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Tee inhaled the heady scents of the forest as he stepped off the travel pod, O trailing close behind him. He closed his eyes, rubbed his temples, and sighed wearily. As the captain of the SS Tetra, he knew that he should be patient with his crew members, but there was only so much he could take. After having to calm Ai down with a battle after the twins slipped rocks into his food, Zed’s voicebox broke and he started to spew nonsense about nutrients, Ess burst into tears and demanded that he fix the problem, Tee had blown a fuse and told them that he was going on a little break to cool off.
(Of course, by that time he was shouting, and since everyone was so shocked that he had raised his voice, no one had objected.)
He rarely left the ship, but when he felt he needed time alone, he came to this forest to recharge. It was beautiful and tranquil. Sunlight filtered through the fat green leaves of the ginormous trees, and the creatures that rested in their branches chirped a soothing melody carried by a cool breeze. The soft moss coating the forest floor acted as a carpet underfoot, squishing under his boots with every step he took. The trees had also begun to shed, their leaves scattered about the forest floor, browning at the edges.
It was the perfect place to let off steam and let himself wander. Of course, O always accompanied him on such trips. And today was no exception. Tee laughed softly as O let out a delighted “Pipi!” as he floated toward a mysterious blue reptile clinging to the rough bark of a tree. The forest never failed to amaze either of them.
After wandering around Tee stumbled upon a small clearing full of strange plants. As he knelt to inspect a honey-coloured flower, he felt a prickling at the back of his neck; he was being watched. He shot up and whipped his head around to find a young man staring at him, face cast in shadow by a nearby tree. The stranger gave a start as they locked eyes; as if he hadn’t expected Tee to notice him.
But instead of running away, the stranger began to stalk forward, radiating waves of menace, causing Tee to whip out his disk and O gave a startled “Pipipi!”
As the man stepped into the clearing, Tee looked closer at his face and realised that he was a boy who could be several years older than him. His hair was a striking deep blue that covered half his face, save for a bright teal cowlick sticking up from the top of his head. A single amber eye filled with rage was fixed on Tee.
“ You,” the boy growled in a surprisingly deep voice.
Tee was caught slightly off guard at the amount of contempt packed into that single word. His hatred seemed personal as if Tee had personally offended his father. Keeping his disk raised, Tee asked in a clear voice, “Have we met?”
His question was ignored by the other boy. “Dimensional parasite,” he hissed, “Have you any idea the havoc you have wrecked on spacetime? How much chaos your heart has been causing?” With each word, he took a step forward, but now Tee was tilting his head in confusion.
“What are you talking about? What havoc?” Tee frowned, his confusion visible.
The boy’s face twisted in rage. “And now you’re feigning innocence? Don’t pretend like you don’t understand,” he snapped at him. “You think you’ve been doing such a good job on reporting the disturbances in spacetime? The only reason why your dimension seems like it’s so calm is because I’ve been keeping it stable. But now your feelings are tearing open another rift, and a repeat of the Intersection is unavoidable.” He narrowed his eyes as he stepped even closer. “You’ve as good as doomed the Tetris world.”
Now Tee felt his frustrations from the previous events from the day begin to boil over. “I still have absolutely no idea what you're talking about,” Tee snapped back. “But what I do know is that I will never betray my duties as the Captain of the SS Tetra.”
“Well,” the stranger narrowed his eyes at him. “It doesn’t matter whether or not you will confess to your crimes or not. I will eradicate every parasite to keep the order of the dimensions in check—starting with you.”
Tee felt a familiar shift in the air: the forming of tetriminos. The boy was gearing up for a battle. Tee gritted his teeth. While the circumstances were far from ideal for fighting a hostile, he had little choice in the matter, and Tee had a feeling that he would make a formidable opponent.
The blue-haired boy raised his arms as energy surged in the air around him. Tee readied his disk. He felt the tetriminos around him, felt the familiar rush that came with a Tetris battle—
“Pipi, pipipi!”
“O!?” Tee let out a startled gasp as the bright yellow furball popped up right in the centre of the battlefield, right in between the two battlers, forcing him to halt his spells and cancel the energy flow, causing the tetriminos around him to vanish.
Tee opened his mouth to tell O to get out of the way and into safety, but O waved his hands (paws?) around wildly and said “Pipi, pipipi, pipipipipi. Pipipi!”
Tee’s jaw dropped at the ridiculous suggestion, while his forgotten adversary looked on in confusion. “I-I don’t think that’s a very good idea, O…”
“Pipi, pipi pipi!”
“I–I see…”
“Pipipi, pipipipi?”
“Well, I’m not certain that will—”
“Pipipi! Pipipi, pipipipi!”
Tee rubbed his temples. “I don’t think that’s how it works, O,” he sighed.
“Pipipi!” O was insistent.
After a moment of hesitation, Tee relented. “Well, I’ll trust your judgement, but if this goes south…”
“Pipi!”
“I know, I know…”
Meanwhile, the blue-haired hostile had no idea what was going on, and confusion had swiftly replaced rage. “...what?”
Tee turned his attention back to him, suddenly feeling nervous and ridiculous. This might have been the stupidest thing he was going to do, and if it backfired…
Tee mumbled something into his fist.
The boy frowned. “I didn’t hear you.”
“Would—” Tee cleared his throat, feeling his face flush with embarrassment with what he was about to say. “Would you like to go on a walk with me? Through the forest? To…to help cool off…just…for half an hour…” Tee wanted to find a hole and hide in it. He had never felt more dumb, asking an enemy to go on a walk with him…
Evidently, the other didn’t seem to know how to respond to this ridiculous proposal either. “...what.”
“I–I mean—” Tee stumbled over his words, trying to parrot O’s reasoning. “O thought it would be a good idea if we went on a walk together, to cool off steam or something…?”
“Why would you…? I’m your enemy, parasite. I’m supposed to—”
“Yes, I know, I’m some kind of ‘parasite’ that’s going to destroy the world,” Tee sighed, still trying to get over the fact that they were really having this conversation. “But…if O says that going on a walk will help cool both of us down, then…well, maybe after that, then we can battle, or you can ‘eradicate’ me, or whatever…”
The boy’s face twisted in confusion; he was still trying to comprehend the situation. Tee couldn’t blame him, in all honestly. He was used to having O giving various strange suggestions to problems that surprisingly got the job done, but this…was on a whole new level entirely. Never once did Tee imagine that he would be proposing a walk with a stranger who had tried to destroy him in a battle on sight.
“I…suppose…it couldn’t hurt,” mumbled the boy. Tee internally sighed with relief. Not only would he have been completely defenceless had the other decided to attack (he had to put away his disk to placate him) it would have been extremely embarrassing for him to be rejected in such a way. Tee then proceeded to chastise himself. Why did he care so much what other people thought of him? It shouldn’t matter so much, much less for a stranger who had tried to attack him on sight!
“Are you coming?” An annoyed voice broke the train of his thoughts. He looked up to see the blue-haired boy standing with his back to him, face angled away.
“Ah, right…” Tee sighed, walking forward to join him, O giggling with excitement and trailing behind his partner.
~~~
“Why are you here, anyway?” The blue-haired was the first to break the awkward silence. “I thought I was the only one that came here.”
“Oh…” Tee was slightly caught off guard by the sudden question, then internally smacked himself for the hesitation. Why was making conversation so difficult for him? “I just…wanted to take a break from my coworkers. They got pretty loud, and I was tired of how repetitive they were getting…”
“I got into an argument with my sister,” came his reply. If Tee hadn’t been busy fidgeting with his gloves, he would have noticed the guilt taking over the other’s features for a split second, before vanishing just as quickly. “I may have…said some things that I didn’t mean. But it had to be done, otherwise she would have just kept repeating herself.”
“I may have said some things that I regret as well,” Tee sighed. “And I try so hard to keep my emotions in check…I can’t believe I snapped at them like that.”
“Well,” the boy said. “Everyone has their breaking point. Everyone needs to let off steam every once in a while, even captains like you.”
At the time, Tee did not think to question why or how the stranger knew this; he was far too caught up in his own thoughts. “...thank you,” Tee said. Then, for the first time since the start of their walk, Tee lifted his head to meet the boy’s amber eyes. “Maybe you can make up with your sister eventually as well. I’m sure she would understand if you explained to her why you were frustrated with her. Being straightforward about your emotions can help.” Awfully rich coming from someone like him.
“I see,” a flicker of regret crossed the boy’s features. After a beat of silence, he admitted, albeit begrudgingly, “You didn’t seem like…how I thought you would be.”
Tee raised a sceptical eyebrow at him. “What? Like a dimension-destroying parasite whose heart is apparently tearing at the seams of space-time?”
“I–” he seemed strangely flustered, and Tee felt a tugging at his lips. Maybe O’s suggestion wasn’t such a disastrous idea after all.
Almost on cue, the other boy rapidly decided to change the topic. “What’s that little yellow thing that keeps following you around? Is it your familiar?”
Tee shook his head. “This is my partner and lifelong friend, O. He’s the communications officer for my ship, and accompanies me wherever I go.”
“How do you communicate?”
“O’s language is one that is easy enough to understand, given enough time.”
“So I take that he’s the one who pushed you to make that ridiculous suggestion?”
Tee’s felt his face warm a little in embarrassment. “Yes…but perhaps it wasn’t as disastrous as I thought it would be.”
They fell into a comfortable silence after that, and it wasn’t until a little while later that Tee realised he had actually managed to hold a relatively casual conversation with a stranger, a first for him.
Tee then noticed the boy beside him walking a little funny. At first, he thought it was some sort of limp, then realised that he was hopping on one foot on certain spots of the forest floor. Tee’s curiosity got the best of him. “What are you doing?” he asked.
The blue-haired never once took his gaze off the ground as he explained. “I’m playing a game. Step on all of the crunchy leaves with one foot, then switch to the other when you’ve crunched three.” After a beat of hesitation, he asked timidly, “Do you want to join?”
“Sure,” came Tee’s reply. He had never heard of a kind of battle that involved walking on crunchy leaves, but it couldn’t hurt to try out a new style.
“I-if you’re wondering, my older sister taught me this game. She’s always saying that it’s important to have fun and stuff…” It took a couple of moments for Tee to realise that he was embarrassed.
“Oh,” Tee smiled softly. “Your older sister seems like she’s nice.”
“I—yeah, I guess,” he mumbled back in response. “We just haven’t been agreeing on stuff recently, is all.”
“I can understand that,” Tee replied, thinking of Ess and the twins. Annoying and rude, yes, but he loved them nonetheless (not that he would care to say it right to their faces, of course).
They decided to make a contest of who could crunch the most leaves, though because they were keeping up a conversation at the same time, no one counted who won. Tee noticed that the other boy seemed to enjoy watching his vest flutter in the breeze as he hopped, something that would have embarrassed him had it been anyone else. Tee came to realise how childlike some of the other boy’s mannerisms were. Even though his appearance suggested that there was an age gap of several years between them, it was almost unsettling, the babyish look in the boy’s eyes. But Tee brushed off this uneasiness and didn’t mention it as they chatted together comfortably, hopping around in any direction. By that time, far more than half an hour had gone by, though neither boy cared to mention.
Just as they began to fall into a comfortable silence once more, O grabbed Tee’s vest and chirped out a “Pipi!” pointing to a nearby shrub. Tee gasped in surprise as he realised what it was, catching the blue-haired boy’s attention just as he was about to hop on a particularly crunchy-looking leaf.
“What is it?” he asked curiously.
“They’re jewelberries,” Tee whispered, awestruck. As the other drew closer, he, too, gasped in wonder.
The shrub hung heavy with what looked like perfect, polished rubies, but a closer look revealed they were berries. The small fruits caught the sunlight, and their smooth surfaces reflected it back in brilliant shades of red, illuminating the forest floor and nearby trees. Tee knelt down closer to the bush to give them a closer look. He then drew back, clearly satisfied with what he found. “What luck,” he said.
“‘What luck’? What does that mean?” he turned around to see the boy still standing a little ways back. “Are these jewelberries rare?”
“That, and they take a long time to ripen,” Tee replied. “It takes years for the shrubs to start bearing fruit, and even then, they only ripen at certain times of year. We were extremely lucky to find these in the wild as well. They’ve been overharvested and there are now thought to be only a few left.” He remembered Ex once talking about the cuisine of his home planet, and how much he missed it. Jewelberries had once been on the menu, evidently.
“So…you can eat these?” the other boy murmured doubtfully.
“Yes,” Tee said, confused slightly. Wasn’t what he just said heavily implied eating them?
A low grumbling noise interrupted his thoughts, and he realised it was coming from the blue-haired boy’s stomach. Said boy’s face flushed in embarrassment as he fidgeted with the cuffs of his tunic. “When was the last time you ate?” Tee asked, concern brushing his words.
“...A couple of days ago,” came the other’s reluctant reply.
Tee furrowed his brows, his concern rising. “You shouldn’t go that long without eating. It’s not healthy.” And he would know with the many, many times he had received lectures from Ex and Zed for the very same reason.
“I know that,” came an exasperated voice, “I just—due to the nature of my existence…” the boy trailed off for a moment, struggling to find the right words. “It’s just…it can be difficult to eat, sometimes…”
Now Tee was just plain confused, but he brushed it off. Questions could be put off. “Well, then,” he started, “Why don’t you try these jewelberries with me? We can find you something more substantial later.”
“...sure,” he reluctantly agreed.
Tee wordlessly plucked three berries from the shrub. He passed one to O, who “Pipi!” ed cheerfully before shoving the whole thing in his mouth before standing up to face his…what? Friend, partner, former hostile? Okay, probably not that last one, he thought wryly.
Shoving the thoughts from his mind, Tee held out one of the berries to him, a sort of silent invitation.
He accepted.
Tee inspected the hard fruit once again. It really was beautiful; each hard, shiny face caught the sunlight streaming through the canopy and reflected it back in shades of blood red. It almost looked too pretty to eat.
He pushed the berry past his lips and felt his eyes widen. He had expected something crunchy, given its hard texture, but the skin broke as soon as he bit down, releasing the flavourful juice onto his tongue. It was the perfect mix of sweet and sour, with a tangy aftertaste that lingered in his mouth.
Tee looked up to see the other boy nibble at one end experimentally, then shove the whole thing into his mouth. He really could see why these were overharvested. They met each other eyes, came to a soundless agreement, and then turned back to the jewelberry shrub.
~~~
Tee, O, and the blue-haired boy sat in mute bliss as they chewed, curled up underneath a large tree, an ever-shrinking pile of the jewelberries in between them, neither willing to break the silence (except for O’s occasional “Pipi”s and Tee’s nonverbal noises of amusement or exasperation depending on what he said).
Just as Tee was working up the nerve to start a conversation, the other boy asked abruptly, “Why are you being so nice to me? I tried to attack you, parasite.” There was almost an edge of desperation in his words as if he were frantically trying to search for a reason to attack him.
Tee didn’t hesitate in his response, though. “If O decides to trust you, then I will as well,” He replied calmly. The other boy fell silent. It stretched on for long enough that Tee thought that he might have fallen asleep until he spoke softly. “What’s your name, parasite?”