#I proofread it but I'm having a really off day bc allergies

[voidwaren]

[READ MORE] STORY 3/?

happy Valentine’s, guys! here’s a part 3/[READ MORE] story I whipped up for the occasion that is not technically finished, but is finished enough to share until I rework it for the eventual AO3 publishing.

(note: it’s more hectic shenanigans than romantic anything, though, so be forewarned. this isn’t fluff! though... if you’re used to my shit, you probably already knew it wouldn’t be.)

enjoy!

It starts as it usually does—with Warren waking up.

Waking up from a heavy sort of nap, specifically, that he’d taken somewhere around when the clock had ticked over into four in the morning and Nathan had left the room for a piss break that Warren knew, even with his wits slowly fading away into sleep, also meant he was going to smoke something Warren would complain about later. Warren had promptly passed out before Nathan had returned, lulled into oblivion from the comfort of the couch by the gentle whirring of Nathan’s movie projector, the snarling face of one Dracula frozen on the wall in all its glory.

He wakes up still on that couch, possibly in the same position he’d passed out in, with a blanket that belonged to either him or Nathan draped over his torso and a pillow shoved haphazardly into the space where his head might have been had he not already had it pressed deeply into the crevice of the cushions like a sorely confused ostrich in a thunderstorm by the time Nathan came to the rescue with sleep essentials.

None of that is particularly out of the norm for Warren to think much of anything about any of it, so he doesn’t as he stretches his appendages out and slowly works the feeling back into his virtually-dead arm. Not until a photo catches his eye from where it sits on the table, surrounded by an arrangement of paper roses Warren knows, thanks to some insightful mentoring from his newest therapist, Nathan had learned how to make, amongst other, slightly more distasteful things.

(You’d be surprised what kind of origami tutorials you can find on the internet. Warren fell down that rabbit hole each and every time Nathan resorted back to tearing the paper to shreds instead of folding it, bored with whatever project he’d focused on and unwilling to bother, at least in that moment, to look for a new one.)

The photo is new in both presence and existence. Warren knows it hadn’t been there before, because the table had been littered with snacks and folders when Warren had fallen asleep, and neither of those things were within eyesight now. He thinks briefly of letting it be, because he wasn’t sure what the point of it was and he wasn’t one to mess with other people’s things, but then he remembers all the times Nathan has gone through his stuff and decides, fuck it, fair is fair. You can’t put candy in front of a toddler and then expect them to live and let live.

Warren picks the photo up, and then he starts to laugh.

It’s a polaroid photo, which immediately tells him Max was somehow involved—as she usually tended to be nowadays, much to both Warren’s and Chloe’s chagrin, thanks to a shared class she had with Nathan and a natural ease between them that came when no strife presented itself, which Warren had not foreseen in any potential future—of Warren’s action figures of the Eleventh Doctor (Christmas Adventure Set) and The Flash (JLA Series 1), tangled in some semblance of an embrace that would have done the famous V-Day Kiss photo proud.

(Well, maybe. The Flash’s hand was clearly situated somewhere around The Doctor’s plastic ass, and Warren was about eighty-five-percent sure the original photo had no such groping, but it was the thought that counted, right?)

Warren flips the photo over, and written on the back in bright, scratchy red sharpie are the words, Nerdy enough for you to be my Valentine? 

And Warren’s throat goes completely dry in response. His stomach does a familiar plummet straight to the heels of his feet, but, for once, it’s not out of fear for a future he couldn’t control.

Nathan was not romantic. At least, not in the traditional sense, and the reasons behind that were ones Warren had, admittedly, been too afraid to traverse after learning of some of the things Nathan had gone through growing up. Warren was okay with that, because he’d yet to regain the concise ability to try at being very romantic himself, and he was sure that, by the time he even got a little of a handle back on his wooing skills, he wouldn’t even feel the need to use them on someone like Nathan, who never did things like this.

Well, you know. Until now.

Nathan was not a romantic, and Warren didn’t have the intuition to see past that. And now Warren had nothing to give Nathan in return.

Okay, yeah, Nathan probably wouldn’t actually care if Warren had nothing to give, but Warren would care, and that bothered him enough that he ripped the blanket off his legs and tumbled from the warm embrace of the couch to launch bodily at his charging phone. He both nearly knocks over a haphazardly-placed camera and almost rips the charger from the wall socket once he gets there, but he barely notices as he decides the fact his phone is upside down is the more dire issue at hand. He knows of only one person so good on her feet that she was as reliable a companion as he could ask for in such a sudden and grave situation, and her number is pulled up almost without him having to think about the action.

He jams his finger against the screen and calls Chloe immediately.

“Warren?” Chloe asks instead of some other typical greeting. She sounds alarmed. Probably because Warren never calls her. They have a purely text-based mobile relationship, and deviating from the norm was a label for potential disaster. He curses himself for not thinking of what his action would look like after everything that they’d been through. He knows he should know better.

“I’m the only one having a crisis,” he explains quickly, just so Chloe can relax.

She does so immediately, as is evident in her tone. “You have an oral obsession with a Prescott,” she teases, “of course you’re having a crisis.”

“It’s not just oral,” Warren grumbles, then shakes his head sharply, because that was not the point of this call, dammit. “Don’t distract me! I’m having a crisis and I need you to help me find something for Valentine's Day.”

The line goes silent. Warren can’t tell if Chloe’s shocked, holding in enough laughter to potentially kill her, or some combination of the two. He knows the line didn’t go dead. He can hear the faint static hum of it still being open. 

It lasts for nearly thirty seconds, and then, “Today is Valentine’s Day.”

“I know.”

“You didn’t get anything for him on Valentine’s Day? How did you not get him something, like, three months ago? You're the sap of the group. It’s basically your prerogative.”

Warren winces. “I didn’t think we were that kind of couple.”

Chloe snorts one hell of a snort. It could top charts, Warren thinks, if such a thing existed. “Not that kind of couple? The shit does that mean? What kind of couple could you actually be? You got together over a mistake in the space-time continuum. Who does that?”

“Er, probably some forms of romcom couples in movies?”

“Are you saying you’re living a romcom, Cracker?”

No, Warren thinks without hesitating. No, he is not. Because there had been far too much terror and trauma involved with his journey for anyone to be laughing.

“Just help me Chloe,” Warren begs. “Please. I’ll owe you if you help me.”

Chloe hums, but it’s in that way that she does when she’s not actually considering Warren’s offer because she’s already made a decision. “Fine,” she says after barely a moment of the supposed consideration. “But if you make me late for my date, it’s your skin on the line.”

“I wouldn’t dare.”

-

Warren sneaks off of the Blackwell campus and meets Chloe at the edge of the block, where she pulls up in her truck with a particularly smarmy smirk on her face. Warren has no idea where Max is—or Nathan himself, for that matter—but he’s not about to start questioning it when he didn’t want to run into either just yet.

“I can’t believe I’m helping Nathan Prescott’s boyfriend get him a Valentine’s Day gift,” Chloe says good-naturedly, if a little awed, as Warren clambers into the seat. Her nose scrunches up. “Actually, I can’t believe Nathan Prescott has a boyfriend. What’s the world coming to?”

“Armageddon, obviously,” Warren grumbles, then smacks his hands against the dash nervously when Chloe pulls from the curb with enough gas to rival Nathan’s hasty driving tactics.

Chloe leans over and swats at his hands to make him stop. “You know what you’re getting him?”

Warren cradles his assaulted hands against his chest and looks over at her. “Was that a question or are you about to tell me what I’m getting him?”

“What makes you think I have any idea what to get a worm like Prescott for Valentine’s Day?”

A fair point, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t try. 

“What do you get someone who has the money to buy the entire town?”

Chloe hums thoughtfully. The familiar stores of the road past the Academy pass them by, and Warren wracks his brain with little to show for it by the time Chloe says, “Why don’t you just snap him some nudes and call it a day?”

Warren nearly chokes on his spit with how fast he inhales, and Chloe starts to cackle. “I am not taking nudes for him, Jesus Christ,” he croaks, trying his best not to blush at the idea and failing spectacularly, if Chloe’s continued mirth when she glances at him is anything to go by.

“I was only half-kidding,” Chloe says from beneath her laughter, and Warren knows it’s a lie. She wasn’t kidding at all, and she’d probably been hoping he’d agree so she could get off scot-free.

“I’m not even technically legal. I don’t know if he’d appreciate it.”

“Oh, he’d appreciate it,” Chloe muses nearly to herself as she turns sharply into a parking lot. Warren graciously ignores that comment as he watches her wrench her gear shift into park and twist in her seat until she faces him. “Are we actually about to go into this blind?”

“Do you have a better plan?”

She purses her lips, then reaches over and unbuckles his seatbelt. She’s not wearing one, or Warren might return the strange favor. Then she smacks Warren on the arm like she’s about to send him off into the fray of an important sports game and then snaps the handle of her door to unlatch it. “Let’s rock and roll, bitcharoo.”

She’s out of the car before Warren can tell her he liked that line more than he thinks he should, and Warren scrambles to catch up with her long, purposeful strides as she makes her way into the Rite Aid like there was a zombie apocalypse brewing behind her and this was her last chance to get the goods before they all surrendered to the oncoming doom.

They’re met immediately with a pink and red smorgasbord of garishly decorated aisles bathed in the sterile white light all drugstores seemed to love to use, peppered sparingly with wilting bouquets, sagging balloons, and the forlorn figure of one Hayden Jones.

“Aw, shit,” Chloe has the chance to say just as Hayden lifts his head and spots them both, and then his face splits into a grin.

“Graham, Price!” he greets cheerily, immediately closing the distance between them.

“How does he know my name?” Chloe whispers, but doesn’t get any semblance of a response as Hayden throws his arms around Warren and picks him up like they hadn’t seen each other in months instead of the maybe-fifteen hours that had actually passed since their last face-to-face interaction, wherein Nathan had thrown the cap of a camera lens at Hayden to get his attention in the hallway of the dorms and missed and nearly beamed Warren instead just as he was coming out of the bathrooms. Thankfully, Nathan’s aim was either terrible or fantastic, and it had struck the wall just over Hayden’s shoulder and right next to Warren’s ear instead. That interaction had ended with Hayden laughing and punching Warren in the shoulder like some sort of teammate that had made a good play. Having taken place, again, maybe not even fifteen hours ago, Warren still had the bruise to show the interaction.

But Hayden was Hayden, and snatch Warren up he did. Warren was never sure what incited the action, because he’d never seen Hayden do it with anyone else. But, hey. At least he wasn’t beating Warren up.

Warren, pretty much used to this kind of thing from Hayden at this point, just holds on until Hayden lets him go again. He keeps his hands on Warren’s shoulders even as he pulls away, looking at Chloe with interest. “What are you two doing here? Where’s Max?”

“How come you call Max by her first name?” Chloe then asks, but is quickly followed by Warren waving his hands in the air and saying, “We’re just here for Valentine’s stuff. Why are you here?”

“Same thing! Thought maybe the candy would be on sale, and it’s good shit to stock up on for parties.”

“Oh,” Warren says, surprised, because that actually was a decent idea. “Cool, okay. Which way to the aisle?”

Warren starts to crane his neck, but Hayden’s face falls. “You’re standing in it.”

“Well, fuck,” says Chloe helpfully as the startlingly bare shelves become the elephant in the room. “There’s nothing here.”

“We’re a little late,” Hayden agrees.

“Little late? This place looks like Walmart after Black Friday.”

Warren pries Hayden’s distracted hands off, then stalks down the short aisle as Hayden and Chloe converse about the relative emptiness of the area and what other places might be like if the Rite Aid was as ransacked as it ended up being. Aside from a few sad bags of chocolate slumped against the far niches of the shelves, there was absolutely, and annoyingly, jack shit all left.

Great.

“What am I going to do?” Warren moans, threading his fingers into his hair and yanking dramatically. “Why didn’t I think we were this kind of couple?”

“What kind of couple?” Warren hears Hayden whisper-ask Chloe. Before she can answer, if she was even going to, he tacks on, “Oh, this is for Nate?”

“You got another boyfriend you didn’t tell me about, Cracker?” Chloe calls, just to be a dick, and Warren whips around and glares at her. To his credit, Hayden gives him a sheepish smile, knowing full well that one was his fault.

“I’m so screwed,” Warren continues, slumping his way back up the aisle and past Chloe and Hayden, who follow like drones directly behind him. The bell rings as they exit, and that’s when Warren offhandedly realizes no one had been at the register while they’d been in there. It must have been a blood bath, whatever had happened to make the shelves that way.

“Uh, no, you’re not, because that would be a good outcome,” corrects Chloe, smacking Warren on the back. Warren tries not to be upset about all the physical affection he was the receiver of nowadays. “The whole point of the holiday is to get fucked, duh.”

Warren shakes his head violently, only stumbling a little when the action grants him unsteady footing. 

“You are not helping, Chloe,” he warns her as Hayden’s hand is suddenly on his arm and steadying him to keep him from falling. Chloe only returns the statement with her patented shit-eating grin to show she’s fully aware of the fact.

“You were going to get him something themed for the holiday?” Hayden asks when they reach Chloe’s truck, eyeing the thing up like he’s not sure what to do about it. Warren nods solemnly. Hayden waits a beat, and then asks, “Why?”

And Warren just blinks at him. Because, yeah, wait a minute. Why was he getting Nathan Prescott something Valentine’s Day-themed on Valentine’s Day? He wasn’t some lovestruck teenage kid praying their boyfriend would drop them a special candy gram (no pun intended) while they were in class or anything, he was Nathan fucking Prescott. Pink candy and hearts and falsified niceties were basically his antithesis, and that was pretty much proven with what Nathan gave Warren. There was hardly anything romantic about the simple gift—it had literally been nothing but something Nathan had known Warren would love. Why the hell wasn’t Warren doing the same?

Jesus, and who here was Nathan’s boyfriend again? Because, right now, it’s kind of looking like Hayden.

“Hayden, I could kiss you,” Warren tells him in awe.

“Oh, uh,” Hayden stutters, apparently caught off-guard by the declaration, as Warren scrambles back into the truck. 

If he was going to say anything more, it’s cut off by Chloe frowning at Warren and blurting, “Are we bringing the lug?”

Blunt to a fault, that Chloe. It was almost an art form.

Hayden’s face immediately scrunches up.

“You wanna join us, Hayden?” Warren asks, just to make the look go away, because Hayden was a nice guy, and Warren found himself strangely uncomfortable with Chloe being her usual barbed self with him.

Hesitating, Hayden looks from Warren, to Chloe, to the truck, and then back at Warren again. He shrugs, “Sure, yeah. Got nothing else to do.”

“Get that ass in gear, then, boy,” Chloe says, ushering Hayden in through the driver’s side before jumping in herself, and back onto the road they go.

-

If Hayden was supposed to help at all past what he’d initially helped with, though, that doesn’t happen. He only sits between Chloe and Warren as Warren lobs ideas at the both of them and Chloe comes up with various reasons as to why each idea is lame, laughing occasionally and being a general deadweight between them. Warren hadn’t exactly expected much more from him, sure, but he would be lying if he said the sudden radio silence wasn’t a little unsettling. 

Thankfully, Hayden perks up once they reach their destinations, even if he still doesn’t offer much by ways of help. He instead meanders around the different, useless shops, offering commentary on things Nathan would definitely not like, and he and Chloe make a game of deciding what Nathan would hate the most.

“Definitely these,” Hayden says in one drugstore on the outskirts of the town, a last-minute-ditch attempt that proves just as useless as the first two, as he holds up a pair of rainbow socks for Chloe to bear witness to. Chloe laughs maniacally and pulls something distinctly X-rated off another shelf to present to Hayden, and they both cackle and banter and generally make Warren’s search harder by attracting attention he didn’t want. He has to wave off store clerks hoping to hurry along or kick them out too many times to count.

They go to three different stores, all full of things that were so far from what Nathan Prescott stood for that, by the time they’re almost back to the academy, Warren’s two steps from throwing himself out of the truck just to both distract him from the task at hand and to be a little dramatic, because that’s just what he was feeling right then.

“Forty-five minutes more and then I’m dropping your asses,” Chloe warns as they pull into what is apparently their final stop before they lose their quick transportation and will be stuck with everyone’s least favorite method of movement: Warren’s poor excuse for a car. “I have places to be and acting as Cupid’s chauffeur is not my day job.”

It’s a relatively small store they’ve arrived at as their last-ditch effort before Chloe called it quits, somewhere past where the gas station and the diner sat, that mostly sold things for tourists to enjoy after visiting the bay for what was usually either whales or something regarding Blackwell. Warren had less of a clue how the hell he was going to find something here than anywhere else, but they were running out of places to go, and there was enough of a mishmash of things housed within that Warren hoped, maybe, something would come to light.

It’s so small that, the moment they step into it, Warren realizes yet again that he recognizes another set of patrons, and that Arcadia Bay was too damn small for its own good.

“Trevor? Dana?” Warren half-greets in surprise when the two figures look up from where they’re paying at the register.

“Graham?” Trevor greets back in the same moment Dana lights up and says, “Warren!”

“And Chloe,” Chloe mumbles from next to Warren, and Warren catches Hayden cocking his head at her in confusion.

“What are you guys doing here?” Warren asks, ignoring them both.

“We’re on a date,” Dana says, smacking her open palm against the curve of Trevor’s shoulder. 

Trevor gives his Trevor smile. Which is to say, a smile that is a little crooked, very warm, and mostly directed at Dana herself, regardless of who he was actually talking to. He holds up the bag he’d just purchased. “They’ve got old vinyls and other things here, sometimes we get one and chill out with it.”

“Like a retro section?” Hayden asks, throwing Warren a look, but Warren’s already caught on. Old movies were basically his and Nathan’s thing.

Dana, too, seems to catch on immediately, even though there’s no possible way she could have had any previous information regarding Warren’s problem beforehand. She walks over, reaches out, and curls her arm into Warren’s. “Over this way,” she tells him as she guides him through the store to a small nook in the back. Set just in front of them is a single, long table covered in crates with vinyls stacked inside, and along the walls are shelves of box sets of varying degrees of media, from anime to sitcoms to shows Warren’s somehow never heard of. It reminds Warren of the FYE in the big mall way farther inland than Warren usually ever had time to bother with.

Warren can swear angels start singing in his ears the moment his eyes land on the glorious display, and they sound suspiciously like Dana herself.

Oh, wait. No. Dana’s just talking to him. Warren tunes back in.

“Might I suggest something over here?” she tells him as if she’s selling him something extremely expensive and obnoxiously sparkly, pulling her arm away to gesture at a small specific section with a flourish. It’s a part of the display that’s sectioned-off by a string of paper hearts, and it holds within a variety of box sets, all with an obvious romantic theme to them. Dana’s got a twinkle in her eye as she picks up, specifically, a black and white box that says Worst Romantic Movies of the Ages in looping white script.

It’s so perfect, Warren is stunned where he stands by the mere idea of its existence. He has to take a moment to reboot, and Dana snorts a laugh while the other party members, who had been left to their own devices, trickle onto the scene.

“That’s the bitch,” Chloe says immediately, grinning and snapping the fingers of both her hands into a finger gun, and Warren blinks as if coming out of a trance.

He lunges at Dana, bypassing the box set completely, and wraps her up in a hug. She laughs and hugs him back, and not even a beat later another set of arms are around him, and then another, and Warren can feel the corner of the box set digging painfully into the small of his back as he becomes enveloped in an entity of friends.

“I ain’t hugging you guys,” Chloe says, and Warren starts to laugh a laugh that almost edges on crying from how surprisingly relieved he is over something he knows doesn’t actually matter.

No—didn’t matter to Nathan. Nathan wouldn’t have cared, that much Warren knows. But it mattered to Warren, getting something for Nathan in return for staying with him all the times he thought he was losing his mind even after it all had been done, and he realizes, as everyone peels away and looks over the box set like it was worth infinitely more than the price tag stated, that he should have known better instead of waiting until it was almost too late.

“I can’t believe you found this,” Hayden offers as Warren gathers himself. He rolls the set between his hands, peering at it with an excited look on his face. “I didn’t even think of something like this. It’s great.”

Warren nods his head, maybe a little too enthusiastically, then turns to Dana, where she’s standing with an arm around Trevor, watching. “Thanks, Dana, holy shit,” he tells her earnestly.

She and Trevor both beam. “Anytime, Warren,” she says, and Trevor punctuates her statement with a nod and a wink.

“Might not be the most romantic thing ever,” Hayden says, clapping a hand on Warren’s shoulder proudly, “but Nathan will love it.”

Chloe reaches out, peels one of the paper hearts off the display, and slaps it on the box set. “There. Romantic as fuck. Now let’s ditch this joint before I miss my Valentine’s Day shindig.”

-

Finding Nathan turns out to be a relatively easy ordeal. He’s in Warren’s room when Warren checks, sitting at his desk and going over a file spilling photos all along its surface, a few rejected options tossed away to sit haphazardly on Warren’s bed.

He looks up when Warren enters and only has a moment to look relatively unperturbed before his eyes narrow into suspicion when Warren’s hand immediately darts behind his back.

“Where have you been all day?” Nathan asks him slowly, highly suspicious, after he’s taken a moment to just stare at Warren and wait to see if it alone would make Warren cave.

Warren hesitates, debating between outright telling Nathan the whole story and instead just giving him the gift, then decides the latter was the safer route when it came to Nathan and his impatience for Warren’s word-vomit and withdraws his hand until it was fully extended, the box set hanging in the air between him and Nathan.

Nathan stares a moment—surprise crossing his face so briefly that, had Warren not already been looking right at him, he would have missed it—and then he stands up and closes the distance, his eyes never leaving the gift.

He doesn’t take it right away—only stares at it, like he wasn’t sure it wouldn’t lunge at him and bite if he put his hands on it. It takes Warren shaking it gently, once, for Nathan to finally accept it with both his hands.

Nathan scrutinizes the box set carefully, turning it slowly in his grip. He’s not frowning, so that’s a good sign, but he looks like he’s not processing what he has in his hands. He confirms the speculation a moment later when he looks up at Warren and says, “What’s this for?”

Warren just blinks. “Uh. Valentine’s Day?”

Nathan’s face screws up like Warren just told him the equation of string theory. Warren can’t help it—he wilts a little, and his fingers spring to twist his sleeve up between them like they always did when he wasn’t comfortable with whatever was happening either to or around him.

“You—” he starts, then falters. Nathan doesn’t say anything, so he tries again, “You wanted to be my Valentine?”

Was he wrong? Had the photo not been for Warren or something? It seemed improbable, given the fact Warren was not only pretty fucking sure they were technically dating now, but also that the fact that it was a picture of The Flash and The Eleventh Doctor didn’t really leave a lot of room for outside speculation of who the figures were supposed to represent. So, you know, who the fuck else could it have been for if not Warren?

Warren is so lost in his own near-spiral that he almost completely misses the slow smile that springs to life on Nathan’s face as he eyes Warren, growing from first a small twitch of the lips until it hung on his face, full and crooked as the kind of grin only Nathan Precott could really pull off.

“You’re an idiot, Graham,” he tells Warren softly, and then he reaches out and wraps his hand around the back of Warren’s neck to pull him down and in. Warren relaxes immediately, and his hands release their hold on his sleeve to press against Nathan’s face.

Hell yeah, Warren thinks to himself as he leans into the kiss, the box set thumping softly on the carpet next to him as Nathan’s hands find their way under Warren’s shirt and Warren’s fingers thread into Nathan’s belt loops in turn.

Nailed it.

[zombiesama]

ok so I have been wondering and trying to look it myself has been dissatisfying, what is nanbaka about?? for some reason this question sounds mean to me but idk how else to word it, so why do u like it so much as well? I'm always curious about my mutuals interests so!! enjoy rereading it too btw!! (also just so u know I'm glad I proofread this bc my phone changed question to quesadilla 🤣)

Nanbaka is a prison anime!! It starts as entirely comedy but takes a really sharp turn into action adventure with some gore and stuff and then swings back to comedy again!

Idk how to explain the comedy parts bc they're mostly slice of life-y but the action stuff is interesting but like all of it is spoilers umu. Basically Jyugo (main character)' s limbs can turn into knives? And he is Very Upset by this and so is everyone round him. And turns out he's been like????? Transformed into the knife hands transformer by some guy named Elf who has done similar stuff to others (there's a guy who bursts into flames that Elf controls and utilizes those powers). Theres a whole bunch of drama where someone from the maximum security part of the already maximum security prison breaks out while most of the main 4 are in that area (the only one left out was injured at that time) and they're separated by the guard that was escorting them there so chaos ensues.

I find the characters really interesting! Theres the chronically ill Nico who has food allergies and a mental illness and has to take Many Many meds every day to stay healthy! Hes terrified of needles and hates hospitals but has to spend a lot of time with the doctor at the prison bc he's so unhealthy. The doctor made good tasting medicine just to make Nico take his meds! He also is obsessed with anime and manga, but has never played video games (but later ends up loving them). Hes the most cool and interesting to me!

And Uno who is a pretty boy but hates being called that. Hes a play boy who has dated many girls and hes really good at gambling (but got caught for underaged gambling and was arrested).

And Rock who is a fighter type guy who's really beefy but has a huge love of food (to the point he broke out of prison many times because the food wasnt good)! He's really lovable and sweet and is Nico's best friend and they sleep right next to eachother at night and their futons touch and it's cute ok

And the main character who I actually find the least interesting of the main four is Jyugo!! His eyes are really pretty they change color depending on the angle you look at them! Hes a master escape artist with no other skills and his whole story arc is learning to be greedy for himself bc he starts off with no desires or wants! He ends up wanting to be with his friends and begs to get back with them after being separated from them for spoilery reasons! He also at one point jokes and says he's also attracted to men so he's bi in my heart

Some other really cool characters are Kiji (a gnc guy who is obsessed with beauty, I prefer to headcanon him as a transwoman though), Hitoshi (another gnc guy who looks up to his big brother), and musashi (who is random human combustion in person form. Hes also terrified of frogs, blind, and really really smart)!

Theres also Honey and Trois, two pretty boys under the care of Kiji. Honey has anger issues and Trois can make anything if given some materials! He makes a bazooka at one point. It's pretty neat.

And Liang, Qi, and Upa all share a cell! Liang is Rock's rival and he's a martial arts guy. Qi is a doctor who hates fighting. Upa is??? Magic??? Hes got this ability called Qigong and hes super strong. At one point he does the kamehameha thing and Nico goes batshit over it.

The character designs are all so good and the colors are so vibrant! The story is very interesting once you get past the comedy parts.

And just hhhh everyone is a little gnc bc everyone has painted nails. All the main four have interesting backstories (from gangs to accidentally smuggling drugs) and their designs are just So Good like loom at these boys!!

I just really love the characters a lot I guess. The story isnt like. The best but the characters are top notch.