“Oh, hell yeah, my roommate’s a cutie, score!” says the - man? boy? oddly buff and tall teenager? - within it. “I was worried that I’d get one of those guys who go for that whole ‘warlock’ aesthetic - like, skulls and chains are great, and all, but have you ever heard of this thing called ‘daytime’? And I totes appreciate the fact that you’re not wearing a shirt, I was debating it but then I decided I didn’t want to look too desperate, you know?”

“... um. I’m, um, I’m actually shirtless because I’m in the middle of running away from the vampire that kidnapped me? The one who’s been keeping me captive? And I didn’t really have the time to properly pack?”

“- oh, oh shit,” says whoever-he-is. “Shit, you’re the first circler who went missing a few years back - uh, that was super insensitive, talk about bad first impressions - do you wanna get in the pumpkin? The pumpkin is, like, super secure.”

“I think that I’d very much like to have the faintest idea why I’m being spontaneously picked up by a spider pumpkin in the middle of my third escape attempt, first.”

“Hell, you wouldn’t know that either, I guess - they’re the new transport thingy for Citrouille Academy, got adopted last year, and this is the start of a new semester.”

“- I heard about that being in the works before I was kidnapped, I guess they went forward with it - doesn’t Citrouille mean pumpkin? Did they - they really decided to use spider-pumpkins to bring people to a place called ‘pumpkin academy’? That didn’t strike them as excessive dedication to the theme?”

“I think it was, like, an upper management thing?”

“- anyways - okay, I think I believe you,“ says Caden, stepping into the spider-pumpkin. “Please don’t turn out to be kidnapping me, I really do hate it when people turn out to be kidnapping me… um, I suppose I should introduce myself, then? I’m Caden.”

“Zeke.”

The door autonomously closes, leaving the excessively orange interior lit by a mysteriously omnipresent glow; they feel a faint impression of movement, and Caden sits down on the C-shaped interior bench, on the side opposite of Zeke.

There is a moment of silence.

“So!” says Zeke. “That was, like, a total bummer, but I’m still super excited and you’re still super cute and, you know, yay! And I sorta rescued you from one of the bad vampires - I’m all fangy too, but in, like, a ‘super rigorous about consent’ kinda way - which is awesome! And we’re gonna be roommates and learn about witchcraft together and stuff, and it’ll be great.”

“We are! I’m finding it a substantial improvement over being about to be recaptured!”

“That has to have super sucked, I’d be really upset if I escaped from some asshole’s rape dungeon and then he was all ‘muahaha, I have you again, my pretty’ - he was draining you, right, not just using you to prune petunias and stuff?” 

“... yes, he was.”

“- do you have, like, trauma there, that I should avoid? I can totally never mention it again, if you want. Or I could go and murder him for you, I kinda wanna murder him, you seem great and he seems like he really hurt you.”

“... I don’t particularly want you to kill him. Um, not that I would restrain you from doing it of your own volition? And you don’t have to talk around it, I don’t think, I came out surprisingly untraumatized.”

“Cool. Let’s be friends.”

Gosh, this sure is an enthusiastic person - with a physique that implies he’s been taking cherries of vigor, an inclination towards spontaneously offering to kill rapists, and a smile that looks like he’s trying to singlehandedly compensate for the sun being down with pure radiance -

“I’d be happy to.”

“Great! Man, I’m, like, so high off endorphins right now, I’ve been waiting for this for months, I live in this tiny place you’ve never heard of and now I get to meet people, you know? Like, great people! With magic! I wish I could run around and hug a tree right now, except I can’t because, you know, pumpkin, but it’s still great and I can totally wait out the half hour and then do that on school grounds - school grounds! - the only school I’ve ever been to has, like a straw roof. Although it’s a pretty rockin’ roof! One time I got together with Cody - big guy from back home, you’d love him - and we had to get a cat down from it, the cat was all ‘mrow!’ and Cody was all ‘damn it!’ and -“

He continues on in that vein for a while.

“ - and that was, like, the only time I’ve ever ridden a canoe without capsizing,” he concludes, “I’m really bad at canoes... hey, uh, how far does the ‘not traumatized’ thing go? ‘Cause you’re really cute and shirtless and I’m really restless and you seem kinda into me, and stuff? I can totally do push-ups instead, though.”

Caden does, in fact, seem kind of into him; he’s been rather hanging off of his every word, even. He has spent a really long time without any pleasant company.

”I, um - you’re really pretty but could you - I don’t mind if you skim off the top of my heart and everything but I don’t think I want to be drained again, soon?”

“- oh, hell no, that’d be - that’d be such a dickish thing to do -“

“Okay, um, then we can totally have sex, you’re really pretty and charming and everything -“

Zeke stands up, sits down next to him, and then: kissing occurs.

Other things, involving substantially fewer clothes, also occur.

Caden vocally approves of these unspecified activities! 

 - it reminds him, a little, of the early days, before escape attempt number one, when he’d actually been pretty pleased with being kidnapped, but even back then it hadn’t been quite like this, there’d always been threatening overtones and he had liked the threatening overtones but then they’d turned into actual mass murder - he feels a little tendril of mixed emotion, at remembering the similarity, but it isn’t a particularly strong similarity, anyways, Nicholas had never been this - exuberant -

He wonders, briefly, if he would’ve been willing to spread his legs for a near-stranger, before - it doesn’t even really feel like an unusual request, now - but it doesn’t seem feasible, salvaging the person that he used to be, and he’s pretty sure going from sixteen to eighteen would’ve upped his sex drive, anyways -

But, recollections aside, he has a lovely time.

Zeke is -

- an odd mix of ‘initially gentle’ and ‘enthusiastic enough about this whole process that he promptly instead resembles a jackhammer’ -

- really intensely into the fact that they’re having sex on what is technically school property -

- eventually finished, after about thirty minutes, having come to completion and lapped up the results no less than twice -

- a polite vampire, and accordingly disinclined to do more than skim a courteously minimalistic amount of life force off the top, or do any involuntary bloodsucking, although he does have to bite his own wrist a few times.

”Best roommate,” he enthuses, after he’s commenced aggressively enthusiastic post-coital snuggles and started hugging Caden to his chest as if the aforementioned is an unusually ambulatory stuffed animal. “Best friend? Best friend. You are totally my best friend now, so it is decreed. And we’re gonna have adventures together, and lots of sex, and stuff! Man, college is great, I was totally expecting it to be worse than this, Cody was all ‘you’ll prob’ly have to hire whores, bro’ and I was all ‘nah’ and I was right! I am totally always right and he is always wrong, that is definitely how anything works. Pay no attention to the lack of omniscience behind the curtain.”