[attr="class","rapha"]They’ve stopped somewhere along the way from one stand to another, tucked back off the beaten path, shielded by booth walls and umbrellas and swathed in steadily falling darkness.

Raph positions himself firmly between Mint and the world, grinning down at him.

“Little bit of both,” he says. One finger hooks gently underneath Mint’s chin, just the barest of touches, to get him to tilt his head back, and he leans down to kiss him, starting soft, giving Mint the option of calling it and stepping away.

Around them, fireworks start to light off.

[attr="class","raphatag"]mint frost - firework flings
its smoochin time

[attr="class","rapha"]Something in Raph was telling him not to stare Caccio in the eye, something hidden deep and primally ensconced in the brain of his that used to be at war with such Pokemon, once upon a time. Then he remembered something he saw on the internet about diverting Sharpedo attacks by making yourself big and countering them, and the two ideas clashed in his head and just made him fizz out a little.

Then Caccio growled, as Mint pushed canned tuna at him like some kind of delicacy, giggled and poked fun at the makeup of the cat’s heart, and Raph realized, then, that moments like this was what awkward laughter was invented for. He smoothes a hand over his chest and looks away, laughing.

“Eterna Forest, huh? Where’s that at?” He pops the top of his beer off with a sharp twist of it against the table and raises it to Mint, in turn. “Were you, like… hikin’, or something?”

Mint tells the tale of his and Caccio’s bloody origins and then apologizes, looking sheepish. “Why’re you apologizin’? It’s a good story. Here, I’ll tell ya mine: the orphanage had a belltower, and these Spearow lived in th’ rafters, just screamin’ and shittin’. Someone got the bright idea to go up and scare ‘em off and, ‘cause I’ve never had a brain, I volunteered.” He laughs for real, then. “They pecked the shit out of me and I guess one of ‘em decided she really liked peckin’ the shit out of me 'cause she followed me down, peckin’ the shit out of me the whole damn time.”

[attr="class","raphatag"]mint frost
mission: tricking or treating
meow meow meow

[attr="class","rapha"]“Ah, maybe, but I don’t have th'… th' charisma for that kinda thing.” He couldn’t talk about his food or his clothes and get other people to care-- he didn’t care about things like that, enough. But Mint was special, like the sparklers he seemed so vehemently to adore; Raph could watch a channel of him talking about watching grass grow and be entertained.

“It’s a good thing t'be scared of. Or, at least, have a healthy respect for.” His own relationship with fireworks-- and pyrotechnics in general, using the term extremely loosely-- was fraught with dangerous disesteem. He’d never really taken the time to have safety precautions like open spaces and ear protection, which probably explained maybe 30% of his scars and occasional bouts of tinnitus.

Mint turns away from him and Raph thinks it’s because he got a little too lecture-y. He just wanted Mint to not get the wrong idea and to also not pierce his dick in a bar backroom with a sewing needle and whiskey, really, that was all. So when his date asks if he’d had anything else he wanted to do, he all but did the Scooby Doo feet-in-the-air run to grab the opportunity.

“I can think of a couple things,” he says, hovering a hand over Mint’s shoulders and standing between him and the crowd, casting him protectively in shadow. “I was thinking about kissin’ you, earlier. Would that be okay?”

[attr="class","raphatag"]mint frost - firework flings

[attr="class","rapha"]“I shall not cross the bridge till I answer yer questions three,” Raph snickered, entering when prompted, and following where indicated. He approaches the kitchen table to set down his multitudinous bounty of goods and freezes when a veritable chill rolls down his spine.

It is a testament to his many years recognizing dangerous types that Raph recognizes Caccio is a dangerous type.

“That is-- a big cat,” he bites off a big pussy before the stupidity can escape his mouth and forces a weak smile. For the briefest of moments he has the terrifying image of Caccio chewing on him but then Mint offers the can of tuna and Raph lets his hackles drop, a little.

“Nice to meet you, Caccio. That’s, uh, Alto Marean for cheese, right?” He starts rooting through his deliveries to find a beer because god he needs one right now. “Heh, if he’s anything like Hally, you’ve prob’ly run him ragged takin’ care of you.”

[attr="class","raphatag"]mint frost
mission: tricking or treating
what's new pussy cat

[attr="class","rapha"]He could sit and listen to Mint talk about things forever, Raph realized, though maybe that was more of a testament to the way his mind worked and his latent desire to just fade out in a group of people and observe and listen, like he was watching a TV show.

“Practice. Right.” He does his best to sound convinced, because he doesn’t want to discredit any of the hard work Mint has likely put into his on-camera persona, but also he thought that Mint could sit there and explain potato agronomy to him and he would be endlessly fascinated.

Distantly he remembers that he got TWO skewers and goes about eating his own, though in a decidedly less ravenous way than Mint.

“Right, right, sparklers,” he says, looking away to chew and scan the nearby area for the booth in question. There are a bunch of different sparklers and firework stands on offer, but Mint is looking for the crystabloom ones in particular, apparently. “Those are the, uh. The fancy flowers?” He doesn’t know a thing about a damn thing.

[attr="class","raphatag"]mint frost - firework flings
brownie wars reference

[attr="class","samcam"]

[attr="class","rapha"]Over his brief but frankly very enjoyable time interacting with Mint, Raph had become immune to the word ‘date’. Because they weren’t ‘dates’, not really, because in order to go on ‘dates’ you had to have the intent of ‘dating’ the person. And he and Mint were just friends. Friends that maybe one day might do… other stuff. But still definitely just friends.

He fires off a series of thumbs up emojis and swings by his favorite brick-fired pizza place to grab a few pies and an order of garlic pepperoni knots; he also swings by a convenience store and grabs a six-pack of Guinness, and adds a six-pack of summery seltzers because that seems like the kind of thing Mint would enjoy, maybe. These purchases, in addition to the swindled candy he already had, make for quite the armful.

Still, he manages to knock, as instructed, on arrival.

“I come bearin’ gifts,” he says, when the door opens, grinning.

[attr="class","raphatag"]mint frost
mission: tricking or treating

[attr="class","rapha"]Raph spares a braincell to ponder what it must be like for Mint to feel like he needs to escape his family. Raph’s biological ties had been severed long ago; he had only his chosen few around him, holding him down, and he couldn’t imagine life without them.

He bends down to see the picture Mint is showing to him, switching both skewers to one hand and hovering his free one over the smaller man’s shoulder, almost touching but not quite. “Aw… cute.” He grins. “The Komala are cute, too.”

Before he takes Mint’s phone he goes to wipe his hand on his shirt, remembers he’s not wearing one, and redirects to his pants, instead. He holds the phone like it’s a prized jewel and not just a standard piece of technology, and fights down the urge to peer through it, squinting, from a distance, like a boomer. A soft chuckle escapes him as Mint goes through the quick process of readying himself for the camera, and Raph wonders if his hair is really as soft as it looks.

He manages to start and stop the video based on Mint’s body cues. They make a pretty good team, if he does say so himself.

“‘Snot fair you look so cute when you eat with your little Greedent cheeks while the rest of us look like bursting Garbodors,” he fake-pouts, handing the phone back to its rightful owner.

[attr="class","raphatag"]mint frost - firework flings
so THIS is where all of onyx's rizz went

[attr="class","rapha"]If that’s okay, Raph says. He considers adding something about how his own place is in a horribly seedy part of town and he spends most of his nights passed out in an attic crawlspace above the bar where he works, but he doesn’t. Need to know information, he thinks, and Mint really does not need to know.

[attr="class","raphatag"]mint frost
mission: tricking or treating

[attr="class","rapha"]Raph watches them turn the meat on the spits and tries to pretend he doesn’t notice Mint looking at his chest. It doesn’t bother him, that’s what it’s there for, anyway; but still. It’s polite.

“Ah, I getcha. Some of those things’re hard to get over, I guess, when you’ve got a certain mindset.” Mint must have come from money, of some sort, because Rpah’d never met a poor person to turn down any sort of food. He wasn’t going to pry, of course, because a) it wasn’t his business and, more importantly, b) he didn’t care. “But, hey, yer tryin’ stuff now. That’s what’s important.”

He takes his kebab skewers from Mint and smiles. “Thanks. So what do we gotta do for this video?”

He lifts his own wrist to his mouth to lick a droplet of grease off of it without thinking.

[attr="class","raphatag"]mint frost - firework flings

[attr="class","rapha"]Halloween was still some days away, but if you knew where to look and how to play your cards right, you could get the goods for a decent price. And by ‘knew where to look’ and ‘how to play your cards’, Raph meant shoplifting, and by ‘decent price’ he meant free.

He did it with good in his heart. He stopped by a few local foster care and social work places and made sure to put the candy directly in the hands of the children, instead of the adults running the joint. Been there, done that, stolen enough of the stuff out of the headmaster’s office with nothing more than a bobby pin and some chewing gum.

He made sure to save a variety of candy as a humble offering for his next venture as he pulled out his phone and fired off a text:



He isn’t entirely sure Mint would even reply. He’d thought their first-- encounter, experience, or whatever, it wasn’t really a date because they weren’t dating-- had gone well. Raph genuinely liked the guy, and thought he was cute, and they’d had a good time, and he hoped, maybe, Mint might want to hang out some more.

One of Raph’s best virtues was that he was too fucking stupid to have ulterior motives.

[attr="class","raphatag"]mint frost
mission: tricking or treating

[attr="class","rapha"]Raph ignores the bit about him being hardcore to better focus on the concept of a parent trap. “Uh,” he said, considering, and definitely thinking too hard about the wrong things. “That’s an interestin’ idea for a movie.”

After a brief moment considering how many kebabs he wanted he flashed two fingers at the stall person and fished the cash out of his wallet. “One chicken, one beef.” Once the transaction was done, they stepped to the side to wait for their order, and Raph filed the little tidbit about liking street food into his Mint folder for later use. “Oh yeah? Why not? You don’t strike me as the type that don’t get out much.”

He himself was rather like the human version of a garbage can. He’d eaten donuts out of the garbage, once, drunk and hungry. Mint didn’t need to know that yet, though.

[attr="class","raphatag"]mint frost - firework flings