#shorty reference

“Sure they both look like they’ve worked outside, but Varian could just as easily be the son of— that guy!” His arm flew outward toward the first person he saw from the window: an old, scraggly bearded man barely a meter tall and leaning heavily on a goat. Yong gave him a flat look. “Okay bad example, but still!”

Hugo had yet to make it past the mental hurdle of Quirin fathering Varian, which in all fairness, Yong and Nuru were very perplexed by too, but they weren’t the ones having a tantrum over it. Nuru had begun to tune their friend out around ten minutes ago to start scribbling out long, complex equations only to solve them a moment later. Yong, Hugo, and Nuru were brought into Varian’s childhood home to spend the night before completing the final trial and opening the Eternal Library. Quirin had been delighted to welcome Varian’s friends, ushering them in without even a brief assessment of their characters. Varian had looked deeply embarrassed when Hugo asked, admitting that he wasn’t known for making friends, let alone ones his age. Not long after they were settled in the guest bedroom, Quirin had called his son down to help prepare a meal with him, leaving the three friends to muse on the genetic gymnastics that occurred to bring about Varian.

“Maybe he gets it from his mom?” Yong pondered aloud. He withdrew a comb that Hugo didn’t know Yong owned and started to rake it through the burned ends of his hair. They were all a mess. A year on the road had not been kind on their appearances. Hugo was ashamed to say that he hadn’t kept up with his usually close shave along the sides and back of his scalp, allowing the hair there to grow and give him a fluffier look. Most of his clothes had holes in them or stained with some chemical or other. Being Yong’s assistant certainly didn’t help with the smell of gunpowder or the charred nature of his sleeves.

But Nuru was probably the messiest of them all. Her title as Princess was as reflective as her shoes. That is to say, not at all. She had taken up the mantle of navigator with an enthusiasm Hugo hadn’t expected, and she trudged through muck and high water to get them to each trial. A flashback to her waving her sword at a sneezeweazel and the subsequent chase through thorny bramble to get away left their sleeves torn and skin razed made Hugo cringe. The only things Nuru ever managed to keep tidy were her star maps—rest in peace to her skirt of constellations—and her sword. Although she used it frequently to cut through foliage on their journey, Nuru kept her whetstone close and sharpened her blade every night. Even her poor telescope wasn’t kept in as good a condition as her weapon, once using it as a makeshift club to bludgeon a bandit on the road.

Yong, ironically, had most of his things intact. Although that probably wasn’t a testament to how well Yong managed his stuff and more how much Varian kept Yong’s belongings safe for him. Far too often, Varian would be launching forward from his place around the campfire to sweep Yong’s backpack of explosives away from the flames. In fact, Hugo was confident that all of the bags hitched to Prometheus belonged to the pyromaniac. That isn’t to say that Yong made it through their adventures scott-free. When the bounty hunters hired by Yong’s parents caught up to them, Yong had gone a bit off the deep end, tying all of his available fireworks together and nearly blowing the men’s’ heads off. Standing behind an explosion like that turned nearly off of Yong into a pile of ash. He was covered in burns and his eardrums didn’t stop ringing for several hours after. And yet at the end of it all, Varian had pulled the teenager aside with a fresh set of clothes and a pair of flame retardant gloves for Yong to wear.

And speaking of Varian. Easily the clumsiest of the group, Varian was coated head to toe in grime. Even as he fussed over the safety of his friends, or maybe because he worried over them, Varian would fall into the most trouble. Be it from Hugo purposely antagonizing some stranger on the road, Nuru not looking away from the stars long enough to see the sudden dip of the hill she was walking towards, or Yong tampering with one of Hugo’s stink bombs to make them spark, Varian did his best to take the blow. It was annoying. Hugo definitely deserved to be the one with a bucket of muddy water thrown at his face, and it would have been really funny to watch Nuru trip and tumble over the slope, and god did Hugo wish he saw Yong receive his comeuppance when a stray bomb tumbled from his mischievous grip, but Varian had already thrown himself over Yong and stank to high heaven for three days.

While the guy had objectively gotten worse in terms of appearances, Hugo couldn’t seem to choke down the butterflies that emerged when Varian’s dirt covered face appeared and twisted into a grin from the doorway. A pair of cooking mitts the only non-road trodden thing about him now.