The Starving Analyst

I actually might prefer Claude’s academy design just because it’s really unique but daaaaaamn his timeskip as well, y’all. Claude is the best-looking character in the entire franchise. His hairstyles? Perfection. His eye and skin tone combo? Perfection. His swagger? Perfection. Trust me, he has not one bad look in the mobile game. I’m so mad at what Hopes did to him (even if his design was, again, stellar in Hopes)

Seteth and Dedue have just deep places in my heart. They’re too good for what they’re dealing with. One is a literal father and the other is frankly still a father. The Lions need Dedue quite sincerely.

I also think time skip Dimitri is really attractive.

“Anything from Sam and Chris?” Jessica asked wearily, padding across the linoleum.

“No.” Even as he said it, Mike checked his phone.

That’s another thing that had changed—Him dying for a text from Chris, of all people. There’d been a time when Chris was constantly on his phone, constantly forwarding memes, and constantly lighting up the group text, asking who wanted to get on voice chat. He’d always fall asleep an hour into the conversation. Chris had been annoying—there was really no other way to put it. But, sophomore year, Mike had come to the halting revelation that he liked him anyway.

It was Josh to whom Mike had first been drawn. He’d known about him at the start of freshman year. People talked, and everything said about Josh Washington sounded fun. His dad was famous, he was rich, he was a little older than everyone else, he had two beautiful sisters in a lower grade, and he threw parties often. A rumor that began flying around among students—which Mike now suspected had been true—that Josh smoked pot in the park after school only made him seem more interesting, more fun, and somehow more adult than everyone else, at least at the time.

So, Mike had made a point to get an in. It wasn’t hard. He could charm his way into anyone’s inner circle; Hannah only made things easier. If Josh wasn’t inviting Mike to events, she was.

But, initially, Mike hadn’t known what to make of what he’d thought of as the “Chris situation.” He’d overheard that Chris and Josh had been friends since they were little. At first, he’d wondered if they’d simply gotten comfortable as friends, been stuck that way, and would have never been close if they’d met in high school. Josh took things like shop class and metalwork. He was a stage hand during all the school plays and flirted with the actresses. He didn’t care about his grades, was late to class weekly, and usually skated by with natural intellect. Chris was an extrovert who liked to chatter on and on. Freshman year, he was taking honors calculus, honors computer science, and advanced chemistry. He was in the Dungeons and Dragons club and could be seen trying to stuff piles of graph paper and tome-like guidebooks into his locker. Even Josh liked to mock him sometimes.

However, the more Mike saw Chris and Josh interact, the more they made sense together—the more he could tell they really had a synergy, a strangely perfect matchup of their temperaments. They got into animated reenactments of their favorite movies. They bantered and pranked each other. They had the same dude-bro mentality that came out when they were together. Still, Mike felt that Chris was really “Josh’s friend” and not someone he hung out with because he wanted to.

He wasn’t sure when that had changed. At some point, he realized that he liked Chris, that it was okay to find himself stuck with him during parties at the Washingtons’. They sometimes didn’t sync up, sometimes talked past each other, but Chris was nice and easygoing, practical and loyal. He was the kind of guy who would offer rides and do anything he could to give you a way out of a jam. Mike still remembered Chris spending all his free period helping him glue back together a physics project that had broken on the way into school.

In fact, it felt like, just when he was getting used to Chris’s ways and counting him as a true friend… Everything had been violently uprooted. That night on Blackwood had turned Chris gloomy and sensitive. Mike felt as though they clashed every other conversation. Only Sam seemed to really be easy to talk to anymore—Mike loved Jessica but they had their ups and downs together. And yet, Mike found himself attached to Chris in a fierce, desperate way, like someone clutching a lifeline. That’s what they all were to each other now, teathers to reality, to the fact that they weren’t crazy. They knew what they’d seen and they had survived it together.

Mike supposed he should, in fairness to Chris, admit that he himself had changed a little too. He’s lost some of his charm and knack for quick-witted conversation, his old humor. He was angrier now, more controlling.

Like Josh, Chris had said. That accusation had annoyed Mike more than he’d let on.

“Sit down,” Mike told Jess. He shook some spices into the scrambled eggs and plated them. He turned the coffee pot on.

A sudden noise at the door made him place the dishes too suddenly and they landed with a shrill clatter.