Who: TJ Jung & Tiger Laredo Where: Suite 6B When: July 24, early morning What: Sneaking back into the suite Warnings:Crude language
Now that TJ had been working at Brewed Awakening for several months he was tasked with opening the shop a few days out of the week. Today was one of them, and while he was getting pretty good at waking up in time, crawling out of bed still came as a struggle. So there he stood in front of the open fridge, blearily squinting inside to see if there was anything worth packing for lunch when the door to their suite opened.
"Evariste?" he called out, but then the figure walked into view and he corrected himself, "Tiger? Dude, what were you doing out so late?"
It wasn’t hard for Tiger Laredo to lie. His brain had already been calculating likely scenarios since the second it had registered that there was someone else in the room. His thoughts moved far quicker than any normal person could comprehend: before TJ had even finished saying his name, Tiger had come up with a plausible scenario that would explain his late-night expedition. Unfortunately for him, what his brain couldn’t account for was the fact that he was a clumsy, organic being and not a flawless, graceful machine. What started out life in his head as an elegant and neat alibi reached his mouth in a very different form.
“Out,” said Tiger warily, his eyes a little too wide and too nervous to be anywhere near convincing. “The...uh, I wasn’t sure if we’d watered the azaleas this afternoon. In the Atrium. So I, uh...went to check.”
Even TJ, optimist as he was, couldn’t possibly have fallen for it.
And he didn't. TJ shut the fridge and leaned against the kitchen counter, grin lopsided just enough that it could almost be considered a smirk. "Alright, so who did you bang on your way back?"
“What?!”
It had to be witchcraft. Tiger had gained himself a reputation in the past, and had definitely set out his stall when he and TJ first met - the flirting had been both frequent and usually sweetly inept, but the last few years had seen an utter reversal of Tiger’s interest. He was known to profess a total distaste for sexual encounters and human warmth in general, preferring the impersonal menace of computers to actual human interaction. Despite all of that, TJ could still work him out in ten seconds flat, and it made Tiger uncomfortable.
“What are you talking about?” he asked, trying to look more confused than he actually was. He wiped nervously, subconsciously, at the corners of his mouth. Just in case. “Why would that be a thing?”
His fidgeting earned a small laugh from TJ. "Come on, Ty, just because you're part computer you're still, you know, you," he said and gestured over Tiger. TJ wasn't sure why he became so adamant about avoiding people over the years, but he had to admit, it made it more fun to poke fun at him whenever the situation presented itself.
Some people would call it heckling. He preferred to think this was all in good fun. "It's not a big deal. It's just, uh, look at you? No one gets that happy over azaleas."
Tiger sighed, too exhausted to keep up even the thin pretense any longer. “Do you know that guy, Stephen? The one who doesn’t get any older?" TJ nodded, so he continued, "We got talking about my powers. How they work, what they can do. Stuff I remember--”
He paused: even if TJ didn’t know it, Tiger had always felt a little awkward talking about that facet of his powers within the guy’s hearing range. Tiger, after all, was forced to remember everything he ever saw or heard: he could voluntarily delete information that was causing him problems or no longer relevant, but otherwise it went in and stayed in. He felt a stab of something like guilt when he thought about that, about the choice he had which was denied to TJ. Instead of dealing with it like a normal person, Tiger turned and started searching through cupboards, away from the expression TJ also turned to hide. He wanted cereal, in that way where he didn’t want cereal at all, but he wanted something to occupy his hands and mouth, and cereal did that great.
“Anyway, I was going through some examples of things I knew from watching it on a video. You know, rewiring sockets, changing a tire, household explosives...giving the perfect blowjob.” At least Tiger had the decency to blush: by the time he finished speaking, he was scarlet. “He told me that wasn’t the kind of thing that you could learn in a video. I offered to prove him wrong.”
This probably wasn't the best point in the conversation to burst into laughter, but to TJ's credit he tended to fill most lapses of dialogue with his laughing anyway. "That's one way to do it," he praised, and stepped aside so Tiger could rummage through the cupboards for their selection of cereals. "I've never thought about using my powers that way, obviously I've been slacking."
Grabbing a pair of bowls of spoons, he slid them over to Tiger and asked, "Mind pouring me some Trix? I'll grab the milk." And he left Tiger's side to do just that. "So, since you're here getting me cereal and not making breakfast for him, I'm guessing it's not anything serious yet."
Tiger shrugged at the first question, and rolled his eyes at the second. “Serious? Teej, I sucked him off like one time. I mean, it was the perfect BJ, but things still don’t work that quickly. No, wait: I mean…” He filled one of the bowls with Trix huffily, and slid it over before filling his own as well. “That makes it sound like I want it to be serious. I don’t. It was just...a thing. A thing that happened.”
It wasn’t just a thing that happened. It was also a gigantic “fuck you” to Evariste, even though nobody even knew that they’d been sleeping together every now and then for the last...however long it’d been. Tiger had made sure to keep it a secret on his side, unwilling to deal with the roommate drama that would’ve been thrown up, but keeping it secret hadn’t made him any less angry when Evariste went through one of his semi-frequent insanity phases.
“There’s not going to be breakfast,” said Tiger flatly. “I’m 21, he’s 75. I know he looks hot and young, but he’s not. Well, he’s hot. But he’s not young, and we won’t have anything in common. I don’t have anything in common with anyone,” he finished, a little sadly.
TJ filled both bowls with milk, and after stashing the gallon back in the fridge he returned to pick up his cereal, sidling up next to Tiger to nudge him with an elbow. "You don't need to have things in common with people to do things with them. Like us having cereal." A pause. "Or you banging probably the oldest guy in the Lock," he remarked, his laugh stifled by the spoonful of Trix in his mouth.
He motioned his head over to the couch, smiling. "Come on, let's sit down."