#enchanted!lui

“No shit, Santa Claus,” Lui said, tossing his Nerf basketball as Gwen as she walked through the door of the room that he shared with Serenity. The three of them didn’t really have much respect for each other’s privacy; Rafe’s room, really, was the only one that was ‘sacred’, and that just meant they knocked when he was home in contrast to sneaking in and moving his stuff around when he wasn’t. “Did I not tell you about the girl last week who I heard asking if mistletoe boxers meant she had to give a blowjob?”

He didn’t mean to sound as cranky as he did, but as December had crept in without a word from his dad, Lui couldn’t help but feel a little down on the season. Most years, Maui was late with making plans to come and visit him, and there was the rare year where he wasn’t able to come at all... but Lui hated those years, and he really didn’t want this to be one of them. He didn’t want to make the trek home just to wake up to nothing but him and his mom on Christmas morning. 

He was sure if he told Gwen what was bugging him she wouldn’t mock him too mercilessly about it -- who knew, she might even get it. But serious wasn’t usually their thing -- lately, he’d kind of saved real feelings stuff for talking to Aster -- so instead he held his hands up, saying “Give me back my basketball and tell what you want me to do about it.” 

@crzytwn

“Oh yeah, um... about that,” Lui muttered, unable to meet Gwen’s eyes for some reason. They were just friends who made out when drunk and did a lot more than that when people weren’t watching, but... “We kinda can’t do that anymore. Maybe. I don’t know.” Lui drummed his fingers on his legs, sure that Gwen was about to judge the hell out of him for what he was about to say. Hell, he was judging himself for it, because he knew how things ended when he tried to make a relationship happen, and he wasn’t going to do that again, not to anyone... especially not to Aster. But even if he wasn’t going to try and pursue her, suddenly doing things with anyone who wasn’t her just didn’t feel that intetersting anymore. “I, uh -- I think I kind of caught feelings for somebody, and I don’t know how to make them go away. I think you gotta murder me.” As an afterthought, he added, in all seriousness, “Please.”

Crap. Lui hadn’t meant to zone out like that, but sometimes these Walt events got so boring, and Aster was... the opposite of boring. The most opposite of boring that a person could be, in his opinion. Still, it was unsettling enough that he’d gone from giving Serenity shit about still being underage and how he was so much cooler than her because of it, to always wanting to be around a younger girl he’d hardly even heard of just a couple of months ago.

Lui wanted to crack a joke, to say something stupid like ‘you’ve got a booger on your face’ or the kind of rubbish he’d say to anybody else, but for some reason, he wasn’t as good at that around Aster. She disarmed him, made him want to talk to her about stuff that was real -- stuff that other people didn’t understand, without the pressures of being a demigod kid hanging over their head. And apparently, she also made him blurt out things he didn’t even realize he was saying, too, because without even realizing it, the words “You just look really beautiful today” were spilling out of his mouth.

“I getchu,” Lui replied, flashing Gwen a thumbs up as his eyes scanned the room full of Walt students. Not that he was looking for anyone in particular... well, not really. “That’s like, the worst time of the year to flirt with people. If you hit on them before Valentine’s Day, they wanna try to scam you into buying them presents on a day where you’d rather be pulling pranks, if you flirt with them right after Valentine’s they’re all vulnerable and heartbroken and turn into stage five clinger onners...” Lui tossed his drink back as his eyes locked on a blonde across the room, too busy with her brother to even look his way, and then he turned to Gwen, his face already twisted into a mischievous grin again. “Wanna just get out of here?” he asked, waving around at all the balloons and hearts and romantic lighting that had never appealed to him in the first place.