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XOXO ❅ VALENTINE'S EVENT
One major problem with being the group that's responsible for solving all kinds of problems in the myth world is other myths can kind of be dicks about it. That's why, on Valentine's Day, Cupid shows up, quickly offloads his kid (the toddler Baby Cupid), and runs off to take care of spreading love on his holiday, with barely a how'd you do. He doesn't even say thank you.
To be fair, you can't fault him too much for only trusting the Guardians to babysit his kid in these dangerous and uncertain times, especially when children at risk against the fearlings.
Still, that means there's a giggling toddler, about 2-years-old in appearance, but maybe with the mental age of a 4 or 5 (he is definitely old enough to understand he's being naughty and deserving of a time out) flitting around the Pole causing all kinds of Valentine's related problems. Fortunately, the toddler has learned that he's not quite old enough to know the right times to help people fall in love (Adult Cupid just helps things along when they're already falling, or when they need help falling back in love, of course).
Instead, Baby C is doing what his father taught him to do and causing all kinds of tricks to try to get people to admit feelings that already exist or manufacturing ways for them to become closer to each other.
HONESTY ARROWS ♥ Baby Cupid isn't shooting magic arrows that cause anyone to develop feelings for each other but he sure is trying to make sure people talk about whatever feelings they have. Anyone hit will be compelled to blurt out various truths about themselves, their personal history, and their feelings to whoever is around them and will have difficulty stopping or drawing themselves away. In fact, if someone walks away they'll feel compelled to find someone else to confess to. The effect wears off anywhere between 5 minutes to a half hour.
TATTLETALE ROSES ♥ Vines of roses are now growing all over the Workshop. For those who are in love, they take the form of the face of the person they're in love with. The more they try to hide it or deny it from someone they're talking to, the more of them bloom with the person's face.
THORNY VINES OF CLOSENESS ♥ The rose vines have their own annoying purpose: bonding! For people that clearly need to become friends, fall in love, or fall deeper in love, thorny vines will wrap around both people, forcing them into a little cage together. The thorns fortunately won't poke them - they seem to be maneuvered in a way to just make sure there are no gaps to escape through. The vines are magically reinforced and can't be opened with any physical or magical means. After that, one of two things will happen:
1) A card will fall from the ceiling of the cage saying: Tell each other how you really feel about each other!!! This will happen if the cage thinks they need to affirm the status of their relationship, whether they need to admit they're in love, admit they've been bitten by the friend bug if they're reluctant to, or really need to talk about how much they mean to each other as friends. Only then will they be let out of the feelings shame corner.
2) If the two don't know each other, or both people could afford to get to know each other better multiple cards will drop from the ceiling with icebreaker questions, as if they're a bunch of new hires at an orientation.
How many will they have to answer before they're released? Who knows! But they have to answer them honestly or the cage won't open.
CANDY LONELY HEARTS ♥ People who are on the lonelier side and in need of support might find a candy heart on a random surface. The messages on them are on the platonic side (Like "You rock!" or "Shine on!") They'll feel compelled to eat them (even if they're on the floor). When they do, a glowing red thread will appear and tie itself around their finger. Briefly, in the air, the glowing string will form into letters that tell the person what they need to do to be release, whether it's telling someone they're lonely, asking for some kind of support, or admitting a vulnerability.
Then it'll whip out and grab someone else nearby, wrapping around their finger as well. Sometimes, two people might eat a candy at the same time and each have a string appear and they'll tie in the middle.
The strings are unbreakable, and they won't be set free until whoever ate a candy talks about their loneliness or vulnerable feelings - regardless of whether or not the other person is an eager listener.
❅ Starters: You can make up your own wildcard effects, feel free! If you do, please consider posting it to the Wildcard comment below so others might be able to pick up the same effect as well if they like them.
❅ Multiple effects: Feel free to have characters slammed by as many of Baby C's traps in the same thread as you want. No reason someone can't have the worst luck and trip three Cupid traps at once or several of them in a row.
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Dan angles an eyebrow up at the second part, but if Bunny's saying not now, later Dan just has to respect that. So, if they aren't going to rake each others' hearts over coals in the moment, that means they can just enjoy each others' company.
"You might could at least kiss me while I'm getting out of these binds."
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That's a very, very lose translation of the situation he's actually headed out to take part in, but it's probably going to make Dan mad in a funny way.
"You can make me five minutes later," he adds, sprawling over Dan's lap, just out of kissing range. "What's a Kardashian anyway?"
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"Ain't she the president? I sure see her in the news often enough. Or maybe she's the queen here? Like the royals back in Britain?"
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He makes an amused little growl as Bunny ducks back out of kissing range. "You going to use our whole five minutes teasing me?"
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"Tell him not to put himself out on my account. You sure you won't need my gift of gab?"
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Unlikely to comfort Dan much. Now's a good time to change the subject.
"Do you want everyone knowing you use sex as a distraction from having to deal with your feelings, or are you going to get out of those strings in time?" he asks, reading the words over Dan's head.
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"Shit, is that what that says?" He slips enough of the tie to lean forward quickly and plant a kiss on Bunny's forehead. "Well, I reckon that's hardly a secret. Not sure I want to explain the birds and the bees to the elves, though."
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He manages to wriggle out enough to have mobility, but not to escape the hogtie, and once he does, he uses it to lurch at Bunny and pull him into a cuddle.
"Whoops, lost my balance there," he says, planting a kiss on Bunny's neck.
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He nuzzles the tip of his nose into that sensitive spot on Bunny's neck that he's become so skilled at exploiting. "I'm trying to make you fifteen minutes late."
***
It's another two weeks before they get to see each other for any quality time, and as ships in the night between missions that take Bunny to Kilimanjaro and Antarctica and Dan to Haiti and Bolivia they mostly just get some quick kisses in while swapping out their gear. Dan doesn't even get the chance to do the ritual of combing out all the parts on Bunny's fur that are a little hard to reach, which is the best way for both of them to decompress after a mission.
But then they get sent on a mission together, a milk run to rural Louisiana to trap a gator that got its snout into some dangerous magic and started spitting fire all over a trailer park, and they do a brilliant job. It's enough that Dan's able to keep that he's fairly sure Bunny wants to talk to him about something from ruining his good mood. He opens the door to their room here at the Pole and pulls Bunny in with him, closing it behind them before he goes for his also-ritual post-mission shot from the makeshift mini-bar and then flopping onto the bed, snuggling up with a pillow and the comb for Bunny's fur and making come-hither eyes.
"We done good today. Saved a lot of folks. Saved their homes, even."
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There they go, making such a good team in spite of the things that interfere with their teamwork; the things Bunny regrets he has to bring up, now that they have a moment to bring it. His voice is already rueful, even as he praises their combined competence.
"Gotta talk to you about something the Valentine's day strings brought up a few weeks ago," he warns, as he hops up alongside Dan to envelope him in snuggles.
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Dan doesn’t sound upset or defensive. He pulls Bunny into his arms for a nice cuddle, working his fingers into and out of the longest parts of Bunny’s luxurious fur, looking for cinders and burrs from the mission, because touch is one of the many ways he loves to reaffirm his and Bunny’s bond.
He gets the comb out and starts on Bunny’s ruff. He has different ways he grooms Bunny, depending on the context, but it’s never workmanlike. There’s always an artfulness, a tenderness, to the way he expresses his love for Bunny this way, whether he’s trying to use the grooming as foreplay or as the equivalent of a massage or as a distraction from something bothering Bunny. Tonight, it’s intimate, sweet, like each gentle tug is a kiss.
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He lets himself and Dan have a good chunk of time to snuggle, making up for lost time over the last handful of weeks as he gets his fill of touch. "You haven't been telling me everything about your health," he eventually says, to get it out in the open.
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For a moment, that's all Dan says as he tries to figure out how to approach this subject. It's not that he wants to be misleading. It's not even reluctance to talk about these sorts of things. It's that he truly doesn't believe Bunny will understand where he's coming from, won't realize how difficult this is for Dan, won't see the sacrifice Dan's made for Bunny as a gift.
Because it is both a sacrifice and a gift, Dan deciding not to affirmatively hasten his own death. For most of his life he's been able to ride out the worst, darkest times with the knowledge that he probably won't live long enough to deal with problems down the line; he's been able to believe that pain is temporary because life is temporary and can be shortened. He never tells Bunny he thinks of death as like an escape hatch, its own safety measure, not a threat but the answer to one.
He gave that up to be a good partner to Bunny. He dedicated himself to sticking around, to dealing with the consequences of his years of bad decisions, to subjecting himself to the ravages of time while married to someone who will never age a day. That shouldn't feel like a sacrifice, but it does, and he knows it'll hurt to acknowledge the reality that it only feels like a sacrifice and the greatest gift he could give someone to him.
"I ain't been hiding nothing terrible. I ain't dying. Far as I know I ain't got cancer or any missing limbs or nothing." He starts to work at some fur that got burned at the base of Bunny's ear, teasing out singe. "I'm just turning forty. That's all."
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"I don't like bitching to you about every headache and upset stomach and tweaked back. I don't. I hate the idea of that being just something we talk about all the time, every ache and pain I got." It's not that he's worried Bunny would pity him; he doesn't care about pity. But he doesn't want to make demands on Bunny to console and support him more than Bunny already gives him unbidden, willingly, unreservedly, over the things Dan does feel comfortable asking for help over. "Besides, whatever's not because I'm almost forty is because I drink and smoke, and those facts ain't changing, so there ain't no point is me mentioning it."
He says that like the fact that he smokes and drinks is akin to the law of gravity or the fact that water is wet. It's unchangeable, almost eternal, like a fixture of nature.
"I don't like getting older." He hates it. "And it can't be changed, so I don't want to waste the time we got together complaining about it."
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He's well aware Dan's always tense, that his shoulders are tight and his back needs hard force to work out even some of the pain he carries around, that he starts his morning with a hacking cough and still exhausted.
He hears the don't challenge it in Dan's mention of his addictions and knows too well by now that he'll just bounce off that wall if he barrels directly at it.
"Are your hangovers getting worse or something?"
That's maybe indirect enough that Dan won't shut down immediately.
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"No. I don't reckon so. I don't know if I even really get hangovers anymore." He wakes up feeling exhausted and stiff and with a headache that eases up but never goes away as the day goes by and he clears out his lungs of all the sediment from lying down; for the last year or so, he's been timing smoking a cigarette first thing in the morning so he doesn't nearly puke up his first swig of coffee. "I mean, I don't feel like I ain't hungover neither."
He isn't really in touch with the information his body sends him. That line of communication is fuzzy and distorted by substances, by stress, by the nagging sensation that he doesn't have ownership of it, by the idea that he's fighting against his body instead of partnering with it to stay Bunny's husband in the long haul.
"I don't feel great most of the time. All the time, probably. I don't bring it up because I don't reckon either of us benefit from that." He doesn't expect this conversation to make either of them feel better. He isn't sure why they're having it, except that shutting it down would just turn this into an argument.
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"Well I wish that weren't the case," he murmurs, finally, letting Dan paint all the wish you'd get sober into his words that Dan is willing to consider. "How bad would you have to feel, before you let me in on it? How bad before I know I've got to get you to a doctor?"
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"I don't need a doctor, honey. I promise. I just feel worn down and I don't want to get lectured by one." He sighs and goes back to brushing cinders from Bunny's ruff, then tries to lighten the mood, knowing he hasn't answered Bunny's question. "You'll see me see one eventually anyway, since you promised to love me even when I'm decrepit and wrinkly."
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