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The other day, in the mid morning, Pin hovered her hand well over Firey's left eyebrow. It's been freezing cold. Maybe it was weird for her for a minute, but it's really not, so standing aside she applies both hands. They don't say anything. She wrings her hands and then shows the back of her hands. Then she wrings them again and splays her fingers out further.
Not that he was looking, but half his vision was covered by the side of Pin's face, and the underside of her forearm.
He can feel her hands are ice cold. Just a fan of thermodynamics...
Outwardly it seems like he just doesn't mind being used as a heat source. But its nice to be useful even if its by his own biology.
Today, now, it's well past dark. Nobody's sitting by Firey except until Pin comes by. Without mentioning anything, she sits facing the opposite direction of him.
Usually if someone were to do this they'd start chatting about something. She seems shyer but that's girls for you. Maybe.
Instinctually she'd like to sit with her legs sorted underneath herself to shield from the cold, but realizes she's trying to get warm so she puts her legs straight. Then one bended. She hugs the raised leg but the area covered by her hand gets cold.
Pin just rests her head on her thigh, looking away.
This lasts so long that Firey settles in for sleep as he was already settled in for the night. It's kind of like she isn't treating him like a living person but it's still a little sweet. For Firey it's not an explainable feeling.
But she's going to get the other side of her cold, he knows, so Pin has more turning around to do.
After a couple months on Team Losers! with him she might not know how to do it right yet. Come on, plastic is porous and she's not a rotisserie chicken.
"It's cold tonight." she finally says once she turns around.
"Yeah," he keeps his voice up so it's conversational and not forced-casual. "Where's everybody else?" He's laying on his front but he can talk like this.
"Dunno." So wherever they are, she either wasn't invited or she'd rather be alone.
It feels prickly to imagine her "rather be alone" is in his company. Like good prickly.
He closes his eyes again.
When he wakes up an hour or two later she isn't there anymore.
When he wakes up again, sometime before sunrise, everyone's clustered around and their team proceeds to have a normal, regular day.
That night the same scenario happens again, and she still doesn't know how to do it right, and he still doesn't intercede. Why would he? She's just warming up how she wants to.
"Where'd you go last night?" He's hugging his ankle. Again she isn't facing him.
"Uhhhh?" She says in a high voice like it doesn't matter, so she went to go find everyone probably. Maybe it was weird of him to ask. No, Pin's just like that..
Pin says not long after, "Gimme."
In his distant peripheral her palm-up hand opens and closes.
He was ripping up grass and crushing it in his fingernails, so.. Firey deposits some of the grass in her palm. ???
She wipes her hand off in the not-ripped grass. "Ew, no! Your hand, give me your hand."
While putting his hand in hers he says "Why?" with such skepticism.
She has rough and square shaped hands that are also unpleasantly cold. His answer is given in how her eyes light up with awareness or confirmation.
"I thought they'd be warm." She explains and starts kneading her forearm over his, then the other side. The other hand keeps his arm prompted out by enclosing his.
He looks to the upper left because nobody's ever done this before. Firey's had brownie batter spilled all over him, he's melted sand under him, he's had quartz rocks tossed into him so they'd explode. But not this.
His touchy reaction must be obvious. She takes her arms off of him and hugs around herself like she's done wrong. "If I have a useful guy on my team I'm gonna utilize it! If I still had Bomby I'd explode him a lot!"
"No, it's fine." Firey urges her, turning to her more with a hand out tentatively. Weird being compared to Bomby, maybe he should've been on woah bunch, that sounds fun.
"Just forget it." Apparently Pin didn't like that response. He's so good at females.
He starts fishing for her arm, properly facing her, "No, come on."
Like three seconds into trying to pull one of her arms out he starts smiling because this is starting to look like rough housing.
"I said forget it! Clearly you think it's weird to hold hands!"
Where they started by slapping and pushing his persistent arms away from her, now he's actually trying to grab at one of her forearms and now they're twisting arms trying to pretend they know anything about how to get out of being grasped.
"Is that what we were doing? I wasn't sure, I thought I was being useful."
Because he turned her words right back to her, Pin hates that a lot. They're pulling closer, fine for Pin if it's just for a minute, and Firey laughs out of small nervousness.
It must be one of her signature moves, but Pin kicks her leg out to plant her heel on him for grappling him. It goes straight through into fire.
She shouts so briefly and brings her foot to herself and seethes. Firey would linger over her to similarly fret over her injury. Just hoping intensely for an indication she's actually okay. Emotionally she's not.
"You suck!" Pin says at the top of her voice the moment she's able. Despite the shouting it makes him smile.
Her closed fist gets him over his head where he's unfortunately passthrough, so there's just a painless whush noise. Maybe because he isn't flinching, she keeps making that mistake.
"No, you suck." he grins, they're still playing, right?
She puts her arms straight down. "That was stupid." She sits right down in the same way, but with her back to him. "You're stupid."
It's a shame and it sounds really dismissive, he'd kind of like to be worth the trouble of being ranted at. At least that way he'd feel like more of a person in Pin's eyes. Moreso someone Pin should care about.
She sits very squarely with her shoulders guarded, so maybe she's not done, actually? Firey copies the same pose unconsciously.
She could handle a poke right now. She doesn't seem too uptight about it. So Firey pokes her on her back.
"Stop!" she shouts suddenly and swipes for his arm. "I'm mad at you now."
Now in reality, she's got Firey riled up and it's hard getting him back down to a calmer baseline, so she can understand how Coiny can get pulled into it along with him. It's annoying to have learned.
"Sorry." he mopes, and it's clear he isn't comprehending how Pin's thinking she's now made things awkward between them from now on. And forever.
No, that thought doesn't occur to him. In fact, he thinks it only ended when she burnt her foot and ankle. If he annoyed her enough, they could start it up again.
She soon gets up and leaves.
Pin doesn't come to sit by him again for another two nights, even if she's always with the whole group when they eventually come around.
It was almost three nights without Pin here, if she didn't suddenly come running over at midnight like she were in the middle of a blizzard, although, he doesn't have a concept of cold.
"It's freezing!" Pin explains her urgency, clustering close over him. She must like creature comforts.. once you give her an outlet for it, here she is.
Maybe she likes sugar and candy too. It's weird thinking of Pin as a person and not the loud red girl who's always next to Coiny.
She's visibly shivering and audibly chattering her teeth.
Once she's calmed down from all that, the concept of cold he couldn't understand, he'll say the thing she doesn't wanna hear. "Ya gonna kick me again?"
It's hard for Pin not to explain what she really felt the other night, but if she tried, she'd explain it so condescendingly and angrily, then proceed to never speak to Firey again. Well, in that case he could still figure it out.
He's stupidly, boyishly, ridiculously stubborn. "I'm over that." Pin says very grumpy but informing him it's water under the bridge. It's supposed to be reassuring.
"Well, I'm not." Firey responds with this instantly, surprising her. "We can hold hands if you want."
How is that Firey's solution to all this, the real problem? Just giving in, letting her bully him? Shouldn't they fight more about it? It's frustrating and everything is frustrating.
"But I.." her shrill voice cracks, "I made it uncomfortable, for you." It's like she's wrenching out the words. Since idfb she's trying to be more communicative instead of combative. Like, help me, help you.
It's really good talking to people everyday that think she's just weird like that, instead of seeing her as someone trying to change themselves. Firey's included in that group because he's really stupid.
"No you didn't?" Firey says simply. She may have entirely imagined his reaction based off of a single facial expression.
"Um." she says so intelligently.
Pin puts her hand down on the grass. Coiny doesn't talk about feelings either.
Firey applies his hand and encloses hers. It's really not a sweet gesture, maybe tentative, hesitant, or curious. He has question eyebrows and that doesn't frustrate her too severely.
Pin shifts to face him and kneads both her hands through one of his like a heat pack.
It weirdly calms her nerves.