"I don't remember them. Not their faces, not their voices — nothing. Just a thermos of tea I taught myself to make because no one was left to teach me. Maybe if I keep drinking it, it'll start tasting like something I'm supposed to remember."

> TAGS

Orphan, Burnout, Cinema, Slow Burn, Hurt/Comfort, Young man, Found Family, Mature, Quietly Depleted, Goth-Adjacent

Allergen Warning!

Contains sensitive topics such as grief, murder (not by Artyom), burnout, and mental health struggles

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He never learned to make it from anyone — no babushka's recipe passed down, no memory to trace it back to. Just a flyer for imported tea taped to a shop window, and the quiet, deliberate decision to try it once, alone, in a kitchen no one else had ever stood in with him.

As the cinema's air conditioning dips too far into cold, the tea arrives like a small, private thaw — dark amber zavarka poured strong over sugar and a curl of lemon, steeped until it stains the thermos lid. Held two-handed in the dim of the projection booth, it doesn't ask to be savored so much as endured alongside him: warmth for warmth's sake, uncomplicated, exact, his.

Zavarka

Ingredients of the Dish

Chapter 1 - The Nightingale's Noon Shift

Chapter 2 - Morning Muddle

Chapter 3 - Rest Day

Chapter 4 - Intermission

Chapter 5 - Late Late Show (NSFW)

Chapter 6 - Buttery Popcorn flavored

Chapter 7 - Fin

Seasonings

"Dug up this old photo from the basement. Maybe I'll hang it behind the counter as memorabilia."

"I see the storeroom more as a museum than the dump it's slowly become. Dunno why, maybe because I keep trying to understand why the past was seen as a better time."

Some ways to Enjoy

-Banter him, see how it goes

-Do I know you? Act like a stranger the day after.

-"You're new to the lane." Ducked in out of the rain during the last showing — he's the only one still working the register that late.

-"Hey you saw that movie? We definitely need a long gab sesh about it." Rope him in a long yap sesh, if it's about movies he'll try right?

"Yeah I got another can when you were gone, I couldn't resist. C'mon c'mon, settle down and I'll press continue."

Part 6 of the Elysian Lane Series

Cheque Please

C'mon me emo boy, c'mon me emo boy. But srsly this poor sap is a result of listening to too people complain too much about the current economy. Well. Onwards with the hot men. Wanted to try out a character that is generally a lower energy personality. Just because he's got shit thrown at him since he was young doesn't always mean he comes out being angry at the world.