When you ask if you can tie Karkat up tonight, he’s basically not surprised at all. It’s not an all-the-time-always thing, but it’s pretty standard! So he’s not surprised, no, but he still goes bright red and shrugs with one shoulder and says sure, he guesses he doesn’t have a problem with it (like you can’t totally see just how hard he’s blushing). It’s pretty dang adorable.

He can feel them both everywhere, standing between the two of them like this. He can feel the way the sweat drips down his back, Simon’s breath on his back, the hard surface of the boat under his hands.

Rumor had already made the entire cultivation world aware that Jiang Fengmian had found the orphaned son of Cangse Sanren and Wei Changze, and that he had taken him into his home as his ward, allowing him to become a Jiang sect disciple – treating him almost as one of the family, even. That much was known, so it didn’t come as much of a surprise when Jiang Fengmian proudly introduced him or even more proudly showed him off, praising him to the high heavens. What did come as a surprise was how little he praised his own son standing beside him, despite them being only a few days apart in age. It was as if Jiang Fengmian had simply forgotten that such a creature existed, much less that he had himself contributed to its spawning, and the constant looks of hope – invariably crushed – the child sent him made it clear that the present situation had been going on for some time. Fuck you, Nie Mingjue thought, seeing red, seeing instead Nie Huaisang in his failed saber classes, struggling so desperately to keep up with the rest even though his body wouldn’t allow for it, being told he was useless and a good-for-nothing and fit for nothing but marriage. Fuck you, Jiang Fengmian.

Parenting is hard, but it's especially hard when it's not actually your kid and your sister who raised you died three years ago and you have to deal with your own abandonment issues at the same time as your new kid's abandonment issues and the guy who's raising the kid with you won't stop being a better parent than you. Or: Jiang Cheng has a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week of birthday party planning.

It feels, sometimes, like Jiang Cheng's waiting to have a bad day so he has an excuse. It’s a Tuesday and Jiang Cheng finds himself huddled under the portico in front of Nie Mingjue’s impressive double-doors, wondering what the fuck he’s doing with his life. He’s drenched to the bone, all of his formal clothes sticking to all of his skin, waiting for someone to answer the door before he freezes to death. Or maybe he’ll just freeze to death! Maybe that’s the option at play here. Considering how the rest of his night is going, he doesn’t think it’d actually be all that surprising.

Sometimes Jin Zixuan's life is complicated. When it comes to Jiang Yanli, though, things just seem to make perfect sense. Jin Zixuan loves his wife very much, but it is undeniable that she’s a little evil. Considering how terrible her brothers are, he counts himself lucky that her evil manifests, generally, in the form of playful mischief as opposed to, for example, putting beetles in his sheets. Unlike some Jiang siblings he could name.

It’s like a high when the both of them resonate on that same frequency—two radios spitting static at each other ninety-percent of the time until they find overlap for one, just one, perfectly-played song. The music is brilliant and vibrant when it’s playing. It’s always over faster than Sanji ever wants it to be.