“Lineball, wrestling, mass mixed martial arts, hiking, calisthenics, weight lifting, dog training, networking - I really need to be doing physical or social stuff basically all the time, I’d be super miserable in a regular school - I might be able to do, like, really aggressive abstract painting, or something presentation-y?”

“... well, see, now I’m actually really curious how you’re only as ridiculously bulky as you are, if those are your primary hobbies.”

“I mean, part of it is that muscles get sort of - denser, harder, more constantly tense, instead of being bigger per se, after a certain point, and also I’m 6’8...”

“I did notice that you weren’t just flexing for my benefit, after a little while. I get the sense that there’s an ‘and’?”

“- okay, so, all of that is true, and that could totally explain my build and activity level, given that I’ve eaten from the tree of physicality and take cherries of vigor but haven’t taken any permanent strength-specific enhancements, but I’m also - preemptively sandbagging, kinda? I spent six years when I was younger cultivating a berry that’d keep me from ever being tired, and I spent the last six years working on something to make me stronger. And I’m gonna take it right before the first match of mass mixed martial arts, because I finangled my opening match so it’d be me against this dick who used to bully me and probably gave me my bullying kink -“

“- you have a bullying kink? And didn’t mention it?”

“- it’s weird, right, isn’t it weird. I shouldn’t get off on shoving people into lockers and giving people noogies, I didn’t wanna mention it - I’m kinda less uncomfortable with some of my stuff than I should be and I really wanted you to like me -“

“I love you. We can make a locker that folds up, put it in a corner, and add in miscellaneous features. You mentioned watersports, helplessness, and publicity, earlier, and didn’t mention - bullying - were you leaving anything else out, that you feel comfortable telling me now?”

... oh, right, he’d forgotten that Caden is perfect, he keeps doing that.

”I love you too - uh, when Trevor was doing stuff, earlier, I was - more into the hitting and the breathplay, than I thought I’d be? We - might wanna experiment with those? And, uh, I like... rape scenarios? And gang rape scenarios? I - part of why I freaked out when you said ‘whenever you want’, earlier, is because - I liked the idea of just surprising you with the rest of the lineball team and tying you up and pissing on you and taking turns while you begged us to stop, I liked it too much -“

“... how realistic is that scenario?”

“... maybe not with a whole team? But probably most of one, male vampire-regulation lineball isn’t the sorta sport you play if you’re subby or vanilla and vampires are reeeeeal sex-obsessed.”

“Tell me more?”

“Getting the impression that you also don’t know the rules of regular lineball - so, whole thing is played on a square field, with four lines drawn on it? There are eight players on each team, and there are two players from each team in each section. There are also lines at the two ends; they’re the end zones. One team starts with the ball on their side, you get a point by having someone in an end zone catch it; you can move the ball by kicking it or throwing it or whatever, but you can only pass it to people in other lines, not to people in your line. And you stop people by tackling them? And everyone wears these weird little color-coded shorts, and nothing else? 

- and the main difference between ordinary lineball and vampire-regulation is that, in ordinary lineball, the player that made the catch, and one person of their choice from the opposite team, spend the rest of the game sitting out, and in vampire-regulation they all get to have sex with a volunteer or a prostitute.”

“I think that I know how to render one aspect of our schedules compatible!”

”I kinda thought that you would say that! I love you and I love that idea. Not sure how to do the other stuff, though, I don’t think you wanna do most of it...?”

“- um, to what extent is the thing ‘I need to be around’ and how much of the thing is ‘I need to be involved in the same thing that you’re doing’? I’d ideally want to avoid you dropping any of your classes, I want you to do what makes you happy.”

“It’s - I wouldn’t need you to be actively lifting weights with me, in weightlifting, but I’d need to be able to talk to you, whenever I had a spare moment, and I’d probably talk to you a ton. So visible wouldn’t cut it, but - accessible, would?”

“- could you tell me more about what the day to day of these classes looks like? I mostly didn’t spend time in the related section of the course catalog...”

“Wrestling’s mostly, like, actual wrestling, and sometimes watching other people wrestle? Mass mixed martial arts varies between, like, fencing, actual sword fighting, boxing, and that kinda stuff; both are super big classes. Hiking’s about traveling weird places and hiking, it meets nine hours on Sundays instead of an hour and ten minutes each non-Sunday. Calisthenics involves a lot of running and doing weird stuff on bars and stuff, weight lifting’s where you go into a gym and lift weights, dog training lets you pick out a dog and train it and spend a buncha time with it - all of those are small, it’d probably just be you and me and a professor?”

“Are wrestling and mass mixed martial arts, by any chance, also ’vampire-regulation’?”

“Love you love you love you - they are, but, like, not in the same way? It’s ‘loser gets fucked’ and not ‘this convenient third party gets fucked’.”

“Drat. Um, we can straightforwardly share hiking and dog training, although they wouldnt’ve been my first choices, and I think we can share calisthenics if the professor is willing to count ‘you mostly just carry me around while I read, and also I sometimes do jumping jacks’? We can probably get something functionally similar called ‘kinesthetic learning’, and I can read books about a particular subject and occasionally recite them to you - maybe witchcraft, since I do want to actually learn anything about witchcraft, here?

And then I can probably be relevantly accessible while - painting on the sidelines while you wrestle, doing poetry while you lift weights, doing something else while you do mixed martial arts? Um, I wanted to take gardening and cooking? And to learn how to speak Honey - but those don’t seem readily compatible...”

“I really wanna hug you without holding back, can I do that?”

“Yup!”

Hugs! To a a degree likely to leave Caden with added bruises - if rapidly healing ones - and to prevent him from comfortably breathing! The extent to which he’s also now smothered by Zeke’s chest also probably isn’t helping.

(Zeke, on high alert from earlier discoveries in kink, notices that he has... feelings, about Caden not being able to breathe. He mostly sets them aside for later.)

”Looooooove yooooooou,” he says, dreamily. “You’re smart. And I bet that it’ll be hella easy to get you, like, a personal Honey tutor to sit on the sidelines of the mixed martial arts class, and I’m already fluent in Honey so it’ll totally be class related when I talk to you.”