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aphantaray · 1 year

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Saffron and Honey

https://archiveofourown.org/works/42788328

Let’s Just Say It’s Growing On Me

Ravi’s coworker, Erwin, pulled a little mason jar out of his pocket. The warped glass made it hard to make sense of the pink blob floating inside.

“Tumor,” he explained with a toothy smile.

Ravi brought their hand to their mouth and took a big step back from the old man.

“Oh, what are you being such a baby for? It’s just meat. A miserable little pile of meat.”

Ravi tried to calm themself down. He was right. Just meat. We’re all just meat, right? It’s fine. But, no, it was all for show. They couldn’t settle their stomach, no matter how cool they tried to look while they examined the jar. They refused to touch the glass themself, of course, so in Erwin’s hand it remained – where it couldn’t hurt them.

Oh god. What if it moved…

“Where did you get a tumor from?”

“It’s mine! They carved it out last week. Missed three whole days of work for this little piece of shit.” He gave the glob of flesh a little shake and a menacing smile. “You’ll pay for that,” he threatened the thing, like it knew what it had done. Ravi got the feeling Erwin was the sort of person who put his furniture in the corner after it had stubbed his toe – you know, to think about what it had done.

Ravi grinned at the thought of Erwin dressing the little wad of flesh in a uniform and putting it behind the wheel of the forklift for a few days, as retribution for the lost wages. “Do you think anyone will notice?” they asked idly.

“Notice what?”

“When the tumor takes your job.”

It took Erwin a moment to realize he was being insulted, “You shit. You’ve been here nine months, kid, you’re lucky I don’t give it your badge. It’ll get more work done. Might even pass a performance review for once. What’d you get last time, Butterfingers McGee? ‘Absolute shit’?”

Needs work. Close enough. Ravi was supposed to be a little more crushed by that evaluation, based on the grave look on their supervisor’s face when she delivered the report and presented the sum total of every penny they’d cost the company by dropping boxes. But the review felt more like a matter of fact. A state of being. Ravi needs work.

“I should get my own pet tumor,” they grinned at Erwin, “Take a little vacation. Get a raise. Get a girlfriend. Hell, it could just live my whole life for me. The latest model. Ravi 20xs. New and improved. Less bullshit.”

When the two of them bumped into each other later that day during a rainy, frigid, harried smoke break, Ravi had to ask why. It had been on their mind all day. Who keeps a hunk of cancerous flesh? He wasn’t going to eat it or something, was he?

“Don’t they burn that stuff?” they asked, attempting to flick their lighter’s flame on for emphasis – which, sputtering in the wet weather, was much less dramatic than they had hoped. Worse, their cigarette refused to light. This was going to be a complete waste of the only break they were going to get all day.

“They sure do, but I told ‘em I wanted it. They still said no, so I grabbed it out of the guy’s hand when he was showing it to me and bolted out the door.”

“You bolted out the door,” Ravi echoed in disbelief. “After surgery? No sedatives?”

“You think a little tranq is going to stop me? Kid.”

The last and only time Ravi had accepted Erwin’s insistent weekly offers to join him for a bottle after work, it turned out an ‘Erwin’ bottle is about the size of gas can – and the stuff in it smelled about the same. And somehow, even after getting through all that and then finishing off Ravi’s beer, he was still on his feet. He even walked them home in the cold, wearing a smile and dancing like a lunatic the whole way. So, yeah, no doubt in Ravi’s mind. Erwin could probably run a marathon on a whole barrel of ketamine.

“You’re just going to keep it?” Ravi really didn’t want to ask about it directly – the whole auto-cannibalism thing – but they were aching to be rid of all the images their mind was conjuring of Erwin preparing his excision for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. They practically had a whole cookbook of body horror in their mind, ready to go.

Erwin was graciously not shoving his unsettling pet in Ravi’s face anymore, but he was clearly fiddling with it in his coat pocket while he spoke.

“Our business is not complete,” he assured Ravi. When they failed to nod with understanding, he launched into a hypothetical situation that quickly turned into some kind of parable, “If you killed a bear before it killed you, you’d spend some intimate time with the thing after, yeah? You’d sit with it, feel it out, know it – figure out where it was going and why it ended up there, with you, angry and scared. It’s a force of nature you can hold in your hands. And if one hair were out of place, that bear would’ve won, Rav.” He could no longer resist the urge to draw out the metaphorical beast from his pocket to glare at it. “I haven’t sat with that long enough yet.”

That conversation played through Ravi’s mind while they waited for their turn at the clinic in the chilly October air.

Ravi wondered if they could bolt from a surgery on anesthetic. But it didn’t matter much, since the nurses never used anesthetic for this thing. Out-patient, they called it. The sign on the front door promised in-and-out in thirty minutes. They’d had quickies longer, with more tender aftercare and less awkward eye contact, too.

But back here, a hundred feet from the front door of the clinic, there was a standing sign on the sidewalk that proudly pronounced – in stark contrast to the other sign’s promise of a mercifully short engagement – it pronounced that the wait from this point in the line was ‘only’ one hour.

Both signs were untrue of course. Unless clocks and time were fiercely warped around here, or maybe there was some hidden asterisk somewhere in the signage. No, this was always a day-long adventure.

It never healed, they were told. It could never heal. The blister-like wounds would fill with black agony over the course of every month, then the nurse would take it out, put it in a jar, burn it. And that was it. They’d get another month. And they’d get a hundred months fewer on Earth than the people lucky enough to avoid getting sick with it – though what exactly that blessed crowd were doing differently than the infected was still a medical mystery, apparently.

The line was the worst part of this whole experience – is what Ravi tried to convince themself. This gymnastic mental exercise was better for their heart. Focus on the annoyance instead of the knife-twisting ache in their back and shoulder. And it wasn’t too hard a lie to believe, since there was just a whole lot of annoyance to focus on out here.

In the last year, the line had been growing longer every month. An article – maybe even a reputable one – strongly suggested that the infected were migrating to the city, sent there by small, overburdened community clinics. The author wrote a merciless and heartless indictment of the little underfunded towns for ‘making their problems our problem’ – because they simply ‘refused’ to put their scant resources towards treating their ill. The article chastised them for ‘burdening’ all the province’s largest and most important hospitals. It was very much the kind of article that could only be written by someone who had never lived outside the city limits.

Our problem.

Ravi’s problem today, in particular. As a dispirited little postgrad student, they didn’t take up much space, which seemed to be an invitation for the occasional impatient guy to cut in line, or for some young woman to insist that she was suffering more severely than they were. ‘Kids at home.’ ‘Kettle on the boil.’ Whatever scant excuse came to mind. Ravi wasn’t going to argue. What’s another hour? Not like they were doing anything else this weekend. Not until their pain got sorted out by the exhausted in-and-out nurse at the end of the line.

It was pretty painful to lose a whole weekend of overtime, stuck waiting in the cold. Did it compare to the pain of leaving their wounds untreated? It was always a tight race, but the physical pain won every month.

But the line and the wait and the pushy people… Today was the worst it had ever been. Ravi felt like they were actually getting shoved backwards by the unjust swelling of the line in front of them. And most of these people were too sick, too frail, and too achy to fight back. If this kept up, they’d end up pushed all the way back to the two-hour sign by the time the clinic closed.

And as if it weren’t bad enough having to stand and freeze in a stagnant line with a couple hundred grumpy people, there was suddenly an overbearingly sweet floral scent coming from somewhere nearby, like someone was emptying a can of air freshener into the air. Who the hell brings air freshener to a clinic? And who the hell sprays air freshener outdoors at a clinic?

“Amy Bee!”

Ravi’s shoulders tightened at the sound. Amy Bee. No one had called them by that cutesy, childish nickname in years. They didn’t recognize the voice, but it must be someone from a past life.

How the hell do you even run into someone you know in a city this big?

“Amaira! It is you!”

An absolutely jubilant young woman – big flowy hair that shone in the grey weather like amber and sun and honey – ran up to Ravi, beaming, making them feel like a sheepish, distant cousin at a family gathering: spoken of too well behind their back, but entirely out of the loop and stuck owing this would-be stranger a fake smile and a pleasant tone.

“Heyyy, it’s… you.”

Name. Name please. Brain? Help? No?

Ravi had no idea what to do here. This woman’s face should be hard to forget. Cute freckles on cold-blushed cheeks, an impossibly bright smile peeking out over a big knit scarf, sparkling blue eyes that felt like a spell even under the overcast sky. And she was… tall. Sturdy. Big. Big energy. Big charm. Just, everything about her was big in a way that made Ravi feel even smaller than usual.

“Oh my gods,” she said, putting a gentle, considerate touch on Ravi’s arm. “I can’t believe you’re still wearing this old jacket. I recognized it a whole block away. Of course you would, though. It’s so you—”

Their old denim jacket, covered in stapled-on patches. They had no idea it was so iconic. It was probably ten years old by now. The sleeves used to be kind of stiff and spacious, but it fit better every year. They couldn’t really wear it to work or school or anything, though, so it was saved for special occasions – like when they were trying to look unapproachable in line at the clinic.

The woman leaned in far too close to inspect one of the patches on Ravi’s chest pocket.

Lilac. Dandelion. Sunshine.

It was her – the source of that floral scent, which was already unreasonably powerful in the breeze, and almost intoxicating now with her right under Ravi’s nose like this – though, admittedly, the aroma wasn’t so suffocating now, now that they knew it wasn’t coming out of an aerosol can.

Kind of nice actually.

Reminded them of summer.

“This is Kittle Skisses, isn't it?” she asked, pointing. “First album?”

Even Ravi had to look down to doublecheck, but sure enough, it was. “That's… right. Are you a fan?”

“Uh, yeah, only since they were still scaring all the old guys out of the room at all the cute little open mic nights around here. They're one of my favorite bands.”

“One of? What number?”

“Oh. Mm. Near the top I think. 70ish?”

70 was near the top? Wow. This woman. Not exactly an exclusive list.

“How many favorites do you have?”

“Oh, a lot. I know a lot of bands, though, so even 70’s a prestigious position to be in. Even the ones down in the hundreds ranks are top tier, I promise.”

“Huh.”

Awkward pause.

The woman was still smiling at them. What was Ravi supposed to say here? They wanted this conversation to be over as quickly as possible. If it went fast enough, they could get out of this without ever revealing that the woman’s name had been forever lost to the sandstorm of time between them.

“So uh, how have you been?” they asked after a second of silence that felt like a hundred years.

“Not great!” she replied, surprisingly cheerful about her ‘not great’ situation, and, unfortunately, apparently willing to be 100% sincere instead of just replying with a ‘fine’ and moving on. “Not great. My buddy just got evicted. Well, more like the landlord changed his lock. No notice, even! That should be illegal, shouldn’t it?”

Ravi nodded. “Yeah uh. That’s… definitely not allowed.”

“Just because the guy had a little party – and not even a party party! You wouldn’t call a few friends hanging out and playing games all night a party, would you?”

“I… would not? I mean, I would need more details. Like, how loud were these ‘friends’?” From a quick, discerning analysis, Ravi felt pretty confident that this woman had the energy of a ‘friend’ who might just be loud enough to be mistaken for a whole crowd of rambunctious partygoers.

“So I don’t even have a couch to crash on anymore,” the woman continued without addressing the question.

And then Ravi saw their social assailant’s machinations.

“Yeah,” they tried to cut in, “Hey, that sucks. I wish I could help—” Maybe they could preemptively excuse themself from the giant ask that was about to be dropped on them.

“—So I can stay with you! Oh my gods thank you so much, you have no idea how much trouble you’re saving me. I’ll stay out of your way, and I’ll be gone in a week. You won’t even notice I’m there.”

Ravi’s mouth opened slightly in awe. They tried to say no. They tried to crumple up that woman’s optimistic smile and leave her out in the cold with nowhere to go. They really, truly, honestly tried to get a no to form on their lips, but somehow it came out yes.

“I knew I could count on you, Amy Bee. You were always sweet as honey.”

Ravi’s shoulders sunk, but they put on as kind a grin as they could muster and started rearranging their apartment in their mind to make accommodations for this woman – who was allegedly an old friend – to sleep on their couch, for one and only one week.

“It’s just an old loveseat though,” they tried to explain. “Terrible for your back.” Maybe if they made it sound uncomfortable enough…?

“Perfect,” the woman replied, undeterred, to Ravi’s dismay. “It’s not full or rocks or iron rods, is it?”

Ravi shook their head. What an odd question.

“Just nice soft cushions?”

Ravi nodded reluctantly. No point lying now. Their fate was sealed.

“No, really, that’s totally luxurious. My guy’s couch had some very aggressive springs in it. I had to get all twisted up just to avoid getting stabbed all night. But normal cushions on a loveseat? Perfect. I’ll just curl up in a cozy ball, pretend to be a little cat, you won’t even notice me.”

A stray.

The woman – whose name still hadn’t returned to Ravi’s mind, so, ‘Jane’? Why not? Too late to ask now, and she had big ‘Jane’ energy – ‘Jane’ leaned back on the heels of her boots and took a long look up and down the stalled and miserable parade of patients waiting to get their monthly treatment.

“You sick?” she asked. Then she finally woke up to the reality of Ravi’s situation and the possibility of them being contagious. (They weren’t.) She covered her mouth with the cuff of her coat, but instead of stepping back like a normal person would, she leaned in and eagerly asked, “What is it?” Her voice was muffled by the impromptu mask. “Broken bones? Fever? Rabies?”

She looked Ravi up and down trying to diagnose their ailment at a glance, which shouldn’t have been possible. They prided themself on being able to hide it. And they were lucky enough to have their wounds in easily concealed locations. Well, lucky for pride’s sake. They hurt just a whole bunch worse under their clothes.

“Oh no. It’s not that tar thing, is it?”

How.

“That’s kind of personal,” Ravi replied, trying to avoid the answer.

But ‘Jane’ must have managed to put all the clues together – the clues being that most of the people in the line had their ugly black spots on display, and also that the clinic had big signs on its exterior advertising its tar treatment services today. The place did other normal medical stuff too, but these clinics got a lot of funding based on the number of these black ‘tar’ blisters they treat every month. Ravi had even seen nurses turn other patients away, just because they weren’t ‘sick enough’ to justify the cost of taking up an examination room that could otherwise be used to extract a bit of black, goopy funding out of someone’s blisters.

‘Jane’, during her brief investigation of the scene, had also made note of the sign indicating the hour-long wait time from this point in the line. The look on her face said that that was entirely unacceptable. She paused for a moment to think, very intently, even rolling her head side to side a bit to consider her options, then she told Ravi she’d be right back before rushing to the front of the queue, intently searching for something.

Ravi leaned out of the line as far as they could get without losing their spot, but they couldn’t really see what ‘Jane’ was up to.

A minute later, with an imperative, “Let’s go!” from their new roommate, Ravi was ripped right out of their precious spot in line and dragged up to the front. They did their best to protest, but there was apparently no stopping this woman, and by the time they even had a chance to look back, their place was already filled.

Heartless.

“Here she is!” She showed Ravi off to an older woman near the front of the line, who was acting overjoyed to see them. ‘Jane’ turned to Ravi and gave them a not-so-subtle wink. “Your ‘mom’ was worried about you! Don’t wander off anymore, okay?”

Ravi had no idea what was going on, but they weren’t about to complain about being thrust to the front of the queue like this. They gave a stupid nod and joined the elderly woman in line.

Before she left, ‘Jane’ leaned in and whispered in Ravi’s ear, “Thank you, really. Look, I’ll meet you at the coffee shop on the corner over there,” she pointed. Then gave Ravi a cheerful wave and jogged off.

After she left, Ravi gave their new mom a quiet thank you and what was almost certainly the most awkward smile the features of their face could arrange themselves into.

“Oh, honey don’t be shy,” she laughed, then gave Ravi a very much unsolicited hug. After letting go, their ‘mom’ glared at the guy behind them in line, who looked about ready to swear at Ravi for cutting – which would have been entirely deserved. And not just because it was extremely rude. ‘Jane’ had come up with an entirely implausible scheme here. But the guy’s ire was quickly deflated by either the woman’s threatening glare, or the realization that he’d be yelling and swearing at a sick old woman. He backed down without a word.

Once she had successfully defended the challenge to the legitimacy of Ravi’s stolen spot in the queue, she asked, “So how do you know Danica?”

Ahh, right. Danica. Yeah, that was her alright. Ravi had never actually been friends with her in high school, but she did always seem to be involved in anything they were doing. Clubs, sports, student council… Hell was there even one class they didn’t share? Not out of any special coincidence though. She was just one of the handful of people in school who had the energy and fortune to do literally everything.

But in all that time, the two of them never once worked together or even sat together. They’d only had a few conversations at all, and Ravi couldn’t remember any of them. The two of them lived in different worlds. And Ravi had a hard time believing they’d made such an impression as a twerpy little faux punk goth kid that she would remember them after six years, but apparently Danica was more attentive to her classmates than they could have imagined.

Or maybe Ravi was the weird one – an arrogant antisocial asshole who was the only person alive that didn’t make any effort to remember anyone. Hard to tell.

“From school,” Ravi replied slowly. “We were in the same year. How do you know her?”

“Oh, we have some common interests. She puts baskets together at the food bank, and once in a while she joins our little stitch-and-bitch – though the little puppy is mostly there for the stitching part.” The woman put out her hand. “Angie.”

“Ravi.” They’d never see this woman again. It didn’t matter.

“Pretty name.”

Pretty. Sure. “Thanks. Picked it myself.”

Angie looked sad to hear that. She shook her head with disappointment and chastised Ravi, “Names are powerful gifts. Shame to throw away a treasure like that.”

Ravi wasn’t planning to get into the storied history of their name with a stranger. Instead, they changed the subject by commenting on the charming colors in the woman’s scarf, which got her talking about how it was a handmade gift from one of her girlfriends, and that was enough to keep her attention off of Ravi until the two of them were split into separate rooms for the procedure.

The nurse did the two blisters near Ravi’s shoulder blade first – after scolding them for the scar on their back, the scar that was left over from their very first blister, the blister that got extremely unprofessionally excised with a hunting knife right after their diagnosis… five years ago now? God. They didn’t need to be reminded how stupid that was. As if the three new blisters that popped up afterwards and the resulting tripling of their pain wasn’t enough to keep them straight.

They flinched when the needle went in. They would have liked to pretend that they had made peace with the feeling of the treatment by now, but nothing felt peaceful about the extremely sharp, jaw-clenching, hiss-inducing sensation of having that thick black gunk forcibly displaced from their body.

‘Tar’ was a fitting nickname for it.

Each extraction filled a small glass vial, which the nurse placed into a rack that contained dozens of others just like it from other patients. Profitable day for the clinic.

For the final blister – the one that was just below the soft part of the shoulder on their right arm – they twisted their neck to watch the nurse. They always watched that one. They figured they might have to do it themself one day. Better to know how to take care of yourself. Ravi didn’t enjoy relying on doctors for their body’s upkeep. Bad experiences with the medical profession. Sadly, love them or hate them, doctors were the ones with the equipment and the prescription pads.

The device the nurse used to administer the treatment was simple enough. It looked a little like a glue gun with terrifying needles sticking out the front. A vial with a wide needle pierced the surface of the blister near the skin to collect the tarry discharge, while another syringe nestled deep in the abscess to inject some thick, clear, medicinal gel from the other side. The gel forced the tar out to take its place in the wound, then over the course of the month, it would get supplanted, replaced in bits with yet another painful black glob.

The last vial rattled into place with the others in the rack. Ravi looked at it intently. Erwin’s words still rang in their mind. This was their bear, wasn’t it? Lots of people died from this. Ravi had been lucky. They continued to be lucky every month. But just one hair out of place, and it could take them. They definitely had some questions for it.

In the moment the nurse had her back turned to discard her gloves, Ravi silently plucked that last vial from the rack and pocketed it, unnoticed.

Their heart was racing when they got out of the building and into the parking lot.

Why did this feel guilty? They deserved this. They owned this, didn’t they? After spending a whole month laboriously… growing it.

They held the vial up to the bright light of the overcast sky. “Amaira Beausoleil” was printed in thermal ink on the label, along with every number and symbol the clinic could think of to describe what ‘Amaira’ meant to the world. None of it meant anything to them, but there was one number printed in the bottom corner that gave them a little reason to be concerned: ‘3/3’. It should have been obvious the clinic would be keeping an inventory of the vials to get their handsome funding, but how did they know ahead of time that Ravi only had enough tar for three of them? Kind of presumptuous. And… if they were counting them so meticulously… would they miss this one?

Well, no point worrying about it now. What is done cannot be undone.

They hid the vial in their pocket and started for the bus stop.

They were already up the stairs of the bus, mere inches away from tapping on their fare, when they remembered they had forgotten someone.

The walk back to the café where Danica was waiting for them was full of stuttered steps. They came to a full stop every time the thought crossed their mind that they could just walk away right now. Danica had no idea where they lived. She didn’t have their contact info. She didn’t even have the right name. How could she possibly find them? More than once, that thought turned them around, back towards the bus, towards a peaceful home with no noisy guests sleeping on the couch, intruding on their sanctuary, pretending to be as harmless as a kitten. But every turn brought them right back around again towards the café, to the exuberantly patient, dutifully waiting Danica.

She waved them over excitedly, inviting them to sit at a table that felt far too small for two people. But it had two chairs, so it must have been deemed large enough by the café’s stingy owner, and by Danica herself, so they didn’t really have a choice.

There was no good spot for Ravi’s feet under the table. It seemed everywhere they tried to put them, they were stepping on Danica’s toes, so they gave up on relaxing and just sat up stiff and straight to keep their feet tucked neatly under their chair. This already felt exhausting.

“How was it?” Danica asked, excited to hear the answer. “I hear it hurts.”

Ravi’s long-lost ‘friend’ looked down at their face with such interest and intensity that it was hard to look away without feeling rude. The light in the café caught her irises in a way that made them shine like gemstones. Entrancing. Ravi wished their eyes could be so captivating. The abyssal brown that looked back at them in every mirror just didn’t do it for them most days.

“It does,” Ravi confirmed. They didn’t know what else to add. It did hurt. No one really wants the details, and anyone who does just wants them for some perverse, false sense of empathy – as if to hear the words describing the pain was enough to understand what it meant to feel it, to live with it.

“And they make you wait out in the cold all that time! Can’t they just get more doctors? Or at least get a bigger space for everyone stuck waiting.”

Ravi shrugged, “I can’t pretend to know how that part of the process works. I’m just lucky it’s free. Down south it costs an arm and a leg. So, you know, surprising no one, a lot of people let it grow until they lose their arms and legs.”

Danica shook her head sadly. “Fuck,” she whispered to herself, in awe.

This wasn’t new or quiet information though. Like most people, Danica just hadn’t been looking out for it. Ravi was always vaguely aware that no one really cared about ‘the tar thing’, as Danica put it, unless it was directly affecting them. But it was kind of painful getting hit in the face with it like this.

“That’s so dark,” she said to Ravi, “I’m sorry you have to deal with all that, Amy. If there’s anything I can do to make it better, please let me know.”

“I’ll keep that in mind.”

They tapped out an uneven, syncopated rhythm on the tabletop, staring at their finger as it rose and fell like a blacksmith’s hammer, shaping the answer to an unasked question in their mind – whether or not this annoyance was worth bringing up. Was it worth the trouble for just a week? Or maybe because it was just a week, and they didn’t care about this woman…? It was their home that she was intruding on. She should use the right name. But it’s always such a thing.

After a dozen slow, heavy impacts, they made up their mind.

“It’s Ravi, by the way.”

“Huh?”

“No one calls me Amaira anymore.” Not true.

“Oh! ‘Ravi’. Raw-vee.” She tried the name out in quick, quiet whispers to herself, “Ravi, Ravi, Ravi…” Then returned her attention to them with a cheerful thumbs up. “Okay! Got it.”

That easy?

“What do you go by these days?” they asked. It seemed like the courteous thing to do. Ravi’s ‘mom’ called her Danica, but old people always seemed pick out the least comfortable form of anyone’s name.

“You call me whatever you feel like, Ravi.” She was practicing now. “I’ve been experimenting with ‘Nicole’. What do you think?”

Ravi smiled at that – ‘experimenting’. There was something nostalgic and warm about that.

“It’s great,” Ravi assured her. “Nice to meet you again, Nicole.”

The newly christened young woman beamed, then dragged Ravi up to the counter to pay for their drink of choice.

The two of them spent a lot longer at the café catching up than Ravi expected them to. Nicole’s energy was kind of intoxicating. And Ravi had a lot more patience for it now that they weren’t suppressing just a whole lot of pain in a miserable line in the cold.

They learned that Nicole had tried her hand at college but found it unsatisfying. Then she spent a year travelling for fun. And another couple years on a voluntourism campaign. That was where her heart was at, she said. But ‘somehow’ she ended up back here. She glossed over why she didn’t have some permanent address to return to. Ravi invented a fiction that she’d been kicked out of her parents’ home for partying too hard or something. And then she shamelessly informed Ravi that she’d been couch surfing with her friends ever since, chipping in whatever rent and favors she could afford while she hopped between jobs.

“I have a bit saved up though if you need it! I’m not some deadbeat drifter. I always pay back a favor,” she asserted, a little indignant at the suggestion that she wouldn’t – a suggestion that she had silently presented only to herself, entirely unsolicited.

“How about you do the dishes, and we’ll call it even.”

Nicole shook her head. “That’s way too little! You’re saving my life. I’ll find some way to make it up to you properly, okay? I promise.”

The ‘one week’ Ravi had initially offered seemed to last an awfully lot longer than seven days. In fact, it seemed to be composed of multiple weeks that just kept chaining themselves together indefinitely. Ravi had no intention of bringing that up, though. Living with Nicole wasn’t nearly as terrible as they had imagined it would be. Actually, it was kind of nice having her around. She always seemed busy, and she always had stories to tell about her life – both her travels and her daily activities. And just like a cat, she often left small gifts at Ravi’s bedroom door. A clay pot. A scarf. A flowering plant – more of a curse than a gift, that one. Ravi’s apartment was where houseplants went to die. An elephant graveyard for ferns, flowers, and succulents. None would be spared. Each cheerful, doomed little plant lived out its miserable little life next to the skeletal remains of its cousins on the windowsill.

All of Nicole’s crafty gifts were handmade. She even offered to bring Ravi along to the studios and workshops where she made them.

“They’ll love you,” she said. She had been on a campaign of trying to get Ravi out more. After her first week there, she had clearly been both surprised and disappointed to find the way Ravi spent their evenings. By the end of week two, there was no end to her encouraging words and… ‘gentle’ pushes.

She didn’t seem to understand how much school took out of them. The night shifts at the warehouse took more. They were barely home. It was hard to imagine going out during the few hours they had left every week. When were they supposed to relax?

“But it is relaxing! Working with your hands, making something. It connects you to the universe, Ravi, shaping it into something new.”

“Yeah, something horrifying. They’ll write stories about it, call it an eldritch artifact. I’ll be hung for consorting with demons.”

But as more and more weeks went by, the ‘absolutely not’s turned into ‘maybe’s, and the ‘maybe’s turned into ‘okay fine’s, where Ravi reluctantly consented to go out with Nicole once in a while, just for a drink or two.

To Nicole’s credit, Ravi did enjoy the nights out, despite the resistant fuss they always put up about being too tired to leave the apartment. Nicole was a joy to spend an evening with. Ravi wasn’t very social at bars, but the way Nicole drew people in, and held their attention, and somehow made Ravi feel like they were part of the conversation without ever making them participate, it felt like magic. It felt like even stronger magic that she somehow deflected every unsolicited phone number with a disarming smile. This woman was some kind of wizard.

That month, Ravi stole another vial from the clinic. It was their secret solace now. They couldn’t do anything about their illness, but they could hold it in their hands, growl at it, ask it why.

It did not answer, but they’d keep asking. They felt like something important was in there.

In all the time Nicole was there, they had never revealed their wounds to her. They even dug an old Christmas robe out of storage, tore the price tags off it, and started wearing it around the apartment to keep their affliction hidden – behind reindeer, snowflakes, and candy canes.

Their sores were gross to look at, but there was another reason to hide them, a reason that nagged at Ravi. They remembered Nicole’s words when they met, when she found out they were sick. She said she wanted to do something for them, to help with their illness, to pay them back, and this thing wasn’t something she could do anything about. No one could. And it would just hurt her to see it all the time. That’s not the kind of burden you put on a stranger. It didn’t even feel like the kind of burden they could put on a friend – not that they had a lot of those left to burden these days.

But Nicole couldn’t contain her curiosity about the vial when she spotted it in Ravi’s hand. It would have been easy to explain it away, but they couldn’t say no to Nicole. And they couldn’t see any harm in letting her take a look. Conceptually, it was just far enough removed from the reality of the sores on their back. It could be any black ooze.

“They have your name wrong,” Nicole noted, disappointed. She wasn’t prepared to hold the glass in her hands, but she was fine idly rolling it around on the table with a pen.

“Among other things, yeah.”

“Ah I see, yeah.” Nicole spotted the erroneous ‘F’ on the label. “I guess they don’t have a letter for that?”

“They do. They have to change it to an ‘X’ if you ask.”

Nicole got animated hearing that. “You should ask!” She clearly thought this was some self-confidence thing, that a little encouragement would make it better.

Ravi shook their head. “It puts an X on your head too. I’ve read a lot about it. Real bureaucratic horror stories. A lot of things get very hard when you put yourself out there like that. Healthcare gets complicated. Legal stuff is a nightmare. And forget travelling with something weird like that on your passport.” They gave Nicole an encouraging smile, to let her know it was fine. “It’s just not worth it.”

She took a deep breath and tried to accept Ravi’s explanation gracefully. Then she returned her attention to the vial.

“There’s really nothing they can do?”

“Well, you hear about research and little breakthroughs here and there.” Ravi sighed. “I hate to be that weird conspiracy guy, but I don’t think there’s any profit motive in curing it. The company that makes the treatment doesn’t have any competitors. If someone made a real cure, they’d lose a lot of money.”

Nicole shook her head. “Unbelievable. What have we got? Butler bots, space vacations – I hear they’re working on stopping old age entirely. Gods, we trapped a little sun in a jar just to keep the whole city lit up at night! But no one can fix something this important when it hurts so many people? That’s crazy. It feels like such a little problem! Haven’t they got rid of diseases like this before? They totally have, right? I’m not crazy? Something’s really wrong with the world. Priorities are all fucked up.”

Ravi couldn’t argue with that. But they did have to accept it, and they told Nicole as much, to her disappointment.

#my work #saffron and honey #original

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aphantaray · 3 years

Note

Star accidently discovers instant coffee. Go!

Hope you'll forgive me. I kind of blasted through this one and did very minimal editing. The dialogue and story flow is bad. But it is what it is. I also took some liberties with the idea of 'accidentally discovering' the stuff.

This is in the Rainbow Latte Blast universe, however it is not canon.

Also I probably won't be putting it on AO3. Secret content.

Neglected Magic

“He he… Marco’s room…” Star was visiting Marco that afternoon for a little adventure planning session. She’d been over a few times before already, but this was the first time he’d actually invited her up to his room. She couldn’t remember the last time she felt so stupidly giddy. Seeing a friend’s room for the first time is always a weird thrill. She was finally getting a peek at the real guy under that stern professional mask.

She was startled to find that it may not have been a mask at all.

“Oh. Wow. It looks like a hotel in here.”

Even the smell was… well it was definitely Marco. Floral, crisp and clean, but not acrid… it was like… a fancy library? But with a touch of stale coffee and the tiniest hint of bleach. The whole room felt like another world from the rest of the house, a world where everything had its place, and everything was in that place, under punishment of law. The only disorder she could find was on his walls, where there were signed posters of pop bands taped up haphazardly – though she suspected there was still some careful system involved in their arrangement.

Marco didn’t seem to know if that was a compliment or not. “Thanks?”

Star sat down on Marco’s bed and ran her hand over the perfectly made, wrinkle-free comforter. “This must take forever. You do this every day? How do you find the time?”

“Uh I don’t know, it’s just part of my morning routine,” Marco said while getting settled in his office chair. He set his latte on the desk – the one Star made for him before their walk over. The special drink was still sparkling, fragrant, and energizing, even from across the room. “You know,” he continued, spinning around to face her, “Wake up, make the bed, lay out my clothes, have a shower—”

“You pick out your clothes out before you shower??”

“You… you don’t?”

“No that’s crazy! I just dig my clothes out of the pile and run out the door!”

“Oh. You know that explains the wrinkles. I thought that was just a Mewni fashion thing.”

“What’s wrong with wrinkles? Who wants plain flat clothes? That’s boring.”

“Well, I didn’t want to say anything that might be… culturally insensitive, but… As your friend, I have to tell you: you kind of look like a mess sometimes. Maybe I could show you how an iron works—?”

“Wow the truth comes out, huh? Anything else you want to say about my look? Mr. Judgey?”

“Uh. I mean, your hair is amazing. I have no idea how you keep it looking so good when it’s so long. I tried to grow mine out once and it got all knotted and crispy before it even got to my shoulders.”

Star didn’t want to admit that she had a little help from her spells. Part of the magic of her morning coffee was a little fresher-upper that fixed her hair for the day. He didn’t need to know that, though.

She tried to imagine Marco with long hair. Might be cute.

“Well. Thank you,” she said. “Maybe I could show you how to fix your terrible hair if you’re going to butt in and make my clothes straight.”

“Deal.”

Yeah, okay, Star was hoping he would say no. Oh well.

He offered to get Star a cup of coffee from downstairs, and she happily agreed.

It would be an excellent opportunity to snoop.

Or… it would have been if Marco didn’t come back less than a minute later, catching Star elbow-deep in his bedside dresser searching for embarrassing secrets.

“Uh Star, what are you doing?”

“Oh! Marco!” Star slammed the drawer shut – and caught her finger in it. “Ow.” She shook her hand and sucked on her finger before she continued, “Uh. I dropped… my… ring?”

“You don’t wear rings,” Marco pointed out matter-of-factly.

“I know! Because I always drop them! Big klutz ha ha…”

Star was a little heartbroken to see Marco had returned with two cups of coffee. One for her and one for himself. She glanced over at the tall paper cup that was already sitting on his desk.

Marco sighed and handed Star her cup before he sat down at the desk. Next to the rapidly cooling drink Star had made for him. Ignoring the poor neglected thing.

“I don’t keep anything embarrassing in my drawers,” Marco calmly explained, “Because, you know, Janna.”

“Oh. Right. Janna.”

“Not that it helps,” he sighed and heaved his shoulders with frustration, “I’ve tried hiding my notes under my bed, in the floor boards, in a safe, in my sister’s closet… Somehow she always finds them.”

Star smirked, “Your ‘notes’?”

“Yes, my notes! On… on life. And the things that… happen… to me…”

Star raised a knowing eyebrow at him until he caved.

“Fine! Yes! It’s a diary. Is that better?”

“No no, you know I like the ‘notes’ thing. Makes you sound like a wizard or something.”

“I am a wizard. The master of self-aware arcana – powerful healing and emotional buff spells.”

“My ‘notes’ are full of rants about my landlord and crush-gush about the regulars at the café.”

“Okay. I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that.”

“What? You don’t have a little crush on any of the cuties that come in?”

Marco shook his head.

“Stone cold, Marco. There’s so many. Your standards must be up in the clouds.”

“No no no, it’s not like that. It’s just… unprofessional.”

“I don’t tell them about it! It’s just for me.” Star paused for a moment before she let Marco know she was concerned about him, “You know, it can’t be healthy repressing all your happy thoughts, Marco. You gotta let go and have fun sometimes. Doesn’t hurt anyone to smile at a pretty shirt.”

“I’m not repressing anything, though. I just don’t have those kinds of thoughts about people. Like, I know what cute looks like. Lots of cute people in Echo Creek. Lots at the university and the café and everything. I just don’t… care?”

“Huh. Weird.”

Marco shrugged, “You know, you’re not the first person to say that, but I guess I’m just built different.”

“But you were crushing on Jackie forever.”

“Well that’s… that’s different.”

Marco started explaining why exactly Jackie was an exceptional outlier, but Star was only half paying attention to the conversation now. She found it hard to avoid staring at her fingers while they idly rotated the cup of coffee in her hands. She was wondering how Marco got back so fast with these drinks. No one can make a cup of coffee in thirty seconds from scratch, and from the smell of it when they came in the front door, there definitely wasn’t a pot ready to go. Had he been hiding some kind of magic from her all this time?

After he was done defending his affections, Marco changed the subject and reminded Star why they were there in the first place: drawing up plans for their next ingredient hunt. She set her coffee down on the end table beside Marco’s bed without taking a sip, then grabbed a chair from the corner and sat beside him at his desk.

They had drawn up a few diagrams, maps, and notes about the dimension they were heading into. There were some blanks they needed to fill in – like, what does the creature they’re looking for even look like?

“Kind of a big gap there,” Marco pointed out.

Star agreed. They opened a blind portal to the unfamiliar dimension – and found they’d ended up in a dense, mountainous jungle. According to what little Star knew about their target, that seemed to be around where they needed to be. They clamored out of the foliage to find some high ground under the dim blue sun there. From that vantage point, Marco started taking notes about the terrain while Star scouted for the creature’s nest. After a harrowing helter-skelter down the slope of the hill to shelter from the aggressively territorial beast, they caught their breath and decided they had enough info.

Star would have preferred to just bust into the thing’s cave and start kicking anything that fought back, but Marco always insisted on having some kind of itinerary before they left for real. All these preparation slowed things down, but it was better than going alone.

Sitting next to Marco at the desk, Star was stuck still as a statue holding the pen to the paper. She was struggling to remember the name of the razor-taloned, winged laser creature that they had narrowly escaped – the creature they were going to be stealing some feathers from next time they were there. She was struggling not just because her memory was terrible, but also because she was extremely distracted by the now-cold latte sitting on Marco’s desk, next to his empty mug.

What was wrong with it? No one… no one would prefer some regular old coffee over one of her drinks, right? So, she must have messed something up about it.

Or… it wasn’t just regular old coffee.

She smiled at Marco and excused herself to use the washroom.

The kitchen was empty, lucky for her. She started digging through cupboards and garbage to figure out where that coffee came from. There must be a clue somewhere. How did he do it? He wasn’t magic. He wasn’t really a wizard. But if he was… No wonder he was sick of her coffee. Had he just been humoring her the whole time while hiding that he was a powerful coffee mage himself?

She found something hidden at the back of a cupboard full of dusty, rarely-used kitchen appliances. Her eyes went wide. A plastic container filled with… “Instant… Coffee…”?

Marco’s name was written on the box along with a bunch of notes – notes that put a glum look on Star’s face.

“Star?”

“Marco!” Star whirled around and hid the box behind her, but since she’d left every drawer and cupboard wide open in her search, it didn’t do much to disguise what she’d been up to. How did he keep sneaking up on her like this?

Marco was a little bewildered, “My diary’s not in the kitchen either, you know. Look if you’re that desperate to read it—”

Star frowned, then defiantly held out her discovery. “Have you been hiding your magic this whole time, Marco?”

“What?”

“What is this!?”

“Coffee?”

“Instant Coffee?? Even I can’t make coffee instantly Marco! You really are a wizard, aren’t you?”

“Star that’s not… It’s not magic. It’s barely coffee. It’s just heavily processed grounds turned into a powder. You just mix it with water, and it turns… into… coffee… Actually no you know what, that does sound like magic when I say it out loud.”

Star’s shoulders sunk. “Oh,” she said, deflated. It was just some weird human thing. Fake coffee? Gross. Why would they even do that? She was glad she didn’t drink any.

Her face was warm with embarrassment, definitely turning red, but she wasn’t done with her interrogation. She aggressively stepped up to Marco and shoved the container in his face, “Okay fine, it’s not magic, but how do you explain this?”

Star directed Marco’s attention to the messages he’d written there on the side of the container.

Marco’s do not touch

Seriously this is my favorite coffee don’t take this from me

At least get some more if you finish it!

Dad. I know it’s you. I installed a camera

Okay where is the camera dad put it back

Marco put his hands in the air defensively, “Look, I know it’s passive aggressive, but he keeps stealing it! It’s hard to find this brand! I even got him his own coffee, Star. He just won’t stop…”

“I don’t care about that! This coffee is your favorite? This stuff?? Heavily processed, mix it with water, fake coffee?”

Marco blinked. He didn’t know what to say. Then a look of realization hit him that quickly turned to a look of sympathy, “Star… are you… jealous?”

“No!” Okay maybe. Yes.

“Star. I love your coffee,” Marco insisted.

The warmth and sincerity of his words shook Star a bit. He’d given her compliments before, but he’d never said that before.

“Why… why didn’t you drink it then?” she asked, most of the indignant rage drained from her voice, replaced with a sadness she was not expecting to come out of herself.

“That’s what this is about?”

Star wasn’t about to be put on the defensive here. “Well? Why didn’t you drink it? I worked hard on that latte Marco. I know I make it look easy but it’s still my heart and soul in there. That’s my art. You’re just going to throw away my art?”

Marco had a look on his face like he had accidentally stepped on a puppy’s tail. “I didn’t know it meant that much to you. I’m sorry. I just like to have a little comfort drink at home sometimes.”

“My drinks aren’t comfortable enough?”

Marco was taking his time putting together his response – which obviously meant the answer was ‘no’.

“Your stuff is more like an adventure,” he explained – carefully, “Exciting and energizing and otherworldly. What you do is amazing. But sometimes I just want to relax with something familiar. If you saw fireworks every night, wouldn’t they kind of lose their charm?”

Star crossed her arms and huffed, “No, that’s stupid. They’d still be crazy explosions in the sky no matter how many times you saw them.”

Marco rubbed the back of his head and apologized, “If it means that much to you, I’ll go finish it right now. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

Wow that was embarrassing to hear. Star immediately got her hackles up, preparing to defend herself, ready to insist she didn’t even have feelings to hurt.

But she did, and she was, and it felt kind of silly now.

And it wouldn’t do any good to force him if it wasn’t going to make him happy.

She sighed and relented, “You don’t have to.”

“You sure? I could just put some ice in it.”

“No, that’ll probably make it explode or something. It’s fine.” She smiled, “Thanks though. Sorry for being weird about it.”

When they got back to Marco’s room, he asked her if she really didn’t like the instant stuff. “I think it tastes pretty good,” he insisted.

“I didn’t even try it,” Star admitted. “And I don’t really want to. It sounds like a crime against everything that good coffee stands for.”

“Aw come on, just one sip. Maybe it’s amazing.”

Star grumbled, ‘Doubt it.” Maybe she was still feeling a little bitter about the stuff stealing Marco’s affection. But she put that aside and caved in to give it a try.

After taking a swig of it, she cursed under her breath.

Marco’s face sunk with disappointment, “That bad?”

“…No,” she mumbled, “It’s actually… good. Damn it.”

This blasphemous fake coffee had stolen Marco’s heart, and now even she was coming around on it.

Marco gloated, “I told you.” Then he cheerfully informed Star that there are some fancy drinks that can only be made with instant coffee. He pumped his fist and grinned proudly, “I can finally show you something magical that only exists on Earth.”

Star realized the Pamphlet had no spells that used the stuff. This could be… an entirely new family of magic. And it was hers to play with.

“Yes,” she smiled mischievously, “Yes you should do that.”

She completely lost interest in their ingredient hunting plans. After all, she might have the most interesting ingredient in the multiverse to play with right here. She got Marco talking about everything he knew about its secret recipes, and Star’s imagination soared with possibilities.

#my work #request #fanfic #rainbow latte blast #secret content #star butterfly #marco diaz #not canon #I mean I'm pretty sure she'd already know about instant coffee is the thing #but it's a fun idea #thanks for the ask #olinnordenn

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