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The first thing Ashe says when he sees Annette again is this:
“Annette!” he beams brightly, eyes lighting up. “It’s so nice to see you again. I’ve missed you.”
The first thing Annette says when she sees Ashe again is this:
“What the hell,” she blurts out, gaze flicking up and down as she takes in Ashe’s whole body, “why are you tall now.”
Annette, in the span of five years, has grown a respectable height of two centimetres. On the other hand, Ashe Ubert decides to be an asshole, and grows ten centimetres. This is awful. This is terrible. This, Annette decides, has to be illegal.
“Well,” Mercedes demurs. “It’s not that bad.”
“How could he do this to me,” Annette wails. “I thought we were friends!”
All those times, where she and Ashe had been relegated to the duties that require the least heavy lifting. All the times they’d been blatantly babied by the rest of the house, patted on the head and cooed over and all the small, little jokes about their age. (Even though Felix is barely even three months older than Annette, what the hell. Stupid Fraldarius, with his stupid grown up face. He doesn’t deserve those genes.)
And now Ashe has gone through a growth spurt, and he’s tall, and he’s the same height as Felix, and also he changed his hair and his face is sharper and he looks actually kinda handsome instead of just cute now and- ugh. The absolute gall of him. That little traitor. Annette has never felt so betrayed in her life.
“You’re acting like Ingrid isn’t also 165 centimetres,” points out Mercedes. “Barely a centimetre taller than Ashe, last time. And she hasn’t grown.”
“It’s not the same,” Annette emphasizes, gazing at Mercedes with imploring eyes. “It’s not just about the height, Mercie, it’s about the soul.”
Mercedes smiles, in a way that Annette has come to know as her being very confused but trying not to show it.
“The soul,” she echoes. Annette nods gravely.
“The soul,” she repeats.
“I...see,” says Mercedes, clearly not seeing.
Ugh. Mercedes just doesn’t get it. But it’s okay, Annette thinks. At least she hadn’t had the audacity to grow taller.
“Gah! I can’t believe it,” Annette continues, dramatically throwing herself back on her bed. “I thought we had an understanding! A thing! We had a thing, Mercie, it was great and amazing, how could he do this to meeeeee!”
“There, there,” Mercedes leans over from where she’s sitting at the desk to pat Annette on the thigh, clearly still confused but willing to comfort her. Mercedes is a great friend, Annette decides. The best friend to ever exist. Unlike a certain 174cm tall man. Who Annette had thought was a good friend, but clearly, she had thought wrong.
“I’m going to cut off his legs,” mutters Annette, darkly.
“Annie, no.”
“Are you still mad at me,” Ashe asks, when Annette approaches him in the greenhouse. He sends her wide puppy dog eyes. “Because you know, I didn’t choose to grow this much-“
“Don’t act like you weren’t over the moon when you noticed,” Annette says, crossing her arms and narrowing her eyes at the man. Ashe pauses.
“...Yeah,” he admits after a brief moment of silence. “I was pretty ecstatic.”
Annette scowls, nails digging into the flesh of her arms. Life is so unfair, sometimes.
“Why couldn’t I have grown?” she complains. “I ate my vegetables. I drank my milk. What happened?”
Ashe just shrugs, helplessly. Annette narrows her eyes at him. Maybe if she squints hard enough, she can pry all of his secrets out from him?
“Did you do some black magic ritual?!” she accuses, lifting a hand to jab a finger at Ashe. Ashe balks, looking at her with confused, furrowed brows. ...It’s pretty cute, Annette’s not going to lie.
“No!” Ashe denies fervently.
“A deal with a witch?” Annette tries next. “Voodoo? Did the Goddess herself come down from above to bless you?”
“First of all, I’m pretty sure that last one is blasphemy,” says Ashe, nose wrinkling. Annette just shrugs, at that. Mercedes may be her best friend, but piety has never exactly been Annette’s strong point. “Second of all, it was puberty! Nothing magical about it!”
“...Was it magical puberty?”
“Annette.”
“Sorry,” apologises Annette, because even she can admit that that was a bad joke. She sighs, glancing away, and back, before deciding to just come out and say it. “And I’m not mad at you!”
“Really?” Ashe asks dubiously. He narrows his eyes at her. Annette narrows her eyes back.
“Really,” she parrots.
“Really really?”
“Really really!” Annette says firmly, nodding her head along.
“Well,” Ashe says in a considering tone, putting a hand to his chin, “I guess if it’s really really...”
At that, Annette giggle-snorts. Ashe grins at her. They kinda just stare at each other for a few moments, beaming dumbly at each other. Then Annette blinks, and shakes her head to clear her mind.
“Oh, but seriously though,” she’s quick to assure, hands coming up in a pacifying gesture, “I’m not mad. I’m just...”
“Bitter?” Ashe offers. Annette wrinkles her nose at the word. It’s so...ugly, Annette thinks.
“Now you’re making me sound like some crooky old woman!” she protests, resisting the urge to stomp her foot like a child. Which, she is a grown woman. Sometimes, she has to remind herself of that fact. “I’m not bitter! Or mad. Life is just unfair, okay.”
“I mean, when you say things like that, it does kinda make you sound like a ‘crooky old woman’, as you put it,” Ashe points out. Annette smacks him lightly on the arm, the easiest place for her to reach. (Terrible. Absolutely terrible.)
“I am not!” she denies. “I am a flourishing young woman, ready to go out in the world-“
Ashe laughs.
“You sound like Sylvain describing a lady,” he says, cutting her off in the middle of her sentence. Annette gasps, offended beyond all belief. Sylvain?! Really?
“Take that back,” she demands.
“It’s true!” Ashe insists. Annette narrows her eyes.
“Just because it’s true doesn’t mean you should say it!”
“Sorry,” Ashe says. And then, very quickly, “but it’s still true, though.”
Annette throws her hands up in the air.
“Ugh, great,” she groans with a frown, deciding to concede the point. Not that she likes it, or that she wants to, but clearly Ashe isn’t going to back down. “You just ruined it, Ashe. You ruined all of it. Thanks a lot.”
“Sorry,” apologises Ashe again, sounding not at all contrite.
“You should be.”
A pause.
Then Ashe asks, tentatively, “So...are you mad at me now?”
Annette looks at Ashe’s face. It’s undeniable that he’s grown since Annette last saw him, five years ago. The angles of his face are more prominent, gone is most of the baby fat he’d had in his cheeks, and really, he’s become rather attractive, hasn’t he? But still, underneath it all, he’s still the same old Ashe, with those same old wide puppy eyes, and that just means, well.
Yeah, okay, Annette’s just going to give in and go for it.
“Awww, Ashe. How could I get mad at a cute little baby like you,” she cooes, and reaches up to pinch at his cheeks. Ashe jerks back, blinking.
“Excuse me?”
“You’re a cute little baby boy,” Annette repeats, using an even more patronising tone this time. Ashe’s face scrunches up, making him look, frankly, adorable.
“I’m only five months younger than you,” he says, sounding affronted. “You can’t say that.”
Annette scoffs at that.
“I,” she says, “am closer in age to Felix than you.”
Ashe opens his mouth. Closes it. Ha, thinks Annette smugly. She can too say that.
And that’s when Ashe says, “I’m still taller than you though.”
Ingrid puts them in time out for three hours. It was one little slapfight, come on. So maybe Annette starting flinging around a bit of fire. Who did that even hurt, anyway? Nobody! Ashe knows how to dodge. He’s perfectly fine. ...Well, maybe it wasn’t such a great idea to throw fire around in a greenhouse. But if Annette’s good at something, it’s magic, okay.
So a plant or two caught fire. So what? They managed to stop it before it got bad. It was fine.
...Also, time out? Really?
Annette would be offended, except she knows that Sylvain and Felix always get timed out. The thought, at least, softens the blow.
Things go back to relative normalcy, after that. Well, as normal as things can get, with Prince Dimitri half-insane, and a war raging around them. But Annette digresses.
In their free time, Ashe and Mercedes work together to bake sweets, and Annette reaps the rewards. Occasionally, Ashe smiles at her, and Annette is abruptly struck by how grown up he looks now. Striking. In a cute way. Kinda. Whatever that means.
Annette’s always been better at maths and science than literature, if she’s being honest.
Whatever the case is, it all comes to a head when Ashe returns her doll to her. Up until then, she’d never seen it as a problem problem. Sure, Ashe is tall now, that jerk, and sure, if you look at him in the right way, from the right angle, Annette supposes that he might even be considered, for some subjective definition of the word...
...hot.
(This is kinda weird. Annette needs to stop this train of thought right now. Partially because she’s calling one of her friends hot, partially because it’s Ashe who she’s calling hot. Because, if she were to say something like, wow, Felix kinda grew up well, then that wouldn’t be that weird. Well, kinda weird, she supposes, but also definitely not as weird as if Annette were like, wow, Ashe, you’re-)
Anyway.
Annette had taken these changes in, processed them, and then packed them into a little box in her head reserved for all her friends. Just like how she’d mentally documented all the changes in her other friends. So, like normal.
Of course, then Ashe returns her doll to her, and ruins everything. (Again.)
Ashe’s gaze is earnest, a small grin adorning his face, as he holds out the small, tattered keepsake from Annette’s father. Annette can only listen, wide-eyed, as Ashe explains how he went back up the tower to get it for her. How he pushed through his own fear of ghosts, just to get her sentimental, ratty little doll back.
Abruptly, Annette thinks, he looks incredibly...dare Annette say it...
...hot.
Her heart skips a beat.
Oh no, she thinks. Oh no, no, no.
“Oh my Goddess, how could this be happening to me,” Annette wails, as she throws herself bodily, face-first, onto her bed. She rolls on her side, turning to face the rest of the room. “This is the worst! This is horrible! How could he just- just do this?!”
She sighs loudly, before looking at her conversation partner, expectant.
A brief moment of silence. Then:
“Why are you talking to me,” says Felix.
Annette throws her pillow at him.
“Because Mercie is too busy in the infirmary, because you took a spar too far, and now Sylvain has a broken wrist that Mercie has to heal and it’s all your fault so you better stand in for her!” she threatens, sitting up on her bed with a fierce glare.
Unfortunately, Felix doesn’t look very threatened. Fortunately, he stays anyway.
“Is it really so bad,” he asks dryly.
“Yes,” says Annette, very empathetically. Felix stares at her.
“...But why,” he says eventually.
Annette has to stop, and think about that for a moment. Actually...
“Huh,” she says, thinking aloud. “Why is it so bad?”
The sound of Felix’s palm meeting his face resounds loudly in Annette’s room.
“I’m literally never going to speak to you again,” he says, muffled against his hand.
“Felix!” Annette cries desperately, grabbing onto his arms as the man tries to stand from the chair. “No! You can’t go! You can’t just leave me alone in this!”
“I was not aware,” Felix says, not breaking out of Annette’s hold even though he very easily can, “that we were in this together in the first place.”
“The second I dragged you in here was the second that you decided that you would help me,” Annette informs him. Felix makes a scrunched up face. Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, depending on how you look at it, it is nowhere near as cute as Ashe’s.
“I didn’t decide anything,” Felix protests. “You just said that you were the one who dragged me in here.”
“You decided to let yourself get dragged in here,” says Annette. “Now it’s ride or die.”
“I think I’d rather die,” Felix tells her. Annette very pointedly ignores him.
“Shut up,” she says. “Anyway. So how do I get him?”
“...Get him?” Felix echoes. Annette shoots him a look.
“You know!” she insists, then makes a vague scooping gesture with her hands. “Like...get him.”
“...To go out with you?” Felix clarifies, and at that, Annette burns red.
“Oh my gosh you can’t just say that out loud,” she whispers, rushed and words tumbling out one after another, in a semi-coherent mess. Felix stares at her blankly.
“You’re twenty-one,” he says. Annette glares.
“I’m twenty-two, you birthday-forgetting jerk, so shut up,” she hisses.
“That doesn’t help your cause any. Actually, I think that actively makes it worse.”
“Shut up!”
“Just ask him to fuck you.”
Annette doesn’t send a blast of fire at Felix, but it’s a near thing.
“I swear to the Goddess, why can’t you just give me advice,” Annette pleads, eyes wide and begging. “Why are you like this.”
At that, Felix finally decides to spare her some mercy. Maybe it’s the desperation on her face. Maybe he just wants to hurry up and leave. Whatever the reason, Felix leans back in the chair, tilting his head slightly as he gives her a considering gaze.
“Maybe,” he says after a thoughtful pause, “you should sing for him.”
“This is the second time, Annette,” Ingrid says flatly, as she leads them to the ‘designated time out zone’. Annette scowls.
“It’s not my fault Felix is a massive jerk,” she sniffs, nose in the air. He deserved that fire, okay. Ingrid considers this for a moment.
“True,” she concedes after a brief silent contemplation. Annette nods solemnly. Beside her, Felix scowls.
“I was actually trying to help, you know,” he says, offended.
The slight singe marks on his face don’t do him much good for being taken seriously.
Mercedes is marginally more help than Felix. And by that, Annette means that her advice doesn’t make Annette want to bodily hurl her off the third floor.
“I think you should just talk to him,” says Mercedes, when Annette complains about it during their lunch.
Well, Annette considers. Maybe a little hurling.
“That’s terrible advice,” says Annette. Mercedes blinks at her, evidently taken aback.
“...To...talk?” she asks. Annette nods firmly.
“Yes,” she says. “Preferably, I never see his face again.”
“Annie,” says Mercedes after a pause, “he lives here. You live here.”
“Okay,” nods Annette, “so what if I move out?”
Mercedes pauses again, longer this time.
“Annie,” she says, then stops. The incredulity in her voice is clear for Annette to hear.
“I don’t see the problem,” Annette continues, nodding along to her own words. “Actually, this is a gre-“
“Problem?” a concerned voice rings out from behind her. Annette stifles a yelp as she bangs her knee against the table in shock. “Ah- sorry! Are you okay?”
Annette grimaces, but forces a wide smile as she turns around. She’s greeted with wide green eyes and a contrite expression, as Ashe stares down at her.
“Ashe!” Annette greets, praying that he hasn’t overheard too much. “You surprised me!”
Ashe laughs awkwardly, rubbing the back of his head with a hand.
“Ahaha, yeah,” he trails off. “Er, anyway, what were you saying about a problem?”
“O-Oh!” Annette stalls, eyes darting around as she fishes for a believable lie. Kitchen mishap? That’s so lame, though. Training accident? But they obviously aren’t injured. Maybe-
“Annie wants to talk to someone, but she doesn’t know how,” Mercedes chimes in. Annette wants to slam her own face against the table. That, she decides, is the worst response that could be said. Ever.
Other than, you know. The truth.
“Oh,” Ashe blinks. He turns to Annette, and she has to physically lean away because goshdarn that grin has to be brighter than the sun. “You shouldn’t be worried about that, Annette. You’re the most likable person I know, after all!”
Annette flushes red.
“A-Am I?” she laughs sheepishly, twirling a strand of hair around her finger. Across from her, Mercedes leans forward with a sly grin, bracing her arms on the table. Traitor, Annette thinks bitterly.
“Yes,” Ashe smiles, sweetly. Annette can feel her heart thudding fast at the sight. Oh no. No one should be allowed to look both so cute and attractive at the same time. It’s a contradiction. It’s unfair. “You’re amazing, Annette. There’s no need to be nervous!”
“Thanks, Ashe,” says Annette. She’s going to combust, she knows it. “You’re so-“ Cute. Charming. ...Hot. “-kind!”
“I’m simply speaking my mind,” Ashe demurs.
Annette’s heart is going to burst out of her chest and do ten laps around the courtyard. Life is unfair. Life sucks. Life is terrible.
...But not that terrible, Annette admits, as she stares at Ashe’s face.
“Er,” Ashe says awkwardly, after a long, few moments. “Is there something...” he trails off, his hand reaching up to brush at his cheeks. Which, look. Freckles. They’re cute.
Especially when Ashe is flushing, like that, red tinging his face.
She wants to pinch his cheeks. And also lick them. It’s a weird feeling.
“Oh, no, no,” Annette darts her gaze elsewhere, shaking her head and waving her hands in denial. “J-Just, uh, nothing!”
Ashe blinks at her, evidently concerned.
“Are you-“
“I’m fine!”
“...Okay, then,” Ashe says slowly. “Er. Well. If that’s all, then actually, I do need to be somewhere-“
“Oh!” Annette hurriedly waves her hands. “Well in that case, don’t let us keep you! Shoo, shoo,” she gently shoves Ashe away. Ashe chuckles as he stumbles, slightly.
“I hadn’t realised you wanted to be rid of me so badly,” he teases. Annette rolls her eyes at him.
“You know what I mean!” she complains. Ashe laughs. “Now go! Don’t be late for your...whatever it is!”
“I got it, I got it,” Ashe nods, and waves a farewell. “See you two around.”
“Bye, Ashe,” Mercedes calls, and Annette tries her best not to jump at her voice. Goddess, she’d forgotten that Mercedes was there. She is a terrible friend, Annette despairs at herself.
This still doesn’t stop her from blatantly watching Ashe as he leaves, though. Ugh. Hormones.
“So,” Mercedes starts, after Ashe is gone. She leans forward. “Are you going to talk to him now?”
“Well,” Annette allows, still staring at the doors in a mild daze. “I guess I’d be fine with still seeing his face around.”
Mercedes sighs softly, as she sits back.
“It’s a start,” she mutters to herself. Annette politely pretends not to hear her.
By next week, everyone seems to know. Sylvain laughs, long and hard, when Annette accidentally trips over a barrel, and manages to land straight at Ashe’s feet. It’s a terrible, terrible experience, but at least Ingrid smacks Sylvain for her.
Though not before grinning, amused and fond, at Annette. She’d even winked. Ingrid Brandl Galatea. Winked.
Annette’s life is going up in flames before her very eyes.
Dedue asks, very seriously, if he should leave them alone when Annette joins he and Ashe in the greenhouse one day. Annette ends up sputtering, face red, before shoving a watering can into his hands in lieu of an actual answer.
Dedue takes it with grace. Though he still goes to the opposite side of the room from Ashe and Annette. Which, honestly, Annette isn’t sure if it’s because he genuinely wants to tend to the plants in that specific area, or like. Yeah.
“You’re so stupid,” Felix tells her bluntly, once. He dodges when Annette tries to punch him, but goes down to an unexpected kick to the shin. This time, Annette doesn’t even get timed out, so it’s a win-win for her.
Mercedes is still insistent that Annette go talk to the man. At first, Annette vehemently refuses, and rejects the idea. But as days pass, and everything only seems to spiral downwards in a worsening cycle of hell, Annette slowly, steadily comes to a horrifying realisation:
Mercedes is right.
Which is how Annette finds herself standing outside Ashe’s room, trying to figure out a way to convert herself from a solid to liquid, and sink down between the cracks in the pavement, never to return. Her friends will speak of her mysterious disappearance for years to come, and perhaps a decade or two down the road, a scholar will figure out the miraculous, incredible technique she used to metamorphise herself into a puddle, and they’ll re-engineer it, and then Annette Fantine Dominic will be spoken of and applauded as the woman who managed to drive such an amazing scientific-slash-magical breakthrough-
Ashe opens the door.
Annette eeps.
“...Annette,” Ashe blinks at her. “...Why are you just standing out here?”
“Uh,” Annette says, her brain short-circuiting. “I, um. Wanted to. Talk?”
Her voice lilts up at the end, her final word a near-squeak. Everything is terrible. Annette should really start working on that idea of turning herself into a liquid.
“Well, then,” Ashe says, after a short, awkward hesitation. “Come in?”
Annette goes in.
She's been in here before, she tells herself. Multiple times. Many times. Stop being like this, she mentally scolds herself.
Her palms are damp with sweat, still. Damnit.
"Do you want tea…?" Ashe asks, already bustling over to his wardrobe. Annette opens her mouth to decline, but then she thinks about it a little more, and closes it. Actually, tea sounds good. Maybe it'll even help calm her nerves.
"Do you have any of the sweet-apple blend?" Annette asks hopefully. Ashe wordlessly holds up a teabag.
Ashe, as most of the people who know him have learnt, is generally good at everything that has to do with food. Case in point, Annette wasn't aware that you could pour tea well, but Ashe pours tea well. Or maybe Annette's standards are just low. The last time she tried to use a teacup, she had shattered it so badly, not even Mercedes or Dedue could fix it.
"Thanks," Annette murmurs, accepting the cup of tea with two hands. She refrains from taking an actual sip, because she knows from experience that she’ll burn her tongue. Then drop her cup. And then there’d be glass and tea everywhere.
(Sylvain had laughed until he cried.)
“So,” Ashe asks brightly, “what did you come for?”
Annette tries to hide her grimace behind her teacup as she takes a sip and oh Goddess it’s still so hot. Annette slams the cup back down, and coughs. Oh Goddess, she’s going to choke to death on tea.
This was a mistake.
“Are you alright?” Ashe asks, eyes wide, and hands fluttering above the table. “Er, just-“
He shoves a napkin at her. Annette grabs at it, then proceeds to slap herself in the face with it.
“...Are you-“
“I’m fine,” Annette insists, words muffled by the napkin covering her face. On one hand, she doesn’t want to remove it, and be forced to face Ashe. On the other, the longer she stays like this, the weirder she looks. She’s trapped herself between a rock and a hard place.
Please, Goddess, Annette inwardly begs, smite me now.
“Okay, so,” she starts.
“It’s hard to understand you through the napkin,” says Ashe very carefully.
Well. That decision’s been made for her. Annette takes the napkin away.
“Okay, so,” Annette repeats, mildly hysterically. “I came here to tell you to stop.”
Ashe opens his mouth. Closes his mouth.
“Stop...what?” he asks, sounding utterly confused. His brow is furrowed, his head is cocked, and his gaze is full of concern as he stares blankly at Annette. “Annette, are you-“
“I am fine,” says Annette, in a way that implies that she is not fine. She is the opposite of fine. She is currently staring at Ashe Ubert’s jawline and wishing that she can put her lips on it. Annette is fucked.
“I see,” Ashe says, in a way that implies that he is not seeing. He is the opposite of seeing, in fact.
“Anyway,” says Annette desperately, trying to steer the conversation back on track (if there ever was a track in the first place) while not having a mental breakdown (if she wasn’t already in the midst of a mental breakdown). “I just need. To say. That. I.”
“You…?” Ashe encourages.
“I…”
“You…?” Ashe is nodding.
Annette’s mouth is open, but the words refuse to come out.
“Guh,” she says, instead. “Fuck.”
“Take your time,” Ashe tells her graciously. This does not help. This worsens matters, in fact. This worsens matters a lot. Because now Ashe is being nice, and gentlemanly, and his face-
(Annette blames what happens next on Felix. It’s entirely his fault. Everything.)
“Please fuck me,” blurts out Annette, and then she proceeds to stand up, walk over to the wall, and slam her head against the concrete. In retrospect, this is a very poor decision, because now her head hurts like she got run over by a barbarian, and also she may or may not be concussed.
“Annette!” Ashe yelps, jumping up from his seat. His chair falls back with a clatter, and there’s a loud thump as his knee hits the table. He doubles over with a groan, clutching his leg.
Great. Now there’s two hurt idiots in the room. Just great.
“May the Goddess Sothis shine her divine ray of judgement down on me,” whispers Annette, “and kill me on the spot.”
She bangs her head against the wall again. Unsurprisingly, it hurts. Even more.
“Please stop doing that,” says Ashe, as he stumbles over to Annette. “Do you need to go to the infirmary?”
“Just let me die,” Annette tells him. She certainly feels like she’s going to die. If not from a head injury, then from her face exploding due to all the blood rushing to it at once.
“Sorry,” says Ashe solemnly. “But I can’t allow that.”
He gently tugs her away from the wall by her shoulders, turning her body to face him. Annette blinks, dazedly, at him.
Glossy silver hair frames Ashe’s face, freckles decorating his too-perfect skin (like, seriously, how does he get it like that, Annette needs to know) and only serving to highlight his cheekbones, far more prominent than they used to be, five years ago. There’s a small smile gracing his lips, fond amusement dancing in his eyes, as he guides Annette up and onto her feet.
How can this be allowed, Annette wonders wildly.
“Are you alright?” Ashe asks, hair falling into his eyes as he cocks his head, examining Annette carefully. “Should I call Mercedes?”
“It-It’s fine,” Annette shakes her head, and quickly looks down. If she looks at the younger man any longer, she might just die. “S-Sorry. Oh my gosh. I can’t believe I said that.”
Ashe laughs.
“Quite alright,” he says. A hand comes up, and rests itself on the side of Annette’s face, long, bow-calloused fingers tangling themselves in Annette’s hair. “I’m flattered, really.”
Annette flushes, even as she narrows her eyes at Ashe.
“You don’t sound very surprised,” she accuses.
“I’m not,” is Ashe’s candid reply.
Annette stares at him.
“...I mean,” Ashe coughs. “It’s...rather difficult not to hear about it. There’s not too much to gossip about, these days, so. Er. People can really be remarkably unobservant at times when talking with their friends, huh?”
Annette is still staring, mouth hanging open, and brain not working.
“Sorry,” Ashe continues bashfully. “I should have talked to you sooner. But, well, I noticed how much you were freaking out about it, and, well, I was worried that if I approached you, it might just make things worse, so, um. Forgive me?”
No response.
“...Annette? ...Are you okay?”
Ashe is starting to look actually worried.
“...No,” Annette manages to whisper, a few long seconds later. She buries her face in her hands. "Oh my Goddess," she says, still hushed and quiet, “This is so embarrassing."
Ashe awkwardly pats her on the shoulder.
"There, there...?" he tries. Annette groans, loudly.
"Can you please pretend you didn't hear any of that," she begs, dragging her hands away and making the biggest, saddest eyes possible at Ashe. "Just- Just let me start over!"
Ashe looks at her, a stupidly, endearingly amused expression on his face.
"Okay," he agrees.
"Okay," Annette takes a deep breath. "Okay!"
Inhale. Exhale. Inhale. Exhale.
Ashe waits, patiently.
“Can you like,” says Annette desperately, “take a step back.”
Ashe takes a step back.
“Okay!” says Annette, closing her eyes as she pumps herself up. “Okay!”
She opens her eyes, and looks at Ashe. Opens her mouth.
“...I can’t do this,” she says, weakly, after a few moments of silence with her mouth agape. “Oh my gosh- Ashe, I cannot- you do it!”
“What, no!” Ashe immediately protests, his hands flying up to wave a refusal. “I can’t! You do it!”
“Why not?!” Annette demands.
“It’s too embarrassing!”
“Yeah, well, it’s too embarrassing for me too, so you do it!”
“No way,” Ashe shakes his head vehemently. “You’re the one who started it first, so it’s your responsibility.”
“Yeah, but we’re in your room,” Annette defends herself.
“You’re the older one!”
“You’re the taller one!”
“Height has no bearing on this issue!”
“Height has a bearing on my issue.”
“What does that even mean?”
“I don’t know, but shut up!”
Ashe looks at Annette pitifully. Annette scowls, and crosses her arms defiantly.
“Shut up,” she repeats. Ashe shuts up.
The room is silent, for a moment.
“Okay, okay,” Annette starts again, biting the bullet. She takes a breath.
...And another one.
“Ashe,” she says, finally, and Ashe is staring at her, fully focused and tensed in anticipation. “I…”
Annette takes another breath. Ashe is nodding, encouragingly.
“...like…” Annette grimaces, as she forces the words out. Ashe is nodding, faster. And it’s the earnest look on his face, the excitement in his eyes, that gives her the courage to spit the last word out.
“...you,” she finishes. And then she lets out a huge sigh of relief. “Oh Goddess, that is such a large weight off my che-“
But she cuts off in the middle of her sentence. Because Ashe is kissing her.
His lips are soft. Just a bit chapped, Annette can feel, as Ashe presses against her. His head is tilted, his eyes are closed, and at this distance, Annette can count his every individual eyelash. Make a map of his freckles. Annette can.
But she’s too busy closing her eyes, as she kisses back. Her hands come up, to grip Ashe’s arms, to pull him in closer. It’s nothing like fireworks, a changing of life like the books always make it out to be. It’s kinda awkward, actually, their noses bumping into each other, a little too wet and a little too slapdash.
But it’s Ashe, Annette thinks. So that makes up for it.
When they break apart, they’re both blushing furiously. Annette licks her lips, absently, and gets to watch in full view as Ashe’s gaze zeroes in on her mouth.
He looks so happy, it’s kinda embarrassing. Annette wants to wipe that dumb little beaming grin off his face, almost. She did all the legwork here, she should be the one wearing the stupidly proud smile.
So Annette kicks him in the shin. And when Ashe doubles over with a yelp, she takes her chance, and drags him into another kiss.
"Please," begs Ashe when they break apart, red-faced and panting hard, "Just ask me to bend down next time."
Just for that, Annette decides, she's going to kick him again. And again.
And again.