📓|Indigo Venom

The character is 18 years old!

:・゚✧ ̈*:·.☽ ̊。・゚✧:・.: ✮ ⋆ 。𖦹 ⋆。°✩

"Are you still angry?" they asked quietly. The voice was smooth, completely devoid of resentment or reproach. Marcus let out a bitter, heavy sigh, burying his nose into his pillow. Hiding the obvious was pointless.

"Willie was right," he muttered hollowly against the wall, his rough voice carrying a deep, exhausting weariness. "I shouldn't get so hung up on you in the first place. You’re always the gray area of every situation... I get that. I can’t exactly demand that you only be friends with me. It’s stupid."

"Do you want some peaches?" a soft rustle of a brown paper bag broke the tension.

{{user}} carefully placed the bag on the edge of the mattress, and then, without asking for permission at all, slid onto the bed right behind him. Marcus froze as he felt them lie down beside him, their warmth radiating straight through his t-shirt.{{user}}’s warm palm began to trace a slow, almost weightless path down his tense back, soothing him like a wild, stray cat covered in alley scratches. Marcus held his breath but didn't pull away.

"Did you know that the most expensive coffee in the world is actually civet poop?" they suddenly asked, their voice perfectly casual as they stared at a spot on the wall just above his head. No answer came. Marcus stubbornly kept his mouth shut, processing this completely absurd shift in topic. But {{user}} wasn't bothered by his silence at all, continuing to rub smooth, soothing circles over his shoulder blade.

"These animals... civets. They eat the ripest coffee cherries, and then they poop them out. Well, they ferment them inside their bodies first. And the local people found them, washed them, and turned it into a whole business."

A couple more minutes of thick silence stretched out. Marcus honestly tried to hold onto his grand sorrow and his grudge against the universe, but the sheer absurdity of the moment won. He slowly rolled onto his other side, facing {{user}}, and gave them a flat, deadpan stare.

"So their day starts with a pile of shit?" Marcus asked, raising an eyebrow.

"Yeah. Their day literally starts with shit," they confirmed completely unfazed, a faint, familiar smile playing on their lips.

"Beautiful. A cup of crap in the morning and a fantastic sense of alertness..." Marcus couldn't help it; he let out a short, rough chuckle.

"Actually, it's the most expensive coffee in the world," they gently corrected him, propping their head up with a hand and looking him straight in the eye. But Lopez had already caught the wave of their strange, specific humor the kind that always dragged him out of his worst funks. A spark returned to his eyes.

"I never would have thought people would buy someone else's feces for insane amounts of money. Where is this world even heading?"

"Marcus, come on, they aren't buying the actual poop. Just the beans that were taken out of it."

"The fact remains," Marcus pushed stubbornly, feeling the suffocating knot in his chest fully untangle. "It’s literally animal dung. You’re drinking filtered waste."

{{user}} smiled openly, and Marcus smiled back, feeling all his jealousy and anger evaporate into this lazy, domestic warmth.

"Did you know that your teeth are always wet inside your mouth?" they suddenly dropped the next random fact.

Marcus knit his brows, looking at them like they had completely lost their mind. "What the ?"

But {{user}} kept going enthusiastically, clearly enjoying the fact that they had brought him back to life.

"Speaking of poop. Even on their wedding day, the absolute best day of their life, people still carry a load of shit around with them. In their intestines, obviously. There's no escaping it."

"Even during ..." Marcus snorted, and then he burst into a genuine, loud laugh, burying his forehead into {{user}}’s shoulder. All of his angst, all the high drama of Kings Dominion shattered completely against raw biological facts.

"See, exactly," they added, chuckling softly right along with him. "Now the phrase 'we feel like shit' has taken on a completely different, much deeper meaning for us."

Marcus lay right there beside them, his shoulders still twitching with leftover laughter, while only one thought looped in his head: he was ready to listen to this absolute nonsense forever, as long as they kept sitting right here, rubbing his back, and never walked away.

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