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**<blockquote>09 August 20XX:</blockquote>**
<br>
Your name is Bubblebrooke and you don’t have time for pleasantries – you’ve found your duck!
“Ash!” You wave at him, impatiently waiting for him to cross the street. He dips under your umbrella and takes the handle from you so you don’t have to juggle everything in one hand, then peers down at the feathery pile tucked into the crook of your other arm.
“Woah.”
“I found my duck!" you tell him giddily. Ash grins at you with what you think is a disproportionate amount of relief for someone who hasn’t even heard about your duck until a week prior, but you don’t care– you've found your duck! This calls for celebration!
“That’s the tiniest duck I’ve ever seen in my life.” Ash says, reaching a hand out to poke at it. He immediately jolts back when the duck snaps its beak at him.
“I know right, that’s why we picked him for Delilah’s project.”
“I could crush him in my hands I think.”
“Do _not.”_ You give him a side-eye, because it’s Ash and you can never really tell what’s going on up in his brain. He’s.. _odd._
There’s the kind of strange about him you don’t worry about, like the perfectionist tendencies, and how he likes to take five shots of expresso with his coffee – which, you’re not entirely sure if the cafeteria is allowed to be doing in the first place – even the slight arrogance that could rival an old-time ruler doesn’t seem out of place on him.
Things you do worry about: how he seems to know things about you which you’re pretty sure you haven’t mentioned before; or the way his eye glazes over sometimes, like he’s tuned into a different frequency from everyone else before he seems to settle back into his own skin again, looking morose for a second before it’s wiped away. How _tired_ he looks all the time.
He seems to be doing better recently though, despite the ever-present bags under his eye, something about him lighter in a way that you can’t quite put your finger on. He’s still trying to pet your duck even though he’s being repeatedly snapped at – you swear, it’s like no one has ever told him about the concept of giving in.
You can’t really talk, considering the amount of time and effort you’re pouring into your chessboard project, but you think you’re allowed a little hypocrisy in the safety of your own head.
“We should let him loose in the theater,” Ash says almost idly, adjusting his bag.
You pause, thinking it over. “Branzy’s going to lose his mind.”
“Is that a no?”
“That’s a ‘_yes_ we should absolutely do that, what are you waiting for?’” You bounce ahead of him, a distance which he quickly catches up to because he’s _ridiculously_ tall, umbrella still tilted to cover you both.
***
“Is that a chicken?” is what Clown greets you with, eyebrows so far up his head that you’re surprised they haven’t shot straight up into the void of space and said hello to the Martians yet.
“It’s a _duck,”_ you say, and then let it loose.
Ten minutes later, halfway through which Branzy had walked in and immediately gotten a face full of feathers for his troubles, Clown has managed to catch the duck, Branzy is down under the counter, and both you and Ash have dissolved into giggles near the snack machine.
“You two should never have been introduced to each other.” Clown says, somehow managing to look dignified even with a squirming, angry duck in his arms. “We’re going to get fired. Is this what you want, Bubble? Do you want to put us out on the streets?”
“Aren’t you like, loaded?”
“Yeah – loaded with a sword, Ash. I’m not afraid to use it.”
From his spot on the floor, Branzy looks like he doesn’t know whether to be horrified or lovestruck. _All_ your friends are odd, you think.
(And there’s something in you that’s delighted by that – look at you go, making not one, but multiple friends. You can't help but feel like as though you've known them for much longer than you actually have, meshing with each other far quickly than you'd have expected.)
“This thing should’ve _stayed_ lost. How did you even find it again?”
You shrug, slinging an arm around Ash’s shoulder. You have to stand on your tiptoes to do it – it’s an awkward angle, but you’re committed to this now. Ash hesitates, slouching a little, like he's not sure what he’s supposed to be doing. Which is fine. You haven’t known Ash well for very long but you get the feeling he's a little stupid about stuff like this sometimes, or just touch-starved. “Ratrick brought it into class this morning. I was told I could keep it under the condition that it’s never brought into campus ever again.”
“Good riddance,” Branzy mutters into the floor.
You’re so tempted to poke him in the side, just a little, to see whether he’d even budge from there or continue mimicking a corpse. Clown catches your eye and blinks at you, slowly, which is as effective as a threat to make you retract your shoes away from him.
Branzy manages to get you and Ash to help put the room back into order again, not that there’s much that needs to be put back together in the first place. Not a lot of people come through here, even though the popcorn is weirdly good. Clown drags spare stools out from somewhere while you’re not looking and you hop onto one behind the counter, duck in one arm, and so does Ash even as he grumbles about how “we should be getting paid for this.” He’s fiddling with a little carving that’s shaped like a totem, fingers brushing over the tiny gems embedded into it. You’ve seen him with it before, holding it the same way someone might hold a fidget cube, or a comfort object. It looks like it’s been re-painted recently – a bright gold.
“Getting paid for what? Causing havoc?”
“This is forced labour,” Ash deadpans, raising his voice as a customer walks in, shrugging off a raincoat.
“Don’t mind him,” Branzy tells them, slipping into customer-service mode so smoothly you have to blink twice to make sure it's the same person. “He’s fine.”
“I’m being held here against my–” is all Ash manages to get out before Clown bats the totem out of his hands, and then they’re both hissing at each other like feral cats. You’d try to record this, but you wouldn’t put it past Ash to dunk your phone in rainwater to get rid of it.
Impressively, Branzy's smile doesn’t even waver. His eyes however, look like they’re screaming for help. “So, uh, would you like a ticket?”
You rest your elbows – and your duck – on the counter and grin sunnily at the customer when they turn to you, looking perplexed. No sir, you’re not finding any help over here.
From next to you, Ash slumps against your side with his totem safely enclosed back in his palm, stretching his leg out in a way that indicates he’s in pain again, and still making a face at Clown who’s ignoring him in favour of actually doing his job now. You lean back into him, lifting up your duck so that he can make another ill-advised attempt at petting it.
“Are you alright?” you whisper to him, and if he’s surprised that you’ve noticed his jitteriness, he doesn’t show it.
“Not yet,” he whispers back, which is a remarkably honest answer considering what you know of Ash.
_Yet._
You can be satisfied with that; there’s always [[tomorrow.->https://archiveofourown.org/works/48701626/chapters/127568722]]
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