henshined | dear shay your christmas present this year is the gift of non-canon shipping

Gentaro steps back to watch her--well, work seemed like an overestimation of the way she was just kind of jamming cable to port, but he guesses it's close enough. "I don't need to try it at home, miss class A scientist, I just plug it in and it works fine."

He leans around her to look at things. "If it works, it works for me," he says, and smiles at her. "You ready to get down to business?"

By which he means the business of watching her learn the Halo controls in like two minutes because she was some kind of gaming god, but whatever.

"It'll be fine!" She was absolutely not responsible if anything started sparking or catching fire. She would be a little responsible. "Life is full of getting stuck kind of mishmash with stuff you didn't bar-gin for, right?" Funny jokes about real existential troubles; that was her.

Straightening up after replacing the horrible monstrosity of wires, Roxane claps Gentaro on the shoulder. "What was that you were saying about total game domination?"

There's plenty of room on the fruit-sectional, but that doesn't stop her from leaning on him while they wait for Halo to (hopefully) load. Competitive as she is, and better suited to single-player games, it's nice to be doing this instead.

She'd probably be pretty miserable, actually, if he wasn't around to hang out with.

"Yeah, yeah, it's all about taking what you've got and running with it, but I dunno if breaking my Xbox cord counts," he complains, before she starts talking trash, and from there he's busy grumbling at her and passing her her controller as he sits on the couch. When she leans into him, he shifts a little closer, clicking though the sign-in menu and tilting his thigh against hers.

"Should I put it on easy so you can figure out how to shoot straight?" he asks, which is an honest question even if it's phrased badly (and it is phrased badly). When he asks, he tilts his head to look at her.

Like every time, he gets that thump-thump feeling in his chest he always gets when she's close by.

"Your hair looks nice," he says, after a swallow against his dry mouth. Then he clears his throat and goes back to loading the main menu.

"No way; I'll take the crash course. No way to learn if you just give me the grub treatment."

(That's your heart, Gentaro. Your heart marks the thump-thump noises.)

Roxane laughs, giving the curl at the edge of her bangs an unconscious tug. Personal appearance doesn't matter much to her (troll, duh), but a compliment is a compliment and she grins a little to hear it.

"Yeah? Thanks! I'll never get it styled like yours, though. I mean, yours is just cute as shit." Personal space laws probably apply to not touching meticulously styled pompadours - this is one time Roxane adheres to the rules and doesn't immediately go in for the touch.

Being Player 2 has its drawbacks - mostly, that she has to wait impatiently for Player One, Gentaro, with the heart thumping and the teenager compliments and unbelievably best friendship, only-supposed-to-be-buddies-ship, to do anything with the menu.

"Okay, okay! Don't whine if you can't pick it up, though, you asked for this."

He clicks through the menu, and as the loading screen pops up he touches his hair with light fingertips. "You think so?" he asks, "thanks! I try, it takes a little while, you know. And if you wanted, I could do yours... You'd be even cuter with a pomp." He's coloring over the apples of his cheeks as the map loads.

Not for the first time, he's really glad the game gave him Roxane for a client. She's the best troll-buddy he could ask for: pretty, and sweet, and a total badass to boot. Grandpa's constant stories about asking his grandma out on a date and subsequent stories about how to treat a lady so she'd appreciate your totally-rocking gentlemanly soul are starting to take on grandpa's probable original meaning all of a sudden. He clears his throat, so nervous he misses the firing button and hauls up the pause menu instead. "Whoops," he says, unpausing, and tries to drag his attention away from Roxane and back on the television.

She's always been a fast learner when it comes to completely useless reflexive skills. Good gamers make good surgeontologists, she thinks she's heard, but that seems like one of those sorts of excuses.

Oh, no way, he did not just flub up the controls when she was halfway to learning them! Roxane lets out a startled noise, showing her fangs.

"Hey, really?! ... I'll let that one slide. Contrary to popular belief, we aren't looking for a fight all the time." Just, like, 90% of the time.

Like, 95% of the time.

"Enough of that and I'll think you're trying to drum up some black rivalry for me." Someone should give her an award for being so awkward holy shit. Roxane sags, almost imperceptibly, back against the cushion. She shoots something, just to make up for it.

"Sorry, sorry! I told you, I hit the wrong button," he says, "fight the bad guys, not me, there's plenty of them to work on, aren't there?"

He nearly stumbles over the controls again when she says 'black rivalry'. 'Black rivalry = black romance = romance!', his brain unhelpfully supplies, and he shuts that down, since that's totally the wrong one, or at least he's pretty sure it is. "I could never hate you, Rox, don't be silly," he says, nudging her with his elbow. "All that rivalry stuff sounds like a waste, anyway, if somebody's your girlfriend you should be kissing her, not pissing her off."

That was... vague enough? Right? Not with the flush deepening over his face, probably, but--wait, was that a tank? "I call the tank," he says, hoping to salvage the conversation. "So don't blow it up."

"Well, there's still kissing, just..." Roxane mumbles helpfully. "Different ... kissing. Whatevs."

Even if Gentaro had given the moirail thing a go with Saionji, she still couldn't much wrap her mind around him getting into other permutations of romance.

"Anyway, you haven't got a caliginous pore in your body, right? It's all flush for you, all the time." With a wink, she adds, "Not your kind of kissing, right?" Roxane holy shit shut up. She about shoves the controller into her mouth. Flirting on the internet is one thing, isn't it, or when it's with certain people.

If this was one of her stories, it would be really easy to broach the subject further, let out something coy about flushcrushes. Thankfully, the tank is there to save them any further conversation about biological imperative.

"Yeah, yeah yeah yeah, no sweat; I'll treat it with the utmost reverence you deserve. That tank will remain intact. For now." Roxane lobs a frag grenade in a direction not at the tank, muttering under her breath: "Fucking wow."

The concept's been explained to him multiple times, by trolls and humans, and besides that time he was a troll, he's never really gotten it. He shrugs easily, unbothered by the estimation.

"No, I don't think so," he agrees, out loud, "I just like everybody! And if I like somebody, I like them. None of this epic rival stuff. And, you know, you don't know anything about my kissing, man." Yet. Hopefully. Shit, he had it bad.

He smiles, relaxing a fraction when she respects the tank. It's like the pomp, only with a cannon, in his mind. "Thank you," he says, pleased, and between the action on-screen and the fun of shooting the laser cannon at hapless Covenant morons, it's almost enough of a distraction that he doesn't catch the way her expression flickered there.

This is nothing like that time he dated Nadeshiko. "So--have you ever? Red-dated, or whatever?" He knows she has a moirail, not in the game, but she's never talked about her quadrants much. Suddenly he's concerned he missed a matesprite--or whatever they were called, matesprit, matesprat, something like that--somewhere.

A brief interlude for story fantasy hour, courtesy of Roxane Laland:

'Well, you can demonstrate.' She throws down her controller dramatically and they die horribly in game because of her great and horrible sacrifice, all in the name of pursuing some attraction that might not even last the duration of their Sburb session. Drinks are accidentally spilled everywhere.

Just like her stories, if it had happened.

Something about throwing Gentaro in the tank seems to make him a little bolder - maybe it's the heavy artillery.

Roxane actually holds back in her merciless slaughter to respond, tracking her character back and forth across the screen. Occasionally, she glimpses in his direction, but otherwise she's watching the avatar path back and forth across the map as she talks.

"Me? Nah. You kinda got a glimpse of the sordid geometries of my friendships, right? Everybody likes somebody but the somebody's never me. Sea-ngle lady here." Usually, it doesn't even bother her. People are gonna like who they're gonna like, right?

The sudden drop in murder of evil aliens doesn't go unnoticed, but he's more focused on the words coming out of her mouth. "What, seriously?" he asks, eyebrows furrowed, "that can't be right. Who wouldn't like you?" He doesn't really understand how someone could be so close to her and not orbit her, in the most ridiculous of space metaphors.

"Other people are stupid if they don't like you," he says, two seconds before his tank gets blown up, and he groans. That was what he got for honesty. At least he knew for sure she was available to ask? That was worth a tank.

"Do you want to? Red-date anybody, I mean."

"Man, I'm gonna have to start using you as an endorsement. My ego could use the lift, I think."

It's kind of hard to explain the phenomenon of liking each of your friends off and on while they frolic in some weird ritualistic tango of getting involved and uninvolved with each other.

Why did he have to go and get himself blown up in the middle of a serious conversation? There's just not enough room to get a joke in (it wasn't here, though, she swears).

"Well ... yeah, I guess? I didn't think about it much at first. Meteor death game 'n' ale. Figure it's worked as a pretty legit interspecies dating service for some, right? Putting people together, forcing 'em to cohabitate."

"I'd be happy to endorse you all over the memos, and wherever you want," he promises, and as he respawns he leans over to bump their shoulder together.

Where was that Wraith... he was going to get the alien motorcycle of death if it was the last thing he did. He swallows before he speaks again, a moment later.

"You got your... eye anywhere?" he asks, and wow he definitely sounded all squeaky there. At least he'd managed to save her from getting run over by a Banshee, though, that was romantic, right?

Roxane shoots him a puzzle look, as though unable to quite comprehend whatever's going on with his sound emission cordons.

"Yeah, I figure maybe those motherfuckers up there? Look like they have a featherbeast's nest we could use."

Swing and a miss.

It's not entirely Roxane's focus on the game that keeps Feigning obtuseness is an underrated skill sometimes. At the very least, it's kept her away from any drones.

"Nah, you were talking about like, in the flush way, right?" Cracking her neck to the side, she blurts out, "Yeah I guess I do. Human kid, though; you know how that's gonna go. Like, maybe he wouldn't mind, but -"

"That's not what I--" meant, he starts, and then she keeps going.

He coughs, and then he hits the pause button. No reason to sacrifice performance for romance, Kisaragi, he reminds himself. His left hand hovers over her right forearm for a minute, and he turns toward her. "Rox, I would more than maybe not mind."

Unless she wasn't talking about him, in which case he is going to regret this in about ten seconds, or however long it took her to stop laughing at him.

After her awkward stumbling into all sorts of awkward confession hour times, Roxane had proceeded to slam back the remaining half of her martini. It's somewhere about halfway down her throat when he responds, resulting in the first and last 'bluh' face she will ever pull when consuming an alcoholic beverage.

"Thought I was being coy; like, super sneaky, since I figured that was kind of the point. You know, not being really forthcoming and just kind of alluding to the bigger picture." Except the way she says it, it just kind of piles out - that sentence exactly with absolutely no punctuation.

"I mean -- that's pretty forward, isn't it?"

Gentaro's just glad she didn't spew any martini on him; whatever she put in those things was strong, and it lingered until he shampoo'd at least twice. (Grandpa always said he was being paranoid, but alcohol would dehydrate his ends!)

He only barely follows along, mostly because he was used to being in a crowd of six or seven talkative people all the time. "Well, it might've worked. Only even when you were being sneaky I was staring back," he admits, coloring, and that's all she gets before he leans forward, resting his left hand on her arm and his right on her cheek, and kisses her.

It's not exactly graceful, but he hopes it'll get his point across.

"Oh."

Lots of things make more sense now -- no wonder Gentaro had shown her so much sympathy to her before. She does put the controller aside this time, albeit without the dramatic spilling of drinks and food items.

Roxane is completely out of her scientific element in this situation, but that doesn't stop her from enthusiastically casting an arm around the back of his neck or turning on the sofa so that they really are nestled snugly together.

Um.

"Cool," she says with a giggle upon pulling away, going very pink-purple at the gills.

(If Gentaro could hear her thoughts he would be offended; he'd do that for any of his friends. But Roxane was special, even among the rest of his buddies.)

He's barely done any kissing at all, but he figures the arm around his neck and the sudden increase in Roxane-pressed-up-against-him is at least kind of a good sign. The giggling and the proclamation of 'cool' relax him, though, and he curls his arm around her as well as he can. "Pretty damn cool," he agrees, "you know, as long as you wanted this to be a... more than one-time thing."

"Like, dating, I mean," he clarifies, to put it out there where the can see it. Be a man, Gentaro! "If you wanna."

(In the end, it's sort of a shame there's no telepathy here - it could never hurt her to be reminded of the flaws in social constructs that belittle compassion.)

"Yeah! I mean, yeah. What else are we gonna do? Except still kick some absolute shit in games, I guess."

She's absolutely giddy. That's the way this goes: Everything that could possibly be a problem with this won't even come up until later. Step One: I have no fucking clue how to do any of this, coming soon to an heiress near you.

Resting her face against the side of Gentaro's neck, Roxane smirks. "You have some ulterior motives giving me the teal degree about my attachments earlier?"

"And now we can do that and call it a date, which is, like, the best of every world, right?" Gentaro thinks as much, and--after a moment where he forgets about her horns and nearly stabs himself in the face--he turns his head to smile into her hair.

"I just wanted to make sure," he answers, pulling away enough to rest his chin on the crest of her hornbed and continue talking. "I mean, maybe I'm biased but it seems pretty clear somebody'd be putting the moves on the coolest troll of all time." His arm under hers tightens around her.

"Well, you know what they say about my genetic material." Actually, she thinks maybe he doesn't know that. And that might be for the best. "Competition was fierce."

She takes the contact with her horns as implicit permission to touch the pomp, which she does, absently messing with it - as much as she can with something so utterly glued down.

"That sounds pretty much like the best to me. Everclearly, I am down for the visitation." She likes that much about Sburb - has she said that before. Probably. A lot. Tipsily, when she can't remember.

Gentaro makes a face at 'genetic material'. "You're way more important than that stuff," he grumbles, "you're you. So of course the competition was fierce!"

He accepts the hand on pompadour easily; it's not like she's trying to flatten it out, and, really, he's about to comb hers into one, so they'll still have enough sheer hair height to make this an acceptable Kisaragi-style rendezvous.

"And so am I, you know, I can kick grandpa out so we can hold hands without the old man telling war stories, and I'll turn on the A/C if it's too hot for you," he offers, "and you can try out all of his sake with him later. I'll even cook for you!" Nothing made of troll babies, though, but he'd mentioned that to her at some point, so she probably knew that much.

"I like being able to see you whenever, too," he says, fluffing at the hair on the back of her head.

"Yeah, yeah yeah! You totally should do that." Manners. "Err, could do that! I tried to recreate that manjuu stuff for tonight but it didn't go so well. Actually, it was kinda like an explosion of fire ... and grain pulp. Pchoo."

It seems like a lot of things to put into one plan, but that doesn't bother her in the slightest.

Roxane's knowledge of matespritship is mostly confined to media representations (really, Mass Effect did interspecies dating too, right?). Cooking and games and hand holding and sake all together all sound so pleasant, so the sheer amount of things to do never really makes an impression on her. All that matters is that they are fun things and they sound good - and they do sound really good and regular and normal. "Maybe after we can jam on a pile of my scarves or whatever. I'll bring them," she sighs, scooting halfway into his lap while he messes with her hair.

"Wow, uh, congrats?" he offers, trying to think of how manjuu would explode. "I've never heard of anybody doing that, you're like a prodigy of kitchen explosions! How awesome!"

Gentaro's priorities are, as always, probably a little off, but he's distracted from talking about her cooking experiments by the sudden and very excellent presence of Roxane in his lap. "Well hi," he greets, as he carefully continues combing her hair forward. "We can jam on whatever, whenever you want, Rox," he informs her, "I mean, we've got time, right?" He has to untangle some hair that was curled around a horn, and he carefully fingercombs it out before it joins the rest of the messy-looking pompadour beginning to take shape on her forehead. "Damn, you should do this all the time," he muses.

"I didn't follow the recipe very well."

Food preparation and science probably should have been kept out of the same space. It wasn't as if there wasn't enough room in her hive to do both. Food experiments are way more fun though.

"No way," she laughs, looking up like she can see the pile of hair building on the top of her head. "You think I have the patience to put this kind of ef-port in every night?"

There's nothing wrong with sitting - in fact, she rather likes it. So it's hard to explain how antsy she gets so easily, even with things she likes. While he's working on the wannabe pomp, she reaches for his controller.

"Should I get your guy some antipersonnel gear?"

In Gentaro's opinion, food science was just cooking! Explosions were just a spice of the adventure known as meal preparation! Somehow, Gentaro's actual cooking mishaps were actually fairly few in number--probably out of luck and lack of opportunity more than anything else.

He's finishing off her sweet pompadour when she takes his controller, and he smooths the top with a practiced eye before he answers. "Go ahead," he says, "I mean, can't hurt, can it?"

He's already got one eye on her controller, though.

literally impossible for me to not read 'eye on her controller' as a euphemism for something

"You gonna show me this artistic masterpiece of yours?" Mirrors are few and far between in her hive, and especially in the above-ground lab she's set up, but maybe he's carrying something along with him. It would suck if she's just cursed him into having to get up.

That's about all the worry she has to spare for that, though; Roxane leans over with the controller slightly, angling to get Player One somewhere that isn't Blown Up In A Tank.

Would it be cheating to make use of the Banshee? No, she thinks not.

This is way more distracting than actually setting him up with a good arsenal and vantage point.

"Sure would be a shame if you flew into a tree, I guess."

dpgjdfiskgm not this time. yet.

"Hell yeah I am," he answers, after plucking up her controller and stuffing it behind his head so she can't get to it. Then there's some reaching around in his Sylladex before he produces a compact with obnoxious flame print and "friendship" emblazoned on the outside. "Here you go, Rox," he says, and flicks it open for her to examine her seriously sweet hairdo.

"Don't drive me into a tree," he says, when he realizes what she's doing. "I don't need my ratio goin' down, y'know!"

look you're the one who says all the time that he touches the butt

"I'm insulted," she lilts, stalling the banshee long enough to get a look. "Don't you think I'm an expert at flying now after enough time with the rocket-hoover?" It's not like they're playing a real-virtual-reality game that requires a disproportionate amount of flying just to get across the world, or anything.

Yeah, check it out: She can even fire reflexively while looking into the mirror.

Roxane hoots with laughter. Her natural response is to run her hands through it. Too bad they're attached to the controller - and Gentaro's player character.

"No way," she says, one hand still desperately trying to keep the vehicle afloat while she runs the fingers of the other through the new hairstyle. "Check out this tapped-out shit. I thought it'd be bigger since I have so much hair."

and he's going to :I

"Insulted my ass," he answers, and reaches the hand not occupied with the mirror to reach for the controller. It's half-hearted. "Look," he says, "you're totally gonna go right into that wall!"

He laughs at her estimation. "Yeah, sure, with half an hour and a whole can of hairspray," he says, "I mean, it does pretty good at stickin' up, figure it's that troll hair thing, but man it'd probably be bigger than your horns if I took a while on it...!"

He's half jealous, half blissful at the concept. Either way he stops reaching for the controller and settles his hand at her hip. He desperately wants to kiss her again, pausing the game be damned. So he shuts the mirror between his fingers and his palms and leans to get a look at her face. "You gonna stop admirin' yourself long enough t'say thanks?" he teases.

it's not like i'm PRESSURING him to touch the butt just i have observed in the past that he has touched the butt

She mutters a little around his grabbing ("You're gonna crash your own damn guy," "This is why we can't have nice things"), fidgeting and kicking a little irritably. Isn't she supposed to be checking out her reborn hairstyle? Eventually, she hits pause after all. Roxane doesn't often know her limits, but when she does it's over inconsequential shit. Level-headed only when it really doesn't count, that's her.

"I could break down the biology of that or whatev, if you wanted, but..." Well, that would be a little boring, probably.

Roxane leans very close, taking her hand off of her hair to place it over his and push the mirror away.

"Man, you're full of it. Thanks for makin' me look like a delinquent."

how could he resist the butt...

Gentaro makes a triumphant noise when she pauses, though the concept of her admiring herself and being good enough at Halo to keep playing was kind of awesome. He plucks the controller from her fingers while she's distracted talking about biology. "No, thanks, we're good," he says, eyes already crossing.

He sucks in a breath when she gets close, and then he surges forward to kiss her again in annoyance. "You're welcome," he says, after a quick peck, "if you're gonna date a delinquent, you gotta try lookin' like one!"

Roxane scrunches her face up when he kisses her, sliding back and away until they're in a position resembling what they started in.

"Some matesprit you're starting out to be, what with changing me into a renegade and all. Betta not let that rebellion get squashed."

Where the fuck is her controller. "Yo, Gentaro...?" she mutters, holding her hands up as she looks to both sides.

See? What was she saying? Bad flushmance. The very worst.

Gentaro is hardly 'observant' in most sense of the word, but even he knows when something's off. "I'm not gonna let anything get squashed," he answers, "unless it's you, at Halo."

He drops the smack-talk for a moment. "What?" he asks, and catches on. He holds her controller up in his hand, shaking it back and forth. "Lookin' for this?"

Yeah, there it is. She draws up excitedly the way a cat does when it sees a string, but resists the natural urge to lunge and him and take it by force. There's a way better way to get it back.

"Just happened to find my controller sitting somewhere beneath your gluteous padding, huh? My hero."

She holds out her hand expectantly, not saying anything else.

dear shay your christmas present this year is the gift of non-canon shipping

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merry christmas gentaro ur getting a kiss from cersei instead

L O L SHE WOULD STAB HIM TO DEATH

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this hot mess of a girl i stg

no she's too cute

it's too much. it's all too much

everything is happening too much

i'm basking in all of the gentaroxy in my life right now maybe it happens NOT ENOUGH

WELL HERE HAVE SOME MORE i hope it cheers you up a little <3

it does make me feel pretty darn great i have to say /gathers them up

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i'm gonna tag here before i throw myself off a cliff

i wanted to tag this days ago but funerals

IN TURN i didn't get to tag this on valentine's day like i wanted to 8( huff huff

WOOSH TIME FOR A TAG

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im tagging this instead I DO WHAT I WANT