shenanigans for everyone

We’re not allowed up to the fourth floor, for any reason – but I don’t blame the landlady for wanting her privacy.

Nobody but the landlady answers the strange willow-patterned telephone on the third floor landing.

We all lock our windows on full moon nights.

No couples are allowed, ever. Only single women and girls.

And sometimes, if you go down the hall to the kitchen late at night, there’s a strange black door that’s never there by daylight.

For some reason, it’s hard to get new lodgers to stay. I don’t know why. It’s a little strange, maybe, but the meals are good, Mrs Hallow the landlady is kind, and the rent is ridiculously cheap. I’ll take the strange black door and the phone that rings even when there’s no wire going to it over rats in the walls and cigarette ash in the food any day. My last boarding house was like that. I like it here.

I’d been living here for nearly two years when I lost my job working at the telephone exchange. It wasn’t my fault – they cut the night shift back, and one of the girls cut was me. Mrs Hallow told me not to worry – as I was an old lodger, she’d let me work for room and board while I looked for another job. She’s so nice, I don’t know why people say she’s creepy. It’s not her fault she’s so tall and thin, and her bones show through her fragile old skin.

I worked hard, wanting her to be glad she’d kept me. One of the jobs she gave me, since I was used to working nights, was packing lunches after supper. For the Night Gentlemen, she told me, but didn’t say more. Every night, I packed twenty lunches in twenty tin pails and filled twenty thermoses with strong coffee. I made sandwiches, and boiled eggs, sliced pickles and cheese, and packed a paper napkin into each pail. I was to have everything done by eleven, Mrs Hallow told me, for the Night Gentlemen came at midnight to collect their meals, and I should be in bed by then. By morning, the pails were all gone. By evening, they were all stacked neatly in the kitchen again, clean and ready to be filled. I never saw them come, but I supposed it must be while I was sleeping.

Then I started to worry that my lunches were dull. I baked cookies for the lunch pails, and pies and pasties. I put in different kinds of fruit and vegetables each day. The Night Gentlemen worked late hours, if they came for their lunches in the middle of the night. They needed to eat good food. I looked through Mrs Hallow’s old recipe books and tried new dishes, like german apple pancake and potato dumplings. Mrs Hallow was pleased, and said she would pay me a little wage in addition to my room and board, if I didn’t mind continuing. She was getting too old, she said, to make all those meals every night.

I had been working at the boarding house for nearly six months when I really messed up. I’d burned a whole batch of cookies to a crisp, so I had to start all over, and I didn’t have time to decorate them before evening. It was Valentine’s Day, and I felt so bad that I decided to stay up late to finish them. The Night Gentlemen didn’t come until midnight, so I had time… I thought.

(Content warning for internalized homophobia/biphobia and mentions of period-typical attitudes towards such)

One is where like. Jinu is always a little aware that he’s attracted to men too. It scares him when he’s human and he tries to completely ignore it but in the demon realm, despite all the shame going around, no one really cares who you’re with. It still takes Jinu years, maybe even a century to even let himself think about it, but he does. Slowly, gradually, letting himself feel it because nobody is around to stop him. He never acts on it, but sometimes his gaze lingers. Fingers brush in a casual interaction and he wonders what it might be like if he ever did anything about it.

Then he meets Rumi, figures it doesn’t matter because they’re together now, until she tells him that she’s bisexual and what that is, and something just kinda. Clicks. They have a word for it now. It’s not completely normalized but they have a word for it now.

It takes him a few days to say it out loud, but Rumi smiles at him when he does, like maybe she already suspected as much, and asks him if he wants to talk about it. To which Jinu says, “There’s not really much to talk about.” but Rumi looks at him like she thinks otherwise, so he tries to explain his experience with it so she realizes that there really isn’t. Except, she’s asking more questions than expected, and he’s talking for longer than he thought he would, so maybe there is something notable after all.

The other is that Jinu isn’t aware of it. Or if he ever was, it was buried a long time ago. So when Rumi brings up bisexuality, he’s mostly interested because it’s a part of her. He asks questions to understand, listens to her talk, and doesn’t think about himself much. That is, until Rumi asks if he’s like that at all. Which confuses him at first, to which Rumi mentions noting he stared at their hot waiter for a bit longer than usual the other day, but Jinu panics a little and clarifies that he doesn’t want anyone else, just her, and Rumi has to backtrack and tell him it’s okay, really, it was just looking. It just made her wonder, if they had more in common in that way.

The conversation ends there, but Jinu still thinks about it later. He wasn’t thinking about romantic love much in the demon realm and it’s not like he could think about men that way back when he was human. And he’s with Rumi now so does it even really matter?

Except. Maybe he remembers fleeting moments. Heart racing, thoughts lingering, eyes darting down to lips and wondering what if. Nothing had ever happened but when he thinks about it, did he want something to? He’s never been with a man, but did he ever want to be? If Rumi were a man, wouldn’t he still love her the same as he does now?

Which leads him to teleporting into Rumi’s room late at night, startling her, and blurting out, “Hey, maybe we do have that in common?” with no context.

Anyways. Bi4Bi Rujinu real, why else would they have the bisexual flag colors during Free?

...did somebody say kpdh reverse au?

Or, you know, he wouldn’t have jumped in front of a fire blast to begin with and would’ve just let her die.

Rest in peace to the incredible Anthony Stewart Head (20th February 1954 - 1st June 2026)