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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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.

"We'll gossip about you," Kathy decided. "And he'll show me all the awkward-teen-Ezra pics he has stashed away somewhere. And tell me stories about when your voice was squeaky and changing and your paws were too big for the rest of you."

Ez had met her when she was a terribly awkward teen. Twice now, really. Was there really any wonder that she was hoping he'd once gone through the same?

Ahahaha. Oh, Kathy.

Ezra raised his eyebrows. "Ohh, I can save you the time and show you just one picture of how I was never awkward."

You know, if he could motivate himself to get his ass off the couch, first.

"Pics or it totally happened," Kathy declared with a laugh, arms crossed over her shirt.

"Prepare to be disapponted," Ezra tsked as he pushed himself up to his feet. He padded out of the living room, then emerged a moment later from his bedroom with a photograph in hand.

He flopped back onto the couch, then handed the picture to her. "Here."

It was a picture of the three of them. Ezra, Ava, and Lock, in their early-ish teens. Ava looked awkward, and frail. Lock was practically unrecognizable, all floppy black hair and eyeliner. Trying a little too hard to look like a goth badass. Both of them had a malnourished look about them, Ava in particular.

Meanwhile, Ezra looked practically the same as he did now, just younger. To quote Ava, 'it looked like he was posing with misfits he'd taken pity on'.

Kathy took the picture and looked at it, eyes softening. This was the first look she'd gotten of Lock and Ava, who were probably the most two important people in his life, and she couldn't help but feel this was a sign that she was a little further 'in' with him than she'd ever been before.

Her eyes were soft as she looked at the photo, and her face fond as she brushed her fingers over the image of his face. "Of course you were always perfect," she sighed, finally looking up at him again. "I don't know how I expected anything less."

"I told you," Ezra replied with a little shrug. He'd watched her face while she'd been looking at the photograph. he knew she was taking more out of this gesture than just the knowledge that he had always been fabulous. No matter how important it was that she know that.

"Aves and Lock don't look half as tragic these days, either," he volunteered lightly after a pause. "But you have to admit they had more reason to change than I did, over the years."

"Some people have sad goth phases. Some had terrible haircuts and a love for giant floral prints." Sigh, younger Kathy. "Fortunately, time usually has a beneficial effect on most of us."

She handed the picture back to him, fingers brushing lightly over his. "You know, if little me would never have stopped to talk to the you in that picture in front of the candy shop."

Ezra set the picture aside on the coffee table. It looked like an idle movement, but he also put it in a spot where he knew know harm would come to it.

Pictures of the three of them as young teens were pretty few and far between.

"The me in that picture would've gladly stolen candy for her from the shop."

"Now I'm a little offended that this you didn't," Kathy said, feeling nothing of the the sort. "But...you were already hot enough to be intimidating. It was only that you were an adult and adults generally don't care about being mean to little kids that let me speak up."

She looked back over at the picture, unable not to smile at it again. "You that young--I would have been terrified of drawing your attention. You were clearly too pretty to be nice."

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