#but I'm already failing at the queuing portion of this.

[quinloki]

Katakuri - Drinking

Reader style - Afab they/them Time slot - Business Hours Client Name - @mewiyev CW: None, really - little dash of angst, sweet ending though, since I imagine I'm going to bury this poor man in angst for the next event >.>

“Thank you.” You state as Katakuri pours sake into a small cup for you.

The quiet bartender of the The Club has become a drinking partner of yours, in a manner of speaking. He doesn’t drink while he’s at work, at least not during business hours, but he does come out from behind the bar to sit with you while you drink.

Quietly filling your sake cup.

Nodding with every soft thank you offer.

Sometimes the two of you talk. About life. About work. Your conversations nip at the edges of being too personal, talking about family briefly, vaguely, almost secretly.

Your family wants you to marry a Charlotte.

The Charlotte family wants you to marry Zuccotto.

You wish not to marry at all, exhausted by the stresses involved before it had even begun. You wished to bring the fortunes of your family up on your own. With your own wit and connections. You could do it, you were certain, especially if your family put the effort into supporting you that they were into driving the idea of marriage.

If there was one Charlotte you’d be willing to cave to… well, he’d need his mother’s blessing.

“Thank you.” You say again as the sweet liquid fills the small cup.

Which would mean he’d have to request his mother’s forgiveness.

Which would mean he’d have to stop working where he was happiest.

Which would mean you’d no longer have these moments. Quiet. Fragile. So close, and so far apart. Separated by what brings you both joy, shattered by what causes you both distress. You couldn’t even begin to imply your feelings toward him, to influence his decisions for your own desires would be cruel.

And so, it was business. Strictly, and nothing more. It is the quiet moments. The sweet scent of sake, the sweet scent that drifts off Katakuri, the softness of the moments between work and family. Between business and family.

Little moments of-.

“It is,” he begins, voice soft and almost unsure. “My pleasure.”

The sad smile on your lips is bitter for only a moment, eyes lost in the shiver of the liquid in your cup before you manage to look over and see the softest tint of pink against his warm cheeks. The sweetest smile to cross lips that only you got to see so freely.

You drain the small cup carefully, holding it out toward him, finding it harder to face him with the pace of your heart in your chest.

“… mine too.” You manage in a voice quiet enough to fall to the ground.

[getvalentined]

I'll admit that while it feels kinda weird to see an event pretty overtly base their own rules/faq/setup/etc on the event that I'm working on, it's also pretty cool to know that someone saw the way I put Sephesis Week together and decided it made so much sense that they wanted to follow that example. (I know who it is, but they don't have their identity listed basically anywhere on the event page so I'm not dropping it here.)

When I do things like this—which I have done before, although only rarely in this fandom—I do my best to be as comprehensive as possible as early as possible. The daily prompt posts for 2024 are queued up to go live on the appropriate dates, and have been since before I even announced the event in the first place. I spent weeks on the layout for the main page, coding and re-coding huge portions of the theme line by line to make it look and behave correctly. I made all the graphics, the custom art, everything.

I've put a massive amount of effort into this event, and I'm terrified that it's going to fail because of negative sentiment, both from the greater fandom toward the ship and from one artist who is pretty big in this corner of the fandom toward me personally. We've already seen someone tell me that I should make it a Big Polycule event instead because "a lot more fans would join that," and the artist in question is basically universally adored by everyone who doesn't know what they did—and even a fair number who do. Those points in mind, there's a pretty high chance of failure here.

But at the end of the day, someone else saw what I was doing and felt like I was doing it right, so much so that they followed my example when putting together their own event. That feels pretty good.