smilestopscars | A House, Currant, Maine, Wednesday

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A House, Currant, Maine, Wednesday

Today's Coterie job had been a dirty one.

No, not the fun kind.

But not the supremely unfun kind, either. Just... literally dirty. There'd been a whole lot of mud involved. It had gotten everywhere, which was why Ezra's first order of business upon getting home had been to take a long and very thorough shower.

Second order of business, upon getting out of the shower, was to throw his muddily destroyed clothes in the trash. With a great big sigh, because he'd liked that shirt, dammit. Just, you know, not enough to go through the trouble of washing it.

Third order of business? Locating clothes to wear.

[ooc: NFB due to distance. Posted with one in mind, but open before her!]

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"There was mud," Ezra told her dramatically as he, too, flopped onto the couch. Now that he was fully dressed and everything. "A lot of it. No place for a fox. They should've found a werepig instead."

"How deeply you must have suffered," Kathy said, dimples deep as she attempted not to laugh. Out loud. "Are were-pigs a thing, though? For real?"

Ezra shrugged. "I've never heard of one," he said, "but that doesn't prove anything."

In his world, creatures didn't tend to much advertise their existence for obvious reasons, so unless you lived in the same area with a population of something or other, you might never even hear about them.

As opposed to Kathy's world, where the first thing anybody did after developing superpowers was pull on a costume and go off to fight crime.

"Can you tell me what you were actually doing?" Kathy asked, amusement still playing around her mouth. "Or were Lock and Ava just messing with you and making you deal with mud for funsies?"

Ezra scoffed. "They wouldn't." Well, not unless he was an ass to them first! Like that time he'd gotten distracted by some wild turkeys.

He sighed and leaned back. "We had a lead on someone hiding out on a farm, but he wasn't there." Which was better for everyone, really, but he wasn't going to say that. "But his traps were." A beat. "They were far too focused on mud-flinging, if you ask me. Absolutely no variety."

"Well, is this really the kind of guy you expect creativity from?" Kathy asked, tentatively tucking her bare feet under his thighs. Her sandals left by the door because who wore shoes inside the house? That was rude.

But Ezra was tactile and Kathy was, too, and she was trying to find little ways to comfort and touch that wouldn't push.

"But anyway, you've showered, you have cookies, and you've got the promise of lunch and ice cream. And delightful company, obviously. Your day can only improve."

Ezra rested her hand idly on her leg. Anything below the knee was probably fair game, even if he was exactly the type who could eroticize anything given enough incentive to.

"That is very true, darling," he agreed, with a glance over at her, and a lazy smile. "Honestly, the shower was already a high point. It was a good shower."

Magically not being muddy anymore was a nice thing.

If he started panting after her ankles, she was going to laugh at him and make Victorian puns all day long.

"Showers are amazing," Kathy said, deliberately thinking only of G-rated showers because her poker face was laughable at best. "Though I'm also a sucker for a bathtub with a book and a bottle of wine. If I ever end up beating the Millennial Curse and owning a home, it had better have a tub big enough that the only thing above water is my chin."

There. That was wholesome enough, right?

It wasn't hot, at least. Although Ezra had to hold back a comment about how he found baths to be boring by himself. That way lay danger.

"Well, that shouldn't be hard to accomplish," he said instead. "You're not a very big person."

Kathy had nearly said her bath needed to be big enough for two, swapping in the chin-thing when her brain had flashed big ABORT! signs at her.

"Hey now!" Kathy said, poking him with her toe, the nail painted a soft baby pink. "I'm tall! For a girl!"

It had been the despair of her old gymnastics coach.

Ezra shrugged one shoulder, and swatted at her foot, very lazily indeed.

"Maybe, but there still isn't a whole lot of you, is there?"

Kathy looked down at herself, then back up at him, nose in the air. "It's quality, not quantity," she declared, trying to sound as haughty as possible.

...Keep trying, Kathy.

Ezra snickered while he pulled her feet into his lap. "Are you taking this as an insult, dumpling? I'm just stating a fact!"

Only because the other way of responding was still firmly in the DMZ.

"Well, I'm certainly trying," Kathy said, with a small chuckle of her own. "Do you think it's working?"

Because, well, she was pretty small. In most places.

Ezra shook his head, and patted her ankle. "Barely teenaged Kathy wouldn't have taken it so badly," he tsked.

And barely teenaged Kathy was definitely a non-sexy topic.

Enough so that Kathy didn't think that pointing out, "If you think barely teenaged Kathy wasn't already looking into her bra and sighing, you've got another thing coming," was too outside the line. "Besides, she was taller than most of the boys in her class, and she spent a lot of time dying over that, too."

"Well, I could've distracted her away from the topic more easily than I can you," Ezra decided. "She was more adorable, though."

There, that was an insult!

(Or it would've been, had it been true.)

And Kathy was responding appropriately, with a manufactured gasp of outrage and an insulted expression. "First of all, how dare," she said, tossing her hair over her shoulder. "Second of all," she reached for the cookies, not actually bothering to use her superspeed. "You clearly don't deserve these."

Well, if she wasn't going to use superspeed... He was definitely going to lean into his wereperson gifts a little to snag the cookies before she had a chance to touch them.

"No takebacks. House rules."

Well of course he should. Otherwise she would have snagged the cookies. And then they would have ended up wrestling for them and you're welcome, Ezra.

"Like you ever met a rule in your life that you didn't want to break," Kathy snorted. "While piously declaring that it's, like, werefox cultures or something."

"This is my house, you know," Ezra pointed out, opening the container and popping a cookie into his mouth, making his next words a whole lot crunchier than the ones before. "The rules in here are sacred to me."

A pause.

Then: "It's werefox culture."

And he smirked.

Kathy threw a couch pillow at his head, laughing with delight.

"That's it," she decided. "I'm going to go see if Lock wants to go have lunch and ice cream with me. As a nice break from all these sacred werefox culture rules."

Ezra looked absolutely offended at having a pillow lobbed at his head. Even if he caught it easily. The nerve of her, throwing things in his house!

Funny how he still settled back into his lazy slouch immediately after. "Oh, I wouldn't do that, if I were you," he said. "If you order anything with vegetables, he'll lecture you about how they're technically his people."

That was not a thing Lock did, no. Nor any other dryads. Because they weren't related to vegetables.

Poor Lock. Did he know how often he was unjustly slandered in his own house?

...Probably.

"Don't dryads just have an affinity to trees?" Kathy asked, because she was a mythology nerd to go along with all the other kinds of nerd she was. "Besides, I'm willing to go out for sushi. He's not a nereid, it should be fine."

This time, the wry joke she'd swallowed back was along the lines of 'it wouldn't be the first time I've eaten someone's relation.' But, hey, not dirty, right?

Oh, Lock knew.

"Well, if you want to take your chances..."

He popped another cookie in his mouth. Please, like he cared about his appetite. Or could even ruin it with anything.

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