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pnfc · 6 days ago

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20 or so years in the future, doof and perry talk in a pool, at 3am, about the past. for about 5k words. that's it

[ on ao3 here ]

Even in dead of night, sounds rattle up the tower’s old iron skeleton to the top. The noise of the residents below, their talking and thumping and TV, warps through metal pipes and chutes into a muffled mechanical soundscape. The aging building’s life functions, thrumming from underfoot, as the fan wheels gently in the air above their bed.

Perry wakes in the room to Heinz’s absence.

Alone like this, he’s left with the many necessities of Heinz’s sleeping arrangement. The carefully selected quilt with the chunky stitching, the snuggly texture. Systematic obliteration of the wrong lights, the wrong sounds. All the particularities that Perry loves. And there are remnants: the old teddy retired to a decorative chair in the corner. The grind guard she doesn’t wear so much now, some little weight has lifted.

Perry squints at the Big Ben miniature on the bedside table to confirm the late hour, and gets up.

He finds her out on the balcony, crosslegged at the side of the pool. The moon’s out of view, but it lights the clouds up like seedpod puffs, and they mirror on the water, underlit by turquoise pool lights. The air is hot.

Perry goes over and places a hand on her bare knee, makes an asking sound.

“Just the usual, Perry,” Heinz says in reply. “I had a stupid dream.” She slides a foot out into the water, where it glows, white in blue. Perry sits at her side. “You were out of character.”

“You’re always uncharacteristically mean in my dreams,” she continues, half smiling. “And you talk. You talk way too often, I think that’s the worst part. In like whatever stupid voice my subconscious thinks you should have. Which changes. I think you sounded French one time, which makes no sense.”

The light is enough for Perry to sign by. What’d I say?

“Oh you know,” she says, her tone compressing. “You regretted this.”

Perry sits with that, with her, pressed against her leg. It’s not an accusation, Perry knows well enough by now, not one made in earnest. They both have to live with Heinz’s self-ravaging mind. He rubs her hand with his.

Hard to know what to regret. He’s put a lot of work in, building this life for himself. Like his boys used to build those miraculous one-day contraptions in the summertime, or Heinz would make reality-cracking machines fueled on coffee and malice, so Perry had built something of his own, more common and slow, but something he was happy with. This partnership with Heinz, this thick-knit network of people he’s living for.

It’s a struggle to even remember the days when he’d been workshopping its contruction. Hard to blueprint a machine, harder to blueprint a life lived in flux, tripwired with secrets and obligations. He used to sweat through nightmares, trying to see the shape of his future, seeing only how easily it could be lost.

Her sitting next to him on smooth cement, 3 AM, poolwater ringing her calf, the bright night sky. He can’t express to Heinz how he never imagined having this much.

So he gets up, with a parting squeeze of her hand, and backdives into the pool, a lazy arc piercing silent and smooth. Might as well give her something to watch. He skims along the bottom, where the LEDs cast sixfold yellow shadows, overlapping like insect wings as he goes.

A few minutes of trawling the circumference, twisting, shooting through the duck-shaped floaty ring, rocketing off the sides with strong pushes of his feet. He weaves and skips between water and air in sinoid leaps. He’s learned to oscillate his body like a seal for these jumps — it’s proved useful sampling the broader animal kingdom for swimming techniques. They keep him limber, in this low-gravity environment his body was made for.

He pops up to check on Heinz, who’s looking. “No no no, keep it up, Perry the Platypus,” she grins at him. “You’re like my Windows screensaver right now. It’s soothing. I dunno if it’s putting me to sleep though, if that’s what you were going for.”

Perry floats over to where she’s sitting. She’s stirring both legs through the water. They’re pencil-skinny and they spirograph ripples that lap into Perry’s neck.

“Y’know what I thought when I found out this place had a pool?” she asks him.

“Well — I thought I’d be doing so much water aerobics. I definitely didn’t think I’d have someone semiaquatic in my life. But that didn’t pan out, the aerobics. So later I thought I’d put in some electric eels or piranhas, for you when you’d visit. Keep it zesty. But I always thought of it right when the aquarium was closed. And you know, after that first spark of excitement has passed, an idea like that just ends up being on your list. So it never happened. You got lucky.”

Perry rests with an arm around her calf, underwater. She’s wearing one of her long hotweather nightshirts, millennial neon geometries advertising a dance camp that Vanessa once attended. It has glow in the dark squigglies. So many little things to keep Vanessa around, her never-worn hand-me-ups.

Perry darkens the shirt fabric in his wet fist, and tugs it toward him. Heinz laughs. “You are not getting me in there,” she says, pushing a foot at him. “I came out here to brood, not swim.”

Perry doesn’t accept it. He pulls her in successfully, and she drops off the edge into the pool without much fuss, splashing him. “This is of my own volition,” she says. “You don’t get to boss me around in the middle of the night. You don’t own me.”

Yes he does. Perry swims a ring around her waist, framing her. The light’s playing off her grey hair, staining it teal. In this view you could mistake them for a matching set. He likes that.

“That is literally still on a list somewhere,” Heinz adds, “the piranhas. In one of my old notebooks.”

They’re piled in storage now, the plans and the blueprints, though she keeps a few sitting around from the later years. A while back they cobbled together a scrapbook of the better schemes, Heinz’s more impressive drawings, fonder memories. Perry got the B.O.A.T. schematic professionally framed, one birthday. Heinz had rolled her eyes at it and hung it in the foyer.

“I feel weird looking at those,” Heinz says. “It’s like oh yeah, that idea was living in my head for years. Thought for sure that one was gonna put one over on Roger, as soon as I got around to it.”

Years, multiple? Really?

“Oh yeah,” says Heinz, as Perry blinks up in question. “You know how I procrastinate, Perry the Platypus. But it was mainly the big plans that I kept putting off, over and over. The ones that required a real surge of hatred, to kick my scheming into gear. Ambitious stuff, you know,” she says, tilting her head. “Mind control, intimidation — stuff that works. Not like the stuff I’d do with you, most days.”

She lilts an arm out, snaring Perry’s hand. He lets her pull him through the water in a curve.

“The bad ideas were more fun — I think I was just trying to give you a laugh, at a certain point. Not that you ever did. The chicken replaceinator, the beam that made people’s ties comically long. I did not think turning everyone’s shoes into heelys would actually win me dominion of the tristate area, Perry, if I’m being honest.

“All those big diabolical plans, they kept me up at night. But I put them off, ‘cause it was more fun getting sugar high with you and bouncing off the walls. Making up an entire song and dance number for the satisfaction of watching you try not to tap your foot to it. Every year it was: oh, just a few more months with Perry. Next year I’ll get serious, for sure.

“And, you know. I can’t regret any of it,” Heinz says. “Because it worked. I got you to dance with me, spend time with me. I didn’t think that was my goal at first — but you know, in retrospect, what else could possibly stack up?

“. . . But I didn’t get to know that, that my time was well spent, until later. Because you can’t really know if you’ll regret something when it’s happening. Like all those bad relationships, all those times I went into debt. You have to wait until you can look back on it all in a decade or two and go: oh yeah, that was a wash.”

Heinz pulls Perry out in a slow-motion twirl, bopping at the water’s surface. She gives him a considering look as their hands detach.

“That’s why I think about you. Because you haven’t been around as long. It takes time to figure out regret. And you don’t have the luxury,” she says with a tight smile, “of regretting a decade. You didn’t fuck up the 90s. You didn’t even have the opportunity.”

Perry can tell she’s got some spleen to vent. Potentially a whole rainbow of humors. He sets up on a paddleboard shaped like a ducky foot — perches zen-legged in its center, balancing what little weight he has. He comes up past her chin now.

“Do you know how many times I’ve invented time travel, Perry the Platypus?” Heinz asks.

“Well, once. When I was in my twenties. For a generous definition of ‘invent’ — we all learned the Onassian principles in college physics. It’s not too hard to plug in the missing variables — sort of an open secret, in the evil science world, how to manipulate time. We’d all dabble, here and there. You overstep and there’s consequences, of course. By the time you met me I was using it for trifles and whimsies. Hyperspecific stuff, that’s less of a risk.”

She fidgets shapes through the water with her hands.

“You remember me, like — summoning the Roman army. That sort of thing.”

Perry remembers it going wrong, yeah, and him sending Heinz back 800 years, in a perfunctory brush-off of that day’s scheme. He remembers finding Heinz back at DEI the next morning, in a sour mood, with a tirade prepared on the difficulties of refining metal ores in 13th century Mongolia. Heinz had lived there a month. Her age was now out of whack with the present date, and she had said something incomprehensible about it, like:

You’ve made me a Leo, Perry the Platypus. A Leo. That’s . . . well I’ve always felt like I should be one, deep down, so thank you. But it explains why horoscope advice has never worked out for me, which in hindsight is just plain embarrassing.

Perry doesn’t recall there being a scheme that day. Even with the freedom to bubble out extra time, Heinz hadn’t bothered prepping more than a long complaining story for Perry — adequate payback for the thwart, he supposed.

“But the first time I got it working,” Heinz continues. “I did some stuff I never even told you about.” She glances up at Perry. “I didn’t even make a plan, I just went back first thing. To Gimmelshtump. Wasn’t even dressed for the weather. And I saw myself there, walking around the outskirts of town. Carrying old breadloaves and rags, and whatever else — I had to be a packrat, back then.

“And I wasn’t even that far removed, at the time, from that kid. But he had a whole system worked out to survive. If you plunked me down in his haferlschuhs now I’d just collapse where he stood, in a matter of hours. Or I’d go crawling back to the ocelots — which wouldn’t end well, I don’t think they’d recognize me.”

Perry’s rather agog. What a length of time to hold this information inside. He realizes he’s perched unstably forward, off the foam board.

What did you do?

Heinz makes a dismissive noise. “What could I do? Nothing. Could I have stayed? Been a parent to that kid? I guess. At least until causality cried foul and wiped me out. But who wants to be a parent at 23?

“And it seems selfish, right, wanting to keep what I made myself into, at his expense. He had to suffer so I could sit warm and cozy in the 80s, failing out of American college because I was too smart for it, schtupping my way through town, selling bratwurst. But I am selfish, Perry the Platypus.” Heinz sets a hard look on him. “All I did was confirm to myself that it was real, all those awful things that happened to that kid. I wasn’t making it up. And I never went back.”

Perry stares at her — he’s sitting pensive on the board, cross-legged, and pushes himself an inch closer with his tail ruddered in the water.

I would’ve stayed, Perry responds, for that kid.

Heinz gives him a quizzical smile. “Would you? That’s easy to say. Would you live out the rest of your days helping him put his rumpkinhosen on the right way? Explaining puberty, that it’s not really the devil growing out of his body, like Mother says? Stealing him acne cream?”

Heinz’s face angles in a mean way.

“Are you gonna convince that kid his parents will never love him? Because that’s all that was keeping me there, apart from Roger. The dumb, burning hope that they might, eventually.”

Ok, so it’s a terrible idea. Perry nods anyway, to be contrary, cheek squished upon his fist.

You’d run away with any cute animal you met, he signs. And I’d kick their asses.

This repairs the mood somewhat, makes Heinz giggle in surprise.

“Oh would you?” she says behind long fingers, eyes sparkling. “Because I’d kind of like to see that. Grizzled platypus with a mysterious score to settle shows up, terrorizes my childhood home. Makes my parents beg for mercy.”

Perry nods. I’d treat you like a princess. Heinz can’t see that he’s blushing. She laughs, louder than before.

“Oh that’s cute, Perry. The Vanessa treatment! Wow. I would’ve turned out different, that’s for sure.” She’s trailing her fingertips across the pool tiles. “But going back in time, taking care of each other . . . let’s not, okay Perry the Platypus? Let’s not and say we would.”

But you did, Perry signs, because once he’s chimed into conversation with Heinz it’s hard to stop himself. Even when he realizes, too late, that he shouldn’t have said anything.

He drops his shaking hands to his lap. Heinz cocks her head with the same pretty smile, now thinner. “You’re gonna bring that up? When we learned how they got you? That . . . that was a mistake,” she says. “We were just getting to be friends, back then. It was exciting. I didn’t have my head on straight. ... And that would’ve been a different situation, in continuity terms, that was . . . ”

She opens and closes her mouth. Perry sees her stare fall to the water, thumb still tracing the putty grooves between the tiles.

“. . . I never really explained to you the technical nitty-gritty, the physics of it. There’s time-space transplantation, moving a body in its current state back or forward through time — that’s what I did going to Drusselstein. But there’s other ways to slide around.

“See, Roger was getting into golf — just excruciating, trying to spend any time with him, it was always ‘Pencil in a timeslot with Melanie and we’ll hit the back nine,’ or whatever.

“I found a way to fast-forward him, that I never got to use. Premature inator-destruction. It happens to the best of us. Usually to me, whenever you got too eager.”

Perry’s propped on his fist, contemplative. I wouldn’t know anything about that.

“See I think you would,” Heinz says, narrowing her eyes. “I’m pretty sure you were my caddie. In fact I’ve gleaned that most, if not all, of the platypuses I encountered in my evil heyday were you. That little guy had your eyes, and he looked unusually hot in golf shorts.”

Perry blinks, mouth trained in a line.

“C’mon, Perry the Platypus,” she wheedles. “It’s not nice leaving a girl in limbo, for so many years. This’ll keep weighing on me.”

Okay fine, Perry signs, shrugging. I was the hot caddie.

“I knew it!” She grabs the foam board and shoves it hard, sending Perry backwards with a splash. “You are such a jerk gaslighting me all the time! Steven.”

Perry shakes water off his bill and punches forward into her, though the effect is more of a cuddle. She tangles him in her arms.

“So that means you know,” she says, scrunching fingers into his chest, “why I wanted to speed through that. And if you can isolate a body, move it forward and back, you can isolate a mind, or a consciousness.

“That was the technique I used, for when . . . you know, when I did the.” She falters. “Really, really bad idea.”

Except you didn’t, Perry signs up at her.

“Yeah, but like. I think about it. How I almost did. How I could’ve screwed everything up. For both of us.”

Perry remembers it more through her recollection than anything. The day she’d cracked into the OWCA admin portal and Perry had let her. The day she found the timestamped geolocation from which Perry had been acquired. He remembers Heinz’s outrage, mourning Perry’s fate at OWCA’s hands, and the wave of giddy revelation that had quickly taken over at the chance to go back, intercede, take Perry for herself instead.

From where Perry had stood Heinz hadn’t vanished, hadn’t even blipped. He just knew that one instant he was rocketing a punch toward someone diabolically driven and the next, post-inator, was socking his fists into the braced forearms of a downed Heinz, cowed under Perry on the lab floor. And Heinz’s eyes had been so haunted, looking up at him from behind those arms, that Perry knew something had passed.

It was years before she’d tell him the full story. How she’d run out of the house as her 41-year-old self, to track Perry down. The bluegreen and red at the riverside. How Perry’s mother had died on the shore, bleeding out of bite wounds, accepting Heinz’s touch as she cooled under frantic hands. The last look she’d given Heinz. The wariness of the OWCA-trained animal control agents who’d found Heinz sitting there, keeping vigil. How Perry had nestled in the palm of her hand, impossibly little, and ate up what milk of his mother Heinz brought to his bill, fingertip to mouth.

He can’t remember any of it, of course, how could he. But he would always carry close to heart the knowledge that Heinz had inserted herself, in this small and careful way. Had been the first human touch he’d felt.

But it made Heinz cry, retelling it. So Perry never brings it up.

He holds the back of her hand, as she winds a thumb through his fur.

“It would’ve been so easy to change what you were to me, and ruin the weird thing we had with each other — even back then, when it didn’t seem like as much. I didn’t know at the time, y’know, that you’d want to stick around this long.”

Perry gives her a sad smile.

“Time travel’s the worst, it’s like an automatic culpability machine,” Heinz says. “It’s a terrible idea to go backward: everything becomes your choice. Any pain in the past is now stamped with your approval, you don’t have the right to complain anymore. Choosing to leave you with Monogram, choosing to abandon myself in Gimmelshtump. It’s so easy to change everything, with a few key edits.

“And greed always makes me want both. I wanna give that lonely little kid a charmed life, and I want to keep the one I have. I want to get to raise you into my perfect little companion,” she says, cuffing the back of his neck. “And I want to get to fuck you, too.”

Her fingers threaten to pince a collar round his throat and he stares up as her words shock his gut, her sick rapacity bearing down on him, heavy. But her face is unplayful: tired and vaguely nauseated, a disgust turned back in on herself.

So Perry swallows down arousal and steadies his composure, in turn. Heinz just closes her eyes, with a sigh, and pushes Perry’s body away from her into the water.

“I dont know how it worked for him,” she says. And Perry doesn’t know who she means, which averted version of herself, so he waits.

“How he could stand to have that power every day, to make any possible reality. And to risk not having one that really matters.”

Oh. Of course.

“I never did got the full story out of him. Professor Me. I wished I knew more — but there’s something so off-putting, seeing yourself from the outside like that. It’s like listening to a voice recording.

“I don’t think he had any extra-special skills, didn’t know anything I don’t — except whatever it was that convinced him pinstripes and a pink cravat were the go-to look for branding himself a big time travel genius. That I’ll never understand, why I’d wanna look like I’m selling snake oil from the future to the past. In fact I get the sneaking suspicion that’s exactly what he was doing. I can’t imagine wearing that costume full time.

“But maybe he didn’t, you know? Maybe he got home at the end of each day and he put his stupid top hat on a peg and he . . . I dunno, worked on jigsaw puzzles with you. Like we do,” she says. “Maybe he was more like me than I knew.”

They never saw him again, after that year. A decade plus of Heinz waiting, stressing, disavowing, dreading. And then at a certain point it dawned on both of them that their trajectory had quietly split from his. And relief overwhelmed curiosity at whatever might have been.

But when she first found out, Heinz had been excited, in a cute nervy way. It was every delusional dream coming true at once and smacking her in the face — right at a vulnerable moment, when another close-call spacetime catastrophe had left her shellshocked and aimless, in need of reinvention.

It’s crazy, right? Heinz would ask anyone who happened to be in earshot. And they’d agree, that it sounded crazy.

It’s like I predicted it! I — I wrote a TV show about it, me being a time traveler. They ripped it off and made me a girl — and then they made Perry the Platypus a human and cancelled it after one season — but I did! I was this hero from the future, and I knew karate. Do you think he knows karate? I bet he knows karate, too, he’s just being low-key about it, because that’s what cool karate experts do, when they know karate.

But then there was the month, the lowest of her life, as Heinz described it, when they weren’t talking. And in the depressive wreckage of their falling out Heinz was left to ponder how, in that glimpse of the future, bright with glory and wealth and eternity, Perry had not been in frame.

He was off to the side, probably. Surely. Though Heinz’s then-drinking buddy hadn’t offered any reassurances. If the future included Perry the Platypus, he was no famous partner of the great Professor Time.

And that’s rookie mistake number one, Heinz had said to Perry later. Traveling through time without a trusty companion. You just don’t do it. I . . . I learned that from cartoons.

Back in the present Heinz is chewing her lip. “It’s just that I had all this baggage, around time travel, that I didn’t even realize — I hadn’t sorted through any of it yet. I just knew I couldn’t go back. And I figured if I couldn’t give myself a perfect past, I’d just have to give myself a perfect future. I never actually wanted to learn about it though, never wanted to skip ahead and spoil myself, in case I got bad news.

“But getting good news was like . . . weirdly so much worse. Like — all that glory I wanted, people shouting my name. He already got it. And with a stupider name. So I didn’t know what to want.

“Except for the uncertainties,” she says, quieter. “The stuff I didn’t know he had, that I knew I had to keep.”

She reaches out a hand. Perry takes it in his paws.

“That’s a lot, I guess, just to say —” Heinz says. “I’m really happy where I am.”

Perry spent years of his life not holding Heinz, not touching. He’d never admit that fear was a reason. It was just a matter of propriety, truly, of acting right under OWCA’s watchful eye, under the spycams they’ve long since eradicated from around Heinz’s loft.

Now he pulls himself into her and she sinks down in the water, so he can wind his short arms around her neck. And Perry feels all those years of idiotic professionalism like a permanent injury in his chest.

But he gets to hold her now, dig his clawed fingers in the clinging wet folds of her shirt and push his bill to the back of her neck, inhale her body heat. Which lessens the sting.

She clutches him back.

“You wouldn’t like the stuff I think about,” she whispers, “the stuff that woke me up tonight, that weighs on me. Stuff I know I shouldn’t say to you.”

Perry pulls back, to give her a sidelong look. It’s strange to hear. There’s no rotten part inside of Heinz that Perry hasn’t learned to love by now.

She elaborates. “I hate how long it took me to get here with you, to figure out my priorities. It took until you existed.

“But you’ve been stuck with me from the beginning. I’m your permanent assignment. In every life you get, you have to make the best of me,” she says. “And that’s when I’m not an irredeemable monster who makes you my slave.”

Perry takes a firm grip of her shoulder and rears back a bit, so he can turn his bewildered face on her.

She waves a defensive palm in front of him. “I know, I know, Perry. Let me get this out.

“I just think,” she says.

“If you wanted a do-over, I could give you one. At the end of all of this, when we’re finally puttering out — I mean we’re getting old, Perry. I could rewind you. You could go back to where you started, live a whole different life. Ditch OWCA. Go out and meet any number of people, around the world, do whatever you wanna do with yourself. Make a life on your own terms. Get to know who you could be without me.”

Heinz was right about Perry not liking this. He’s not sure exactly where his shock turns into anger, but the net effect is hurt, at what she’s saying.

He gives her his wildest are you kidding me look.

“You know I didn’t actually think you’d say yes,” Heinz says. “It was more a question of how hard you’d hit me in the face for saying any of this.

“But I think you deserve the option, if it turned out you did regret a decade of your life, or two. Because that’s all you got. All you got out of life was me and the dumb choices I made.”

She’s hunched into the curved pool wall, tugging at her elbows under the surface. She won’t quite meet Perry’s eyes.

“I could build you a machine and you could use it to go back without me knowing — so it wouldn’t hurt my feelings, it’s not like I’d remember,” she says, and there’s a wretched emptiness as she voices this thought, like it’s rehearsed.

“You could hold onto all of this, or I could wipe it, give you a clean slate. I just wish you could have, like. . . one choice in your life that’s not built around me.”

Perry stares at her. It seems she’s at the end of her speech. Her pool-lit image is ghostly, flickering like a hologram. Her eyes face down.

He racks a hand up his face with a sigh, the sound gurgling in his bill — not to dismiss her pouring out her stupid heart. But what else can he do, faced with such an unpersuasive offer?

She looks at him then, so he signs one thing. You’re too old to hate yourself this much.

“Oh Perry,” she rebukes, as he swims around her to the poolside. “That’s really not the point. You get that it’s unfair, right? Your life versus mine. I got to have all this time, and you — got me, and that’s,” she falters, as Perry hoists himself out of the water.

“I — I don’t think you’re unhappy, that’s not what I’m saying,” she quickly adds. She grabs Perry’s wrist, to make him look at her.

“I don’t know how to deal with you — living less,” she says, staring into him with benthic eyes. “And me being the most you ever got.”

Perry grabs the outside of her hand with his other paw, and tugs. Heinz acquiesces, allows herself to be lifted, and clambers the rest of the way out of the pool.

She’s like a bedraggled cat, long silver hair strands dripping on the pavement. Perry retrieves a fresh towel from the wicker caddy, pads back over and swathes it around her narrow shoulders.

“I should just accept that it’s romantic,” she mumbles, while Perry rubs the towel into her hair. “Like a destiny thing. But it’s a lot of pressure, the universe setting you up with me.

“Are you happy with that, Perry,” she asks. “I bet you are. I bet you feel all cheesy and warm about it.”

Heinz and Perry have been rewatching the same old telenovelas for years. Perry just rolls his eyes, to say you know I do.

Heinz nods. “That’s a problem, Perry the Platypus. So my offer stands. If you ever want to fix it.”

Perry presses his face to her cheek, in lieu of the slap she deserves. When he drags his soft bill across her face she tips it into a kiss, automatically, the deep-grooved pattern of their motions betraying whatever self-injuring case she was trying to make, about the awful tragedy of Perry loving her.

It’s not a choice, he signs, pulling back from the kiss. Taking you out of my life. It wouldn’t be my life anymore. So no.

Perry holds a paw to his chest. The fur’s mostly grey there — a way he really matches Heinz now, no trick of the light required.

If you weren’t in here . . . I don’t know who I’d be. Just a very good pet and a very good soldier. That doesn’t interest me, he signs, and he’s thinking, with less tact: fuck that guy.

Heinz is quiet, staring. She’s slumped so soft in the summer haze, a vulnerable thing in front of him. A whole city behind her. One she gave up ruling, because she liked Perry more.

I’m built around you. No fixing it, at this point. Sorry.

Perry shrugs, and draws his hands into snatching claws: I’m selfish, too.

#fic #this fic is partly me chewing on / rejecting post-pnf canon and the rest is my otp marriage sickness #i still prefer posting things on tumblr first even tho i inevitably realize theres no reason not to put them on ao3. ao3 makes me nervous

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