- and after about a minute of squirmy, excessively-clingy hugging and beaming and dreamy sighs, he loosens up. Not by a ton, but by enough that Caden should be able to talk with only mild muffling.

Caden takes a moment to catch his breath - he doesn’t strictly need to breathe, but he does feel like he ought to.

“You speak Honey?” he eventually inquires - mildly muffled by Zeke’s chest, as had been predicted.

“Yeah? I lived on a pretty diverse witch commune, learned Milk, Honey, Wine, Brandy, and Tea fluently, and then Lassi and Beer with an accent. You just sorta pick things up, you know?”

“... um. Um? It’s pretty uncommon for people to pick up seven languages at all without being pretty devoted or magically assisted - I’m pretty unusually interested in languages, and I have goblin fruit help, and I only speak Tea, Milk, Soju, and just enough Honey to skip to intermediate levels of study?”

... Zeke shrugs, to the extent that this is allowed by his current position of supreme snuggliness.

That seems to be the end of that line of conversation.

”I do still want to take some form of cooking, at some point - maybe not gardening, gardening seems less teamwork centric - and it seems like some types of cooking might be physical enough for us to do them together? But I don’t have to take them this semester, necessarily - do you think that you’d be okay with taking some sort of cooking? It’d make it all 25 credits, in total, but that seems relatively reasonable when those credits are taken up by ‘playing with dogs’ and ‘making pastries’ and ‘having sex with athletes’, instead of, say, calculus? And we both don’t need to sleep, I think, so it’s not like we’ll be pressed for time...”

“You’re, like, completely reworking your original schedule so that I don’t have to drop any classes, because you’re great, I think I can handle a little extra workload? What sorta cooking class do you wanna take - I can handle, like, from-scratch pancakes and dicing things and avoiding fires, but I don’t make stuff often enough to really know how good I am at it?”

“ - um - how quickly do you pour in oil when you’re making mayonaise, why do you have to break off the ends of sugar snap peas, and how many tablespoons are in a cup?”

“- don’t know, don’t know, don’t know.”

“Sorry to spring that on you - a few drops at a time, because otherwise they have an inedible string in them, sixteen - I imagine that I’ll be similarly unlearned in the ways of calisthenics! We can try something general, instead of something specifically oriented towards pastries or haute honey cuisine -

“What’s a dip, how long should you rest between sets, and what’s the difference between a traditional push up and a diamond push up?”

“I love you. I don’t know, I don’t know, and I don’t know! Please do educate me in the ways of people who ever exercise instead of relying on a strawberry they ate when they were six to keep them toned, wise sensei, I feel dreadfully ignorant.”

“I love you and all of your appalling ignorance of physical fitness - and a dip is where you, like, grab onto bars on both sides, and then hold yourself up, and then lower yourself down and bring yourself back up? And you should rest between 45 seconds and five minutes between sets, and a push-up suddenly becomes precious-gem-themed when you do it with your hands together, instead of apart?”

“Huh,” says Caden. Snuggling continues.

”Should we try doing something about that whole thing with - James? Jamie? something starting with a J? - and... Alexander? Um, I think that he was named Alexander? I’ve ever taken a raspberry of recall but I don’t think it was quite good enough to let me remember quite that many names.”

“There were so many names - and I dunno? Maybe? I kinda didn’t walk away from that whole interaction thinking that Jamie was the one in mortal peril. Alexander’s creepy but Jamie has this whole - ‘if you mess with me you’re gonna lose, and it isn’t gonna be pretty’ vibe.”

“- we can offer our support and avoid direct intervention, otherwise, I suppose. Do you know if we share any classes with them, networking aside?”

“No idea - definitely not the ones with, like, two each, maybe the larger ones?”

“Mm - um, on another topic, do you want to the library with me and stop by some office or another so we can handle the course change, on the way?”

“Nope! I definitely do not want to go with you to a place. That is definitely a thing that can happen and I am not just being silly.”

“Oh no! However will I defend myself from the rabid goats I earlier purchased from a bridge salesman without your charming company!”

“The power of friendship? Guacamole. A spoon.”

“Zeke, I can’t access any of those options! You’re my only current friend, I don’t have a food processor, and we don’t have a cutlery drawer. You’re my only hope.”

“Then I’ll come. But you will owe me a debt, paid in... hugs. And ramps, so other people can find those options accessible.”

“Then we shall begin our harrowing quest. I’m sure that there’ll be a dragon, and that we’ll end up cinematically jumping out of a window.”

Zeke kisses him, briefly, because how could he not, and then he withdraws from snuggling and en-pants.