get in the gonculator, joey!

When he was much younger, smiling was difficult. He'd never really been taught to. He'd never had anyone around who smiled much at all, let alone as a consequence of his presence.

So he didn't do it much. It wasn't worth the effort, really. Does it matter if it takes more muscles to frown than to smile if you're so highly trained at the former over the latter?

For all his frailty, he kept the muscles on his face very active, staving down all possible flickers of hope and sadness alike. He was a little statue, moved from place to place wherever it'd be least offensive among the décor - if he deigned to turn his hands up like a little waiter, maybe he'd even be useful. But that wasn't often.

It's not often that one thinks to ask an eight-year-old boy to chop the cabbage for supper, indentured servant or not. He'd only learned because very often the keepers of the house were too drunk and drunkenly contentious to deal with sustenance themselves.

Of all the things he didn't want to have happen, ugly strangers burying him in a ditch was probably at the top of the list. He found, soon enough, that he liked doing things on his own terms.

No. He very much did not like to be cajoled.

But Milton was a cajoler, through and through. Maybe he'd gotten it from Addam, or maybe he hadn't. Maybe he'd had a much more outward roundabout of change than Mikhail ever had, or ever planned to.

Maybe he was just. a little bit. too much.

Intellectually, he knew that the other boy didn't find smiling any easier than he did. Instead of the slow grind of destitution, he'd had his entire family ripped away from him by a natural disaster. That wasn't something you learned to cope with, really. It was more just something that swallowed you alive. Or didn't. But it did so all the same.

One speaks of swallowing: mouths and teeth. So he got very much used to seeing the pearly white fangs flash out from beneath lightly tanned skin pocked with freckles and ruddiness. So he listened more carefully every day to the up-and-down cadence of a musically accented voice, much more interesting than whatever it was he brought with him from places where conversation was always kept low.

You know how it goes. Just as the canlid was starting to be prisen open, communication becoming two-sided, communion being reached instead of just unarbitrated belief, one died and the other was left even more invisibly scarred than he ever had been.

Because the other boy hadn't been his family. He'd only been...something like a friend, and maybe something a little more than that. And nobody accounts for that when it's time to move on to the next house of worship in empty, broken dreams.

The Tantalese prince smiles a lot too. Not too much, but just enough to be grating. It's...unsettling, when cockiness is so obviously put on like that, and yet so obviously not.

Is he playing at being wise, or playing at being carefree? It's hard to tell, day to day. This kind of undercurrent isn't really one that melds with the bombastic artefact of electricity. When he least expects it, dark is bright, and vice versa.

Of course they're just the same. They always say you end up marrying people who look like you - likemindedness is the easiest step right around that, of course. But this still isn't what he'd meant when he'd pledged to marry his Driver, whenever the day of actually having one came.

Which isn't how it's supposed to be, when you're a Blade. Not at all. And he isn't one, and he wasn't one, and he doesn't care to be, it's just an easy enough disguise, it's all disguises and hiding and lying and veneers upon the visages...

But the prince has half a Core planted on his pec and he still couldn't be any more human. Whatever's unreal about him isn't stored in his prefrontal cortex, nor anything being lightning-bolt-jolted through his heart.

It really is all in the teeth, still. His smile is only beguiling when he wants it to be, and not even always then. Most times it just looks dumb, covered eye winking and all.

He knows he looks pretty dumb himself when he smiles, of course. He knows he looks like a goddamn idiot.

Does he admire the other man for what he did, standing up for his principles and running out on a future plan that he'd been born and raised into but really wasn't all that sure he liked?

Does he feel like he messed up, letting himself care about something when staying afloat had always meant scratching sigils into his skin and then rubbing mud into the wounds for bad measure?

Maybe he does. Maybe he doesn't. Maybe it's a much more inward roundabout of change than he'd ever thought possible.

What a sick experiment. Schoolyard scientists' always are.

So when Zeke throws an arm around him, the other reached behind his back before pointing up to the stars, to ask why he's always grinning like that and where he learned it from, such a handsome chap as he is, Mik just has to gulp down a pointy piece of promise and say that he doesn't know.

That it's just always come naturally, for as long as he's cared to remember.