Pumpkin Carving
"Halloween was a month ago, Lora."
They're standing in her and Haze's kitchen, craft projects shoved into a decidedly untidy pile at one end of the island to make room for the assortment of garishly orange supplies - yes, even the tools are festive - plunked down on the other side of the stove. Jin has tried his best to keep slightly apart, each cable on his pristine snow-white (not to mention expensive) sweater a dangerous magnet for potentially staining organic material, but it hasn't worked; Haze has wrapped an insistent arm around his waist and is shoving him gamely back in to the brouhaha.
Lora, none daunted, gaily waves a carving knife - or, no, that's Jin's best chef's knife that he carelessly left out in the open from when he'd begrudgingly agreed to cook last night. Damn it.
"So? Thanksgiving is tomorrow. It's still fall time, and the leaves are all sorts of beautiful colors, and the snow hasn't started falling." As her substantiation dawdles on, Lora leans slightly forward and up onto the balls of her feet, twirling a single index finger through her long ponytail.
"Never too late for a good old-fashioned jack-o-lantern," she concludes triumphantly, finger now free of the wound-up hair and pointed at a jaunty angle towards the ceiling. "Am I right, Haze?"
Haze is all giggles. Unfortunately. "Of course, my lady!" It's a weird pet name, but oddly fitting, and Jin is sure there are worse things his oddly gullible childhood friend could have garnered to be called by her wife. Haze doesn't call her "your grace" or anything similarly stiff, after all. And to Jin, of course, any kind of pet name is weird. People being...emotional. Yeah. That's weird.
But for all Jin bemoans the existence of quite a many of humanity's most beloved holiday traditions, he makes sure to keep enough common knowledge of them to save himself from situations just such as this. Case in point: "What are you going to carve into it? Surely you're not going to make it," ugh, "spooky?" Reluctant jazz hands accompany the final word.
"Hm." Lora cocks her head to the side. "I suppose not. We want people to be welcome here, not scared away." Under her breath, Haze murmurs the reluctant addition that "I don't think many people besides me would be scared of a jack-o-lantern, Lora." But nevertheless.
"Who's people?" Jin deadpans. "The only reason I'm here is because you don't trust me to take care of myself if I move out on my own. Exactly who is going to come to any sort of get-together that you two throw?"
Suddenly, Lora and Haze's expressions are painted into matching pouts. "Us two? What, you don't think we can throw a good party? How about - oh, I know!" Now both faces are lit up all too gleeful, and the two women lock eyes and clasp hands. "Do you know what I'm thinking, Haze?"
Oh, god. Not this again. Whenever Haze and Lora get an idea, they just have to go through this whole rigamarole of making the other guess if they've arrived at the same conclusion. Catching brainwaves, they call it. Privately (which is how he does everything), Jin thinks that perhaps their domes should be just too thick to ever facilitate such telepathic communication, but who knows? Stranger things have happened.
Five more seconds tick by, and Jin begins to pick boredly at his fingernails before being violently shocked out of his disinterested stupor. "What about Malos?!" they shout in frighteningly synchronous tandem.
Oh, yes. Stranger things have happened. It's bad enough that they know he's got this off-and-on, on-and-off relationship going that he's too awkward to actually legitimize, but Jin will not be letting the two catastrophes mingle over punch and incipient mistletoe. No sir.
"Malos," Jin starts with an eyebrow raised and a sigh lowered, "doesn't care about Thanksgiving. He never goes home, because there isn't really anyone to go home to, and he just sits in his apartment eating stale rolls from the grocery store and playing video games."
"What kind?" pipes in Haze. "Role-playing," Jin answers automatically. Because the engineer who hates his co-workers likes having a team, and a job to do. Fair enough.
Lora frowns, more or less dismissive of the genre selection. "That doesn't sound very homey. It sounds rather lonely, really."
"No no," Jin assures her, "I think he likes it. It's something of a tradition."
"And have you ever joined him?" she questions.
"Agh...I think he likes to be alone."
Lora's finger crests the air again. "Aha! So it is lonely! You can't hide from me, Jin. You know I'm too clever for that."
Yeah, right. Clever, schmever. And that's why the two of them think Jin is such a poor sad lonely boy, instead of just a man who happens to be getting free room and board in exchange for occasional meals cooked and appliances repaired, because his landlords are absolute ninnies. Or saps. Or just...just human.
"Okay," he relents. "If I promise you that I'll...carve this pumpkin with you, will you promise that you won't say another thing about Malos?"
Before Lora can respond, Haze gives an insistent shake of her head. "Not good enough, Jin. We'll leave you and Malos alone IF you promise to go visit him tomorrow - or today, even!"
Today. Right. Because it's never too late for a jack-o-lantern and it's never too early to humiliate yourself in front of the most intelligent, attractive, and goddamned stupidly compassionate man you've ever known, all because your not-sisters are pushy.
"Fine." Conceding again. "Now can we get this over with?"
So then, if Halloween was a month ago, why is it that Jin finds himself, somewhere between that Wednesday evening and the following Thursday morning, on Malos's doorstep, thankfully without a round red-haired face poking out from either side or any stringy orange flecks on his sweater, holding a pumpkin carved with painstaking precision into the likeness of a mask he used to wear in high school?
The character, which he'd made up to cope with the death of his mother, was called the Flesh Eater, and it would live forever, helping others every waking moment and never having to fear the loss of loved ones or of the memories he'd share with them. Jin rather thought he'd like to forget the current moment, however.
If he goes home now, he'll have to ditch the pumpkin somewhere on the side of the road, and it's really too big of a chance that Haze will spot it in the coming weeks before the snow, because Jin isn't ready to expend all that much effort driving out into the middle of nowhere to dispose of the damn thing. So. Nothing for it. He rings the doorbell.
The device is recognizably old-fashioned, no camera or wifi attached, but instead of a chime styled to accompany, Jin hears a tinny recording of Malos's own voice echo from some speaker mounted on a wall halfway deep into the apartment, singular among the other miscellaneous sound effects and background music floating through the ground-level not-quite-house. Cute. Jin would try to puzzle out what the shouted word was, but somehow that feels a little too personal and embarrassing for the both of them. A little too...indeed.
No other sounds issue from within. Jin is tempted to call out, and see if Malos snaps to the trigger upon hearing his voice, but eventually springs for another press of the button instead. This time, there's a shuffle of feet, a creak of couch cushions, and the television noise quiets to a whisper. "Coming!" Great. No turning back now.
When Malos opens the door, his eyes go first to Jin, then to the pumpkin, then back to Jin's face again. He seems to work his lips around various choices of words, intent to keep Jin's own focus on his mouth and away from his socks emblazoned with embroidered turkeys, both cooked and wild, before clamping his jaw shut completely and making his mechanical way through waving Jin inside.
"Having a good time?" Jin asks wryly as he spots the various cans of soda and boxes of supermarket baked goods strewn about the sofa in the living room.
Instead of getting offended, Malos laughs - his first real utterance today, discounting the doorbell hook-up. "'Course I am! Isn't this what holidays are for? Eating crappy food that you didn't have to cook yourself and spending all day doing what you want to do, and only what you want to do?"
With that, he sloshes unceremoniously back into the chair and palms the game controller. "You wanna join?"
Jin stows his commentary on Malos's worldly viewpoint in favor of setting down the pumpkin, dusting off his hands, and responding, "I think that's a single-player game."
"Oh. Yeah," says Malos, dumbfounded for the moment. Then, he recovers: "But Alvis came over one time and edited the ROM to allow for a second player. Here, I have a second controller around here somewhere..." Despite his magnanimous invitation, Malos makes no move to look for said controller. So Jin takes a seat, hands clasped together with his elbows on his knees. After a beat, he shucks off his own boots, revealing hand-knitted lavender socks from Haze with double-strength nylon yarn for the toes.
"Nice socks."
"Same to you."
Another beat.
"This sucks." Malos reaches lazily for the TV remote and shuts it off, not bothering with the game console.
"You're not enjoying yourself?" Jin asks, and knows it's rhetorical.
"I mean, I'm glad you came..."
"Would you rather have had Alvis, or your younger sisters?"
The stagnance breaks; Malos gets loud. "Oh, hell no. They'd bring, like, dates, or whatever."
"And I am...?" Jin poses another loaded question, biting his lip to keep from chuckling full-out.
"You're whoever you want to be, I guess."
Sighing, Jin removes the remote, controller, and phone from Malos's place of repose deep in the recliner (why does he have so much furniture? wishful much?). Malos responds by slapping his hand away, then latching on to his wrist and pulling it back in.
"Halloween was a month ago, Malos."