『 R E Q U E S T S , C L O S E D 』AnimeCharacters x Reader

32. Loke x Reader x Gray Fullbuster | Sweet Sundaes and Bitter Squabbles

→ characters : Loke/Leo, Gray Fullbuster | Fairy Tail

→ requested by : SilentSnowFairy

→ 05102017

→ wherein three pairs of exchanged looks and three withdrawn wallets end in more than what you'd bargained for.

xx

There's the puzzled sound that leaves the waiter's lips when he returns to your collection of seats and conversation to announce the bill in a monotonousness that sat on the fine, traced line of professional indifference and poorly-disguised tiredness.

And then there's the three wallets, pulled with deft curls of fingers, at a frightening, unplanned synchronization that it some cruel jest played by the gods, who had an equally frightening availability of time and power, and an unavailability of entertainment that could supply for their immortality.

There's also the finished glasses of sundaes: chocolate, strawberry, and vanilla; the clearness of the glass was decorated with molten ice cream sloshed against the arches of the glass shape with absentminded, but not listless, spins of the backs of spoons.

There's the exchange of glances and the rise of brows under the spill of delicate afternoon, and the waiter expresses his confusion again because all three wallets are slapped onto the table.

xx

"I'm paying for it."

"No way, you can't even pay to keep your clothes on for longer than four minutes!"

"And you can't even pay for your shitty commitment! You go from girl to girl faster than I go from shirt to shirt."

"Okay, boys, I'll pay for it-"

"No way!" It's the first time Gray and Loke have ever agreed on anything without some sort of ingredient of contrive, and you can hear the waiter begin to tap his patience into the flat of the clipboard as he shifts his weight from black polished shoe to black polished shoe.

xx

Loke wins their argument (Though it isn't really winning if his wallet was a couple jewels emptier, was it?) and as the waiter finally takes the payment and the wallets are sheathed once again, Loke's nose is turned up a little higher, a little prouder, as he scoffs the conversation through (while Gray drove his eyes to the dusty pavement as he grumbled his losses to the deaf concrete in his passing.)

The crowd of strangers that once stood at an unshaken consistency had been reduced to a roaming few, with faces too youthful to be dressed in the grim shackles of a leeching occupation, and the rarity of some too obviously trapped in the troubles of their line of work, too desperately searching for some kind of release in some kind of comfort. You'd seen those kinds of people when you allowed your eyes to venture from the diminishing pile of ice cream.

Now, a stranger passing by, hands tucked into pockets, and eyes cast elsewhere, was as elusive as the absence of some kind of bickering between Gray and Loke. You had no pockets to retreat to, and the hands you wanted to hold were too busy fidgeting with the might of a frenzy; morbidly, the sound of Loke and Gray's voices raising in an alternating rhythm had become some welcomed noise that rung your ears, the same way a person fancied the hum of songbirds, or the articulate, passionate tangle of a piano's solemnity.

"You know we should do this again sometime, I had a lot of fun today," you muse, but it snatches the boys' attention nonetheless.

"Yes yes, that sounds wonderful," Loke charms you with his smile, soft, shining like a invaluable treasure sunken to the bottom of the darkest ocean, or something like that.

"But I'm paying next time," Gray says.

"You wish." Another argument rouses from the pits of its slumber, and once the volumes raise and the hands clench in premature punches, you know you've lost the boys yet again. Though you can't help but giggle into the gaps in between your fingers, and your smile stays through the footsteps and the aging afternoon.

xx

The two of them leave you by your door with a handful of promises before they make their exit (Loke much more suavely than Gray, though you suppose that Loke's easy charm comes from afternoons of practice with girls that have swooned and cooed just as easily as you have.)

You're a bit too rattled to register the two pairs of lips too terribly soft against the skin of each side of your cheek to react until after Loke and Gray have detached themselves, surely laughing at the blush that spreads across your face like a lightning strike that births curling flames on dry shrubbery. It's a bit cruel how your cheeks still warm from their kisses even after they've taken their footsteps and their conversation far, far away from you.

You swallow, the keys jingle a little too excessively that it's almost mocking, and you decide to silence them with a heavy shove into the keyhole. Even after the door's shut with a gentle nudge of a toe, and the blush is scrubbed off with a few movements of unconnected fingers, the boys' laughter still resounds too loudly, too surreal in your ears. With a sigh, you accept how badly you want your palms invaded with the coldness of another glass of sundae, and the silence invaded with shared laughter and purposeless bicker.