"You're not supposed to fuck anybody except your one true love because sex is a special magical thing. Men and women have different roles in most countries in Auradon but what their roles are are different in different places."

"What are their roles here, and also what is up with the thing where Charlotte talks about being demure and submissive even though she is blatantly the opposite of that." 

"Oh, white women are supposed to be demure and submissive, but if you claim to be following the rules there's a certain amount of leeway for... not. Nobody follows all the rules, you just have to give lip service to them."

"Weird. — speaking of weird literally nobody has been willing to give me a straight answer about the race thing, obviously I'm not dumb enough to ask people here but the person at orientation went off on a tangent about how you shouldn't have blue hair and the internet was spectacularly unhelpful —" 

"Black people in Louisiana used to be slaves. When the English conquered Louisiana, they made the white people set us free, but white people still aren't fond of us."

...he buries his face in Asher's shoulder.

"Thank you." 

"For what?"

"A lot of things, but the thing I meant was telling me." 

"You have my number, you can call with questions."

"So I do." Asher's shoulders are really very excellent. 

Sasha's chest is excellent. What were they talking about?

Couldn't have been anything too important. 

Weeks pass!

Asher leaves. He does not, in fact, leave Sasha any way to contact him.

Classes expect Sasha to do about three hours of homework for each hour of class time. Four of the five teachers care. Fairy Godmother assigns reading at the end of every class but never comments on anything that's in it and doesn't collect the exercises.

Charlotte's friends get used to Sasha and coo over him less. There are people his own age at parties; conversations get silent when he joins and he hears laughter when he leaves. 

Charlotte teaches him to use the trolley. (The black people sit in the back.) She gives him a few hundred dollars whenever he asks for it.

There's so much food in Auradon.

He stops trying to join conversations, hangs out at the outskirts of them when there isn't anything else to do and goes outside to climb trees when he can do that. It's not the same without anyone else there egging him on but he's not picky, it's fine, Auradon is objectively so much better than the Isle, theres color and light and food oh god so much food and — 

— and he is not actually capable of three hours of homework for every one hour of classes and he can see his tutors getting more and more frustrated with him, and Asher didn't leave a way to contact him and he can't talk to Nico or Nat or Legion or even Queenie who never had much to say and Charlotte still won't let him get a word in edgewise or even really listen to what he's saying and he's kind of getting used to sleeping alone but that's still a kind of — at least in Remedial Goodness there are people, people who know the Isle and don't think he's stupid and are having the same problems he is, but they can't talk there not really and it's not — 

He uses the trolley to get to bookstores and libraries and sits as close to the back as they'll let him. He doesn't think anyone will understand the gesture and honestly that's a good thing but it's still important to make one. 

He doesn't miss it. He doesn't, he doesn't, he doesn't, if he misses it they might send him back.

But he wishes his gang were here. 

One afternoon Ralphie leaves the newspaper open to a very interesting advertisement. It says:

New Orleans' newest, finest, and best run bathhouse!

Four floors!

Open 24 hours a day 7 days a week!

Relax at our wood-paneled sauna! Brace yourself with a cold plunge! Pamper yourself with massages and more! Enjoy our fine selection of play equipment!

Priced for all budgets.

It is illustrated with a very muscular naked man.

...Auradonians are so fucking weird. 

Yeah, okay, he'll check out this bathhouse. 

Kaleva has been having a bad day.

Bad month.

Bad more-than-a-year, really, bad time-since-Chen-started-glowing-at-Ben-and-stopped-glowing-at-Kaleva.

He is acutely aware that this is why Chen chose Ben. If Chen had impossibly chosen Kaleva, Ben would be happy for them. He definitely wouldn't daydream about Kaleva dying of a long and painful illness through which Ben was supportive and through his loving self-sacrifice and devotion Chen realizes that actually he loved Ben all along and now he smiles at Ben and never never at Kaleva.

That is because Ben is good. Kaleva is not good. He is bitter and jealous and petty and his perversion doesn't even make the top ten list of reasons Chen doesn't love him.

He spends hours in the library. But it's hard to focus. He keeps getting distracted thinking about how much he hated Ben, and how despicable he is for hating Ben, and how much he wants Chen inside him, and how even if impossibly Chen decided to love him instead Chen would never want any of the sick things Kaleva wants more than anything in the world.

He used to help Ben with economics. But helping Ben involves seeing Ben, knowing how happy he is with what Kaleva can never have. So he stops giving advice and eventually Ben stops asking.

Kaleva sleeps a lot. Sometimes when he's asleep Chen holds him, and he's read the books now, he knows exactly what he wants, and it's warm and intimate and so so good, and when he wakes up he's cold and alone.

He returns to the book about the bathhouses of New Orleans. It's easy to get fucked, if you're a sodomite. And he doesn't want that, he doesn't, he wants Chen, but maybe if he closes his eyes and pretends it'll be the closest he'll ever get outside of dreams.

He books a ticket to New Orleans.

The bathhouse, from the outside, looks... pretty normal, insofar as normal really exists anymore. It's a building. He's spent enough time in New Orleans now that he knows that it isn't, like, an overtly weird building. 

There's no indication of what he's pretty sure, from that advertisement, is going to be inside. But hey, even if it is just a building for taking baths, that's still super weird and he kind of wants to check it out. Probably. (Probably they don't know enough about him here to laugh at him when he leaves. Probably he won't look like an easy target here. Probably.)

Kaleva goes to the bathhouse three days in a row. Tries to talk himself into going inside. Fails.

And then on day four he sees the most beautiful boy in the world and stares.

Sasha has gotten very, very good at knowing when he's being stared at. He turns. 

The most beautiful boy in the world is looking at him. He should probably have some form of emotion about this.

That is.... not "you're the weird villain kid nobody likes" staring. 

"Hey," he says, as casual as he can. 

He should say something. Something witty. Something clever. Something that will impress the most beautiful boy in the world with his intelligence and charm.

Everything he could possibly say is incredibly stupid.

He thunks his head into a wall.

....oh no. He's cute. 

"Want to go in?" he says.