwiched between Isaac and Ashley, which was a trip) to take in the rest of the little flat.

It was nice. It wasn’t his lab, but, it was nice.

There were monkey bars on the ceiling.

He’d stowed Gaia and Merc away for the transport, fairly certain he wasn’t going to get absconded with or attacked, but he wasn’t exactly relaxed. As the two simians jump down to meet them and their little group diffuses across the living space he freezes. Ashley speedruns them through his collection of Pokemon and Kepler immediately calls them Bonga and Congo in his head.

He resigns to not verbalize anything out loud so he just lifts a hand and says, “Hey.”

Kepler never got invited to parties or houses or had friends so he didn’t really know what to do once the intros were done. Ash busied himself in the kitchen and Kepler feels like he’s about to exploud because he has no fucking social skills and then Ash tells him the WiFi password and he snickers.

“Funny.”

Maybe this will be okay after all?

He vacillates between kitchen table and living room but gets mad distracted by the way Ashley weilds a kitchen knife like a fucking samurai of old and so he finds himself drawn into the kitchen, sort of studying what he’s doing but also really trying hard to not be a fucking creep. But Kepler has always liked learning! And what Ashley is doing is so fucking fascinating.

He jumps when Ash turns back to them and asks for help. Kepler exchanges a, frankly, terrified look with Isaac, because he’s certain he’ll slice his fucking fingers off if he even tries.

Isaac Merlo Ashley Shepard

☉