~ Tнє Pαяα∂σχ Hσυѕє ~ now back to regularly scheduled chaos

“Ha!” Zuko laughed as he managed to successfully capture Sal. It may have been a dirty move, and he likely wouldn’t have pulled it if he had been desperate to let the pillow fight continue. He wanted to continue it, sure, but there seemed to be a lot of other things that could be done in a sleepover, and Zuko really wanted to experiment them all. They could always continue the pillow fight later if they got bored of all the other options.
“Maybe people in most pillow fights are boring and just think inside the box,” Zuko replied, pulling himself up so his face was less than a foot away from Sal’s. Sal’s momentum had carried him forward into a fall, too. He supposed he should be grateful that the ground was soft and covered in pillows and blankets. “That was fun,” he added, voice sounding rather uncertain. “It’s… been a while since I’ve done anything actually fun.”
Zuko rolled over, flopping onto his back and staring at the ceiling as he attempted to catch his breath.
“So what’s next?”

Zuko didn’t expect to run out of things to do any time soon, mostly because he assumed that the two of them would probably be able to spend a decent amount of time just talking, even without the House’s activities to keep them busy. He may not have enjoyed just hanging around the Living Room, but with Sal it seemed perfectly doable. Not boring in the slightest. This room just gave them more options.
“It would’ve been embarrassing if I hadn’t won,” Zuko breathed, a ghost of a smile touching his lips as he looked over at Sal. “I mean… my thing is kind of being good at fighting. That should include pillow fights. If I had failed at that… well, then I would have been letting down everything I stand for and every master who’s ever trained me.” He said it like it was something serious, but the expression on his face betrayed that he was mostly joking. He had already lost his honor. There wasn’t much more he could lose in something as silly and fun as a pillow fight.
Zuko relaxed, trying to push away the urge to take Sal’s hand. There was no reason to do that, and the chances that Sal would think it weird were too high for Zuko to feel comfortable risking it. He just glanced over at the other boy instead, pushing himself to his elbows.
“Do you think the House was nice enough to give us video games?” Zuko asked, brow cocking as he looked around. He didn’t know what setup was needed for video games, but he was intrigued by the idea of playing them.

The other rooms seemed to have been designed to teach them each things about the other. Somehow, this room felt a lot more natural. A little bit more like their first room, where they could choose what they revealed about each other. Unlike that first room, however, they knew each other well enough that they were able to settle into a familiar, comfortable rapport. It was easier to establish here than it had been in any other room, though Zuko wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was because they were on equal footing, here. There was nobody targeted by the room. Nobody who was supposed to be the teacher to a student. Nobody who was supposed to learn something about the other. That made this Zuko’s favorite automatically.
“Yeah,” he echoed, lifting his gaze to meet Sal’s. “High stakes.” There was a lightness to his voice that he seldom brought out. There wasn’t much in his life that left room for levity, but whatever he was developing with Sal… whatever was happening in this room, it was there. The chance to laugh. The chance to just be a teenager, and not one with the weight of an entire nation on his shoulders.
There was something about seeing Sal with his hair down that was disarming. Zuko knew his own hair was flowing over his shoulders, and he knew he should fix it, but… he didn’t want to. He wanted to keep the casual atmosphere of the room alive, and somehow he felt that keeping his hair loose was tied to that.
“What… that doesn’t even look like anything,” Zuko pointed out, arms crossing. “That’s a video game?”

Sal Fisher | Sleepover Room | strider

There was something incredibly easy about talking to Zuko. It was comfortable, somehow, in a way he wasn’t quite used to, but wanted to hold onto as long as he could.
Zuko was right about this room being easier. The House had given them a little more room to be themselves, he thought. At least, he felt like he was more himself than he had been in the House so far, and Zuko seemed…
Relaxed. He hadn’t seemed relaxed before, even when he’d seemed fairly happy.
He gave a quiet laugh, his hair refusing to stay out of his eyes now that it was free of its pigtails. It was sort of ragged this way, fringed unintentionally, in a way that was too rough to be wavy, but definitely wasn’t straight.
It wasn’t the only thing.
“Shut up,” he told Zuko, but his tone was far too bright to mean it. He scrambled to his feet and over to the video games, searching for just a second before he found the button to turn them on.
Music burst to life, and lights flashed, and he bounced once, clapping impulsively. “Oh, here we go. Get over here, let’s see if you can win in my domain.”

Sal Fisher | Sleepover Room | strider

Sal glanced at Zuko, a tiny smirk pulling at his lips, though it didn’t matter if Zuko saw it. He was enjoying this, and he thought he could tell the other boy was, too.
It was nice, not worrying about how he was coming across. That was the benefit of going through the harder parts in these rooms, he figured. They had been awful sometimes, but it was hard to be worried about offending someone who’d died for you. Weird though that was.
He waved him over and settled in front of the game, letting out a breath. This, he knew how to do.
“Alright, so these things are buttons, and they control your character,” he explained, pointing them out. “You can go ahead and try them out, if you want. You have to kind of get used to them, so your reflexes know what to do and you don’t even have to think about it. I wouldn’t recommend not thinking about it, though, that’s a great way to get distracted and die.”

Zuko tilted his head a little as he regarded Mordecai. It was always interesting to meet someone new who had been in the House for a while. It always left room to question why they had never met before. Why the House had never seen fit to blink them in together until now. What made this blink different from any other blink? Would the two of them end up as friends? Enemies? Strangers? There was so much potential in a first meeting. Potential Zuko may not have realized if his relationship with Sal hadn’t developed as quickly as it had. He found he didn’t like the idea of staying strangers with anyone else in the House. They all had interesting stories, even if they had personalities that clashed with Zuko’s. Impossibly, he wanted to know someone well enough to be seen as an enemy rather than just ending up as strangers drifting past each other.
“Zuko,” Zuko repeated, though he was mildly intrigued by the way Mordecai had misheard his name. “It’s… nice to meet you, Mordecai.”
Zuko glanced around the Living Room once more, trying to come up with a satisfactory answer for the other blinker.
“I guess… I’ve been in my fair share of rooms. Do… you want to try one now? See if you can stay in one all the way to the end?”

Zuko couldn’t separate himself from his mission. He wasn’t anybody without his honor, and the only way to get his honor back was to capture the Avatar and bring him home. He couldn’t be a Fire Nation citizen without honor. He most certainly couldn’t be a prince. That was what he had grown up as. He had never expected to take over the throne, but he knew that one day he might be able to fight Lu Ten’s wars with the honor and pride of a general. He had hoped that one day, Lu Ten would see him as a trusted advisor. His plans had fallen apart, of course, when Lu Ten had died. And then again when Zuko had become the crown prince. He wasn’t ready to be Firelord, especially without his honor.
He wasn’t thinking about honor now, though. He was just letting his character jump up and down, trying to figure out if he could jump and move forward at the same time. It was easier than he had expected, but also much harder. Sal’s character seemed far more dexterous, but Zuko had a feeling that had more to do with how he handled the controller than the character’s actual skills.
“I didn’t know other people got that,” Zuko admitted, setting his controller down in his lap as he looked at Sal. “The brain being a little too loud thing.”

Honor was such a huge part of growing up in the Fire Nation that it was almost unfathomable that there were people who hadn’t grown up being taught what was honorable and what wasn’t. He had no concept, of course, that the Fire Nation had corrupted the meaning of honor into something that barely resembled its original meaning, but it was still important to him. He hadn’t yet had to reconcile his uncle’s version of honor with the version his father claimed he lacked, but that lay in his future.
Zuko’s childhood had been difficult in a different way than Sal’s had. Zuko had always known who he was, and who he was expected to be. He had never had to forge an identity for himself. The people who cared who Zuko was outside of being a member of the Fire Nation royal family numbered… well, few enough that Zuko could probably count them on his fingers. The House made that number larger of course, but it was still pretty small.
“I can’t imagine,” Zuko replied, picking his controller back up and forcing his character to walk in a circle. His eyes narrowed as he tried to pick up speed, having trouble keeping the circle even. “My uncle just says to meditate. It… helps a little, but sometimes it just makes all the thoughts get louder.”

Zuko made his character jump once, then run in a quick circle. The movements were a lot jerkier than Sal’s character’s, but that was okay. He wasn’t in this to win right off the bat. He just… wanted to experience the kinds of things that Sal enjoyed doing. If he was absolutely humiliatingly defeated doing it… then he just got to see Sal’s expression when he scored a victory. As far as Zuko was concerned, that was a victory for him, too. Even if he really, really disliked losing. He could be honorable when it came to losing. He could accept it and move forward.
“It works, sometimes,” Zuko repeated with a small shrug. “I mean… when the thoughts are angry, especially. When the thoughts are loud and angry, meditating doesn’t make the thoughts go away or make my mind get any quieter, but it does help calm them down into something a little more rational.” He looked up at the screen, letting his character go into idle animation as he read through all the options. “When I practice either firebending or sword fighting, that makes the thoughts quieter. I think it might… be the same thing. Trusting instinct instead of conscious thought. Should… we start?”

They kept touching and then skating over more serious topics, but not in a way that seemed to be avoiding them. It felt… more respectful than that. Almost like they were both saying ‘I see you, and I acknowledge this, and we can talk about it eventually. You don’t have to be afraid to mention it. For now, we’re not going to let anything get in the way of enjoying this.’ He hoped that Sal felt the same about it as he did. He wasn’t going to press Sal about his sad or scared thoughts, just as Sal hadn’t pressed him about his angry thoughts.
“It’s the scared thoughts that are the loudest, for me,” Zuko admitted lightly, leaping at one of the walls in an attempt to leap off of it. Either the video game didn’t support that kind of action, or Zuko had just failed to execute it properly. He didn’t know which it was, but he wasn’t going to try it again.
“Yep,” Zuko said, gaze flashing over to Sal for just a moment before he shifted to a more comfortable position.
“I don’t need beginner’s luck, though. I bet I’m better than you expect.” A grin appeared on his face before it faded into something like concentration, a bolt of lightning on his features with light that remained for more than the split second of flash.
There was little more than a moment’s hesitation before Zuko hit the start button.

Vince - Lodge - @/mint & clo

Vincent peeked open an eye as Myrnin shuffled out of the room, a bit surprised that he’d listened. He then leaned deeper into the coach, closing his eyes with a sigh. “Victoria,” he hummed, “how have you been?”

He opened his eyes again as Myrnin returned, staring at him as he approached in innocent awe. He smirked as the drink was handed to him, but - given the nature of their relationship - he of course looked down into the cup before taking a drink. A frown crossed his smug expression as he noticed the slightly discolored bubbly bit floating around the top. He gave the vampire a disappointed look, “What did you do to it?”

Sal Fisher | Sleepover Room | strider

Sal blew air through his lips, a playfully scornful noise that would have been more audible if his scars hadn’t cut through his lip, but he trusted would make his point just as well anyway.
He expected Zuko to give it his all, of course. He’d learned by now that Zuko really didn’t seem to do anything halfway…even a pillow fight had seemed to deserve everything he had. Sal couldn’t help being a little bit impressed by that.
And also drawn much further into the competition than he thought he was capable of, but that was just because he wasn’t going to give anything a halfhearted try when Zuko was working his hardest at it. It was a matter of pride, or dignity, or something like that. Probably.
Sal focused on the game, leaning forward slightly as he let himself slide into the game. It was easy to get immersed, and having someone else there with you somehow made it even easier, not harder.
“You have to try and make it to the end before I do,” he explained, nimbly clearing an obstacle. Not that they were that hard, yet, but he was enjoying the idea that it might look more impressive than it was. “And see if you can collect the little shiny things, too, that’ll help you.”

Sal Fisher | Sleepover Room | strider

It was nice, being around someone like Zuko. Someone who was willing to throw playfully sharp remarks at him, and then just as willing to die to save him. Not that Sal wanted that part to happen. But, he had to admit…there was a depth to this room, one he didn’t think would have existed without the hard ones they’d already been through. They both knew this wasn’t everything. Sal hoped he wasn’t the only one in feeling like it was plenty on its own, even so.
“There you go!” He called, though they were right next to each other. He did a flip in the air, gathering as much as he could before he landed and rolled to keep his momentum going.
“Famous last words,” he added, for good measure as he tried to keep his lead. It wasn’t that much of one, but still…if he could stop Zuko from passing him at all, he was going to feel fairly proud of himself.

Sal Fisher | Sleepover Room | strider

Sal hoped they would get more rooms together, rooms they didn’t have to fight to survive. He liked this one better than the others, though...he thought that could have been because he and Zuko seemed to be getting used to each other, a little. He knew where he stood with the other boy. He was even beginning to learn how to tease him best, which hadn’t exactly been his original goal, but he was glad anyway.
He was leaping forward again when Zuko spoke, at the same time he caught sight of the other boy’s character falling down the cliff.
“Oh, you…sort of died,” he told him, wincing sympathetically at the slightly theatric thump. “Sorry. I didn’t think about warning you not to fall off the cliff. On the bright side, you…caught some shiny stuff first?”
He wasn’t quite paying attention enough now to realize his own character was also hurtling towards a cliff. He glanced back, just in time to see himself slide over the edge, too.
“…and that’s…yeah, that’s totally how you win.”