That friend who is too woke

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Text:

“Reyna, you won’t believe the day I’ve had,” Piper greeted her girlfriend before she even had the chance to step through the door. “I haven’t been this productive in weeks. I finally went over my Spanish vocab with Leo and then I did a bunch of laundry and I spent the whole evening finally writing that essay I was putting off. It’s a miracle!” she announced, feeling thoroughly accomplished and proud of herself.

“Well done. But also: did you have dinner?” Reyna asked gently, and Piper froze.

“What time is it?” she tried innocently, hoping that maybe she could get away with pretending she’d been about to head down to the cafeteria. Which, in her defense, had genuinely been her plan at some point. It was just that, somewhere along the way, she’d sort of gone into hyperfocus tunnel vision and forgotten that food was a thing that existed.

“Almost 10 pm.”

Right. So the cafeteria was definitely closed. Whoops.

This was… less surprising than she would have liked to admit. Really, she was lucky Leo had left when he did and flipped the light switch on the way out. If he hadn’t, there would have been a real chance of her girlfriend finding her hunched over her laptop in near-complete darkness while she’d barely begun to wonder why she was having to squint so much all of a sudden.

Piper deflated. “Damn it. I swear it was still 5, like, fifteen minutes ago.”

“I understand the feeling, but I’m pretty sure it doesn’t work like that mathematically,” her girlfriend said lightly. 

“Dyscalculia, remember? Don’t ask me to do maths. Especially not at 10 pm,” Piper shot back, reassuring herself twice that the essay she’d neglected her basic needs over was saved properly before finally closing her laptop. She’d been ripped out of her little focus bubble now, and her body decided to immediately file a bunch of complaints about all the things it had paid absolutely zero attention to. Like the fact that her posture was shit because she focused best leaning forward and with one knee pulled up to her chest. Or the fact that she was not only hungry but also mildly dizzy. Had she had anything to drink since she’d gotten back from lunch? “I guess I should go find something to eat,” she sighed, feeling less than enthusiastic about the idea of leaving their nice, cozy room to spend a minimum of one hour failing miserably at cooking in the communal kitchen, only to inevitably give up and just eat instant noodles for the fourth day in a row. 

“That pizzeria you like should still be open. I could IM them and we can go pick it up together, if you want,” Reyna offered, reaching out to squeeze Piper’s shoulder. “I know hearing this won’t thrill you, but your back will thank you for the exercise in the morning.”

“Ugh. You’re the worst,” Piper groaned, giving her girlfriend a dirty look even though pizza theoretically sounded great. Her stomach grumbled at the thought of neither burnt vegetables nor instant noodles. “I don’t wanna go outside. It’s nice and warm in here,” she complained nonetheless.

“The sky is really clear tonight. It would make for a perfectly romantic stroll under the night sky.”

Piper caved. Damn her girlfriend for knowing her so well. 

“Fine.” She reluctantly extricated herself from her chair. “The things I do for pizza.”

She took the hand up her girlfriend was offering her and blushed furiously when Reyna pulled it up to her lips and pressed them gently to her knuckles. “For what it’s worth: I’m proud of you for tackling so many of the things you were dreading today. I wish you hadn’t forgotten dinner over it, but it happens, and it’s not an insurmountable issue. Besides, I’m not really one to talk here.”

The problem with Reyna was that it was so perfectly easy to be hopelessly in love with her that Piper couldn’t help but do completely ridiculous things for her—like go on midnight pizza errands or actually sit down and do her coursework so she was free to hang out with her in the evenings.

While Reyna called the pizza place, Piper found the water bottle she’d put on her desk next to her laptop several hours ago and hadn’t taken a single sip from all day. Now that her body deigned to remember that drinking water was a thing that existed, she emptied it greedily. Once her mouth felt a little less like she’d been walking through the desert for three days, she put the bottle down and slipped into her girlfriend’s purple NRU sweater—the one she herself had refused to buy because the concept of university merchandise was stupid and selling sweaters to freshmen when summer was still in full swing had seemed even sillier. The logo was slightly faded now, but the fabric was still pleasantly fluffy and the sweater was slightly too long, cutting off halfway down Piper’s thigh rather than at her waist like it was intended to be.

Reyna raised an eyebrow at her, then apparently decided to retaliate, slipping into the denim jacket Piper had abandoned on her desk chair. Reyna was taller than her, but a combination of their height being at least vaguely comparable and Piper’s penchant for oversized clothes meant that their clothes theft was a lot more mutual than Jason and Leo ever could have dreamed of. Piper was actually more than a little proud of the fact that Reyna did this. It wasn’t something Reyna would have ever dreamed of doing back when they’d met. She also looked so unfairly good in that jacket that Piper briefly considered ditching their pizza plans in favor of a makeout session, but between her own growling stomach and Reyna’s single-minded determination not to let her starve to death, she figured that would tragically have to wait.

She was slightly placated by the fact that her girlfriend's fingers remained intertwined with hers and the night sky being exactly as clear and beautiful as promised. 

She wondered if her dad was looking at it, too, all the way in Oklahoma. There was something comforting about that thought—about the fact that, despite the distance, they still shared the same night sky. That they still looked at the same constellations he’d taught her so many years ago. 

Despite Piper’s initial protests, she was glad she’d agreed to this little trip. The air was so much fresher here than it ever could have been in a human city filled with cars. Reyna had been right, it did feel nice to get to stretch her legs a little bit after how long she’d been hunched over in her chair.

She and Reyna walked hand in hand for several minutes, enjoying the fresh, cold air in amicable silence.

It was one of the things Piper liked about their relationship—the way neither of them felt the need to fill every silence between them. They didn’t always need words to fit together just right. Sometimes, just existing in each other’s general vicinity was enough.

“You look like you have something on your mind,” Reyna finally said. It was an offer to share her thoughts, but without pressure behind it. If Piper had wanted, they could have lapsed right back into silence, with nothing changed between them.

But it was late and Piper was feeling both brave and slightly reckless, so she said, “just thinking about my dad again. You know how I’m planning to visit him next weekend?” Reyna nodded. “I was wondering if you’d like to come along.”

“I wouldn’t want to intrude,” Reyna said quietly. 

“You wouldn’t be intruding. I think he’d like to get to know you a little better, actually. I talk about you an embarrassing amount.” Piper laughed nervously and tried to ignore how sweaty her hands suddenly felt. “But also, no pressure. I know that’s kind of a huge deal and maybe I shouldn’t have dumped that on you out of nowhere, I just-”

“Piper,” Reyna broke in, voice infinitely gentle. She looked at Piper, then. Really looked at her, the way so few people ever did. She knew the real Piper, with all of her questionable cooking skills and bad habits and worse sense of humor, and she loved her with a steadfastness that still made Piper’s head spin. “It’s not that I don’t want to. I just know that you don’t get to spend nearly as much time with your father as you wish you did. I wouldn’t want to cut into that time.”

Piper gently bumped her shoulder into Reyna’s. “Maybe consider that you’re both important to me and that’s why I’d like you to get to know each other,” she pointed out, shaking her head in amusement. Of course it hadn’t been a rejection on Reyna’s part. Of course she was just being thoughtful as well as a tiny bit dense. “And dad may still refuse to go surfing with me, but he suggested we could go camping for a week once I’m on break, the way we used to when I was little. I’ll have plenty of one-on-one time with him, then. In the meantime, I’d like to properlyintroduce him to my girlfriend, without quests or doomsday prophecies or monsters interfering.”

“You should know better than to tempt the Fates like that,” Reyna said, shaking her head, but she was smiling. “Now we’re definitely getting at least one monster.”

“You’re coming, then?” 

“Of course I am,” Reyna told her, like it was the most obvious thing in the world. Her whole being radiated love. “You asked.”

And, well, at that point, if Piper ignored her grumbling stomach and left their food to cool on the pizzeria counter a bit longer so she could kiss her girlfriend silly in the middle of the street, who could blame her, really?

~~~~

Half an hour later, the two of them were curled up on Reyna’s bed, sharing pizza with the TV running in the background. While Piper had refused to give up the stolen hoodie, Reyna had placed Piper’s denim jacket back on the hanger where it belonged and that Piper also conveniently ignored most of the time. Piper was both fond as well as slightly exasperated at the way that apparently, borrowing her clothes also served to give her girlfriend an excuse to tidy up a little bit.

Not that Piper could entirely blame her. Reyna’s bed was their default cuddle spot specifically because, between the two of them, she was the tidier person by a mile. Piper’s bed, on the other hand, currently hosted several open books, a half-emptied bag of Fonzies that was definitelyLeo’s fault, as well as the laundry Piper had folded and then apparently forgotten to put away because she’d gotten distracted.

It wasn’t that she didn’t try to keep her spaces tidy—she actually tried very hard. It was just that sometimes it felt like she invested four hours into cleaning up, then blinked once and found that everything had suddenly returned to being a mess in new and interesting ways.

Thankfully, Reyna didn’t mind sharing her bed, so long as Piper made sure the mess didn’t expand to her half of the room, too.

It was very obvious which space was Piper’s and which space was Reyna’s, but the shared walls they’d decorated alongside each other tied the room together enough to almost make it seem cohesive. The star-shaped string lights Piper had put over the window during their first week at NRU glittered gently in the dark, illuminating the cork board beneath that was filled almost entirely with pictures of their families and friends. On the window sill sat two orchids—one yellow, one purple—that Reyna lovingly kept alive in a way that was entirely mystical to Piper, who had once managed to kill a cactus by forgetting to water it.

Piper’s chaos and Reyna’s tidiness had learned to coexist, fitting together in a way that felt like home.

Piper wasn’t even pretending to watch the show they’d put on. It was one of the ones Reyna had picked out—it was a competition show about forging historically accurate weaponry and then getting judged in a bunch of different categories, including one where they slashed at different dummies, which was a fun enough concept. But the way Reyna’s eyes gleamed as she watched it and the way she sometimes couldn’t help but talk over the competitors, cutting in with more historical facts than any of the people on their screen knew, explaining which of these weapons she had experience fighting with and what monsters they were most effective against, was infinitely more mesmerizing than any of the things happening onscreen.

She loved this version of Reyna, too—the one that had learned that there was no such thing as being too much of herself with Piper and just let herself go on her rambles about swordsmanship in medieval Europe without even a hint of restraint. When a contestant got something wrong, she shot Piper a look, like, can you believe this guy, then went on a three minute rant about why what he’d said was both factually incorrect and a sign of poor research practices. 

Reyna was an excellent listener, and Piper loved her for that, but gods, she adored getting to listen to her in turn. Adored it when the restrained diplomat Reyna had schooled herself into fell away and revealed the passionate, prideful, pedantic girl underneath that had once dragged her, Jason and Leo all the way back through an exhibit about knights to exasperatedly correct every single fact that Leo had spent the whole afternoon getting wrong on purpose. She was an absolute force to be reckoned with, and getting to be a person she let herself fully unmask around was a joy very few things could match.

Reyna made all the space for Piper that she could ever ask for, but she’d also learned to make space for herself, and gods, Piper was so, so impossibly in love with this girl. More than that: as she let herself sink against her girlfriend, Reyna still rambling about the benefits of different types of ranged weapons, Piper knew that this was what coming home felt like.

———

Notes:

I still struggle quite a bit with mostly plotless fluff, so I did have one kind of important moment in there, but it’s mostly plotless fluff, which I’m counting as a win! Also, Piper’s experience here with “I got so much done today!” *pauses* “…I completely forgot I have human needs, didn’t I” may or may not be based on the author’s personal experience, lmao. I love writing domestic Pipeyna. I need to do that way more, honestly.

Reyna dragging them all through a museum is based on this lovely fic by my @queenjunothegreat!