A/N Bettaowl: As noted in the summary, this fic is going to be a one-shot collection of anything that inspires K_morpho and I in our series, or events that can't necessarily be explored in depth. I recommend reading the original mascot AU first, for context!

But as a brief refresher, Haseul's a genius scientist/engineer, and Ara's a psych major.

“You’re still sick.”

It takes a second, looking up.

“I’m fine,” Haseul responds.

She catches a twitch of Ara’s mouth. There’s a lazy swing of the joint pinched precariously in between her lips. The bright cherry of the stick flares with soundless fumes.

Haseul instinctively pulls away, drunken in her desire to pinpoint the spatial center of the cloud.

She spends a few more seconds watching the center shift, back to the girl who created it, and then back again to the fading smoke, away from the girl who she realizes had still been watching her.

There’s a conversation in that look. Haseul doesn’t have the energy to indulge it so she smothers her face into the blanket she’s currently swaddled in. Even then, her restless body conspires to keep her mind busy. She suddenly remembers to stifle a tickle in .

Ara leans over to tug at Haseul’s blanket. It knocks her glasses askew.

“Fine.” The gesture is brief but just enough to slight her. “If you really insist on getting ed up, darling.”

Haseul can practically feel the prickling smile split across Ara’s face when the psych major spots Haseul’s pushed up spectacles, peeking against the sliver of her forehead. On an impulse she reaches out to right the frames, tucking Haseul’s hair behind her ear with a thumb.

“Charming, I guess I’ll be relying on you.” Haseul mutters. Ara smiles wider when Haseul flusters at the attention, but eventually pulls away.

“Tell me if the smoke bothers you.”

“It doesn’t. I want to try.”

Couldn’t be worse than diesel. Haseul clears to rid of a sticky memory like it’s phlegm.

“Sure, don’t let anything stop you.”

“I’m not sick anymore.”

“Yeah, and I’ve brought enough for two.”

“You always do.”

“I’m always prepared for a little adventure.”

“Let me join you then… on the… trip.”

Ara glances at her patient’s squirmy posture, thoughtfully retucking the blanket she had earlier disturbed. She nods, takes a savorfull drag, eyelids falling, body sinking into the fleeting warmth, until she extinguishes the red dot against a shrieking metal resolve.

“Alright. Break time after this one.” The undergraduate points at the split-screen of empirical data and complementary walls of text on her computer.

Ara goes back to priming through the key contents of her psychology journal for the nth time in that afternoon sunlight, not without — unsurprisingly — sliding her feet — cold — under the covers. Haseul forgives her cheeky behavior and picks up on her own scholarly reading, feeling sheepish herself that she hadn’t been as helpful as she wanted to be with Ara’s research. She knows her companion won’t get to the 11 other tabs she has opened, even if it was never the intention to.

The two begin to wrap up their broken clock pretense.

Sitting with shoulders up and heads down in the far corner of the Nerd Nest, on a right arm angled chaise sectional leather sofa Haseul frequently sleeps on, the girls press closer than strictly necessary, ushered by the perpetual chill in the air. It’s a conveniently wordless excuse that the temperature is a product of part-thrill and part-mandation for proper chemical storage.

They had initially settled on their respective positions on the sofa to maximize heat-bathing potential from the rays beaming in through the windows on the opposite wall. Of course, Haseul’s the one to get the patient-prioritized sun-soaked spotlight, even though Ara’s just as prone to the cold. So in addition to that plan, they’d also resorted to extra layers of clothing.

Haseul has on a hoodie Ara lets her borrow after she accidentally left it there on the day of the rain storm, and to equally compensate, Ara has on one of hers. As if content as a cat marking a new home, there are pieces of the girl scattered around Haseul’s house like pencil doodles on scrapped paper and pink hair ties bounding cylindrical junk on workbench counters.

Ara rests her foot against Haseul’s thigh. She can’t help a chuckle escaping her as she shoves it away, thinking about how the slight demur in Ara’s footsteps when she’d first arrived had quickly become a thing of the past.

Ara stretches and peers down at the battery percentage before closing the lid on the laptop. She turns to fully face her partner, criss crossing her legs.

“Here, sweet and simple,” Ara says, rewarding Haseul’s patience with a flicking of her worn lighter once, twice; a new joint rolling in between her forefingers.

The flame against the end of the joint, wisps of smoke rising as soon as it’s ignited. Ara wraps her lips around the other end, chest rising with a slow and meditated intake. She exhales, tilting her head up to blow a billowy stream of white towards the vents above their heads. Her gaze fixes blatantly on the novice as she gives her instructions.

“Take a deep breath, and make sure to take it all the way into your lungs. Don’t just keep it in your mouth. It’s okay if you don’t get it right from the start. Your body won’t like it. It’ll hurt but only because your body will want to reject it.”

Ara hands Haseul the joint, watching expectantly.

Nerves bundle together as the engineer carefully weighs the thin roll on her fingertips.

Haseul has had plenty of opportunities to get high when she was studying in Colorado, but she never really regarded it with that much interest. As that was the general disposition she had with most recreational activities, there was no reason at the time for it to be an exception.

Ara hides her grin into a palm. She must’ve made a face while being pensive. As childish as it sounds, Haseul didn’t want to disappoint.

“All the way into my lungs, you said?”

She readies herself, repeating Ara’s step-by-step procedure in her head, learning the rise and fall of her chest.

“Yeah. It’s just breathing. Except prepare yourself for the―oh, okay, or just go for it, but be careful―“

“HACK, oh―oh, this burns―“

“Haseul, oh my god.”

Haseul feels like she’s choking on jetpack exhaust. Hiccups of smoke escape in spluttering coughs, she doesn’t even notice when the joint is plucked away from her hand and replaced with a glass of water.

“Drink, now.”

Haseul gulps the cooling liquid down greedily. Her insides feel raw, like she doused the inferno end of the stick directly against the inside of and the chalky fire roared out of control. Ara’s hand rubs comforting circles on her back.

“How would you rank blazing one on the 1-10 pain scale?”

“Maybe a 4?” A 4.5. “The water helped a lot, it’s okay now... It just caught me… by surprise.” She’s still rattled, the itch in resurfacing with each cough. She’s well aware that her cheeks are blooming in heat, and it couldn’t be blamed on a fever. That was hardly the most graceful attempt.

“What about you? Doesn’t this hurt you too?”

“Not so much anymore. But sometimes we need a little pain to remind us what makes us human.”

Haseul touches her chest with a wince, “I’m sorry,” and downs her water, “But I’ve underestimated the pain.”

Ara’s hand leaves Haseul’s back, but she squeezes in closer to steal her away from any further brooding thoughts.

“Don’t worry. I was like this the first time too. My friends dared me to smoke from one of the bigger glass bongs, about this high. And those burn, even if you’re a veteran.” She laughs merrily.

“I didn’t even get high, it was so bad I didn’t even want to think about trying again.” Ara lightly shoulder bumps Haseul.

“Anyway, trust me. This is natural. Are you feeling anything?”

Haseul ponders the question, the cannabis’s flavor lingering on the back of her tongue. The pungent stench of weed seems to persist and the couch will have to be sprayed with something to cover up the smell.

Nothing about her reasoning or processing abilities felt particularly impaired so she admits, “I don’t know if I took as large a breath as I could have.”

Ara nods in understanding. “You don’t usually feel the effects until after a couple of hits. Up to you if you want to try again.”

Haseul imagines the crackles of embers cooking up an ashy trail along her windpipe — but she concedes easily at the suggestion.

Ara furrows her brows. “Are you sure?”

She snuffs out the last cinders in and nods firmly. What she lacks in trachea self-preservation she makes up with determination, she supposes. Or stubbornness.

“I’ll be fine. And this should stop burning after the first few tries, right?”

Ara scrutinizes for a moment longer and acquises. “Alright.”

Haseul allows Ara to place the joint in between her lips. Fixates on Ara’s leg pressing against hers as she nudges forwards.

“Inhale. All the way into your lungs...”

 

---

 

20 minutes later and Haseul is floating miles away from her body.

Her head is stuffed with cotton candy, fluff, and other bright, simple things. Everything has been picked and prodded apart into simplicities. Complex solid figures broken down into squiggling squares, circles, rectangles, rhombi... Like the thread on a sleeve absentmindedly pulled at until the thread unwinds from its togetherness, until the only thing left is the vaguest sense of a shirt, she tugs at the loose strands of the universe and holds the unraveling fibers of shapes. Cohesion lost.

She giggles and plays with a half-hearted paper crane she tried folding about 5 minutes ago.

“Haseul. You are so ing stoned.”

Ara… Ara, Ara: plump cheeks and lips and eyes that look gorgeous in fiery golden sun, brown hair glinting, pen tapping against her notebook in off-set patterns and decorating the page with black ladybug spots. She smells of pinewood, peppermint, forest. Earthy. Grounding. Haseul’s head swims at the scent.

A precursory glance around the laboratory reveals nothing new, and yet. Every single design and schematic she could unwind with her mind. doesn’t hurt anymore, no more jetpack exhaust — is so cottony — and her head is ing flying blasting off into the stratosphere of drug-induced, languid, comfortable and warm human pleasure.

“Do you even hear me?”

Ara tilts her head, but Haseul seems keen on the other side of the room, eyes half-lidded, blinking stars out of her eyes.

…She’s gone.

Ara snorts lightly. It’s like watching a baby deer take flight for the first time. …No, that’s not right. Ara stretches on the couch, popping her back and tossing the notebook carelessly to the side, again, exiting out of the tabs on her laptop. Exit… Exit.

Ara catches Haseul from the corner of her eyes.

She smiles and they exchange a knowing look.

They made decent progress, and Ara should really take Haseul out for dinner again for helping her hammer out some of the finer details.

Exit exit exit.

Haseul gives life back into her tiny piece of paper, turning it into a paper airplane instead. She flies it across the room, grinning wide when it crosses to the other side.

It feels like there’s something nipping at her ribcage, twisting with too much affection. She takes a deep breath, numbing the sensation that she knows will return with a loving, heart-shaped vengeance.

That’s a problem for future her. For now her head is starting to swim in and out of lucidity, on the brink of slipping out shore. She keeps a loose hold on the end of the pier, ready to get lost but not yet ready to lose the moment she has to study Haseul.

“Hey, hey Ara.” And Ara falls right back into the present, Haseul’s smile turned lopsided with baked seduction―

“I’d like to observe your geometry.”

Ara barks out peals of laughter, disbelief and even worse, legitimate amusement, coloring the sound. “So this is what you’re like.”

Haseul pouts, and Ara tries desperately hard not to focus on her lips. “You’re greasy all the time, this is only fair. I get at least a few freebies.”

“Yeah? What else have you got then?”

Haseul’s eyes pool dark at the challenge, stars pinched out of existence, leaning in until they were inches apart, never breaking the gaze. Her voice pitches low of dark chocolate sweet. “I could unravel you at the seams if you’d let me, darling.”

Ara’s heart slams against her chest and she chokes.

She doesn’t mean to be caught off-guard, she’s rarely ever been one-upped in a game of flirtations. It’s hard to swallow, Ara’s still mute, and her silence is stretching painfully long.

Haseul is going to be the death of her, Ara decides, trying not to think about tugging Haseul closer and peeling her hoodie off.

The scientist takes the silence as victory, takes pity on Ara’s wit lying prone somewhere in the back of her skull, and softens the angle of her smile. The stars return with just another blink or two. “I’ll be cashing in my other freebies at a later date.”

“Well,” she says, peeling her fingers one-by-one off the pier and drifting off to join Haseul. A familiar cotton enters her system. Eyes turn half-lidded as the world goes both sharper and fuzzier at the outlines, “Don’t keep me waiting.”

Haseul rolls her eyes again, the minor movement somehow plucking her mind from her body, and her body tugging it back a moment later. She’s not come down at all: her movements are still boneless, and her thoughts drag along but with crystal clarity once they arrive.

And her eyes have been open for one of her creations. She slides off the couch, wandering towards the invention laid off to the side table. She returns in a molasses-like walk that takes longer coming back. It takes more out of her than she expects, but she shakes off the exhaustion.

“Check this out.”

Haseul sets the object on the table with little fanfare. It’s a tiny thing, no bigger than Haseul’s palm, folded up in an intricate design that Ara instinctively associates with Haseul. It looks to be made from the same metal used for the jetpack models.

“Open sesame!” the engineer exclaims, ing her hands out towards the device and triggering the unfolding mechanism with a silly squinting expression. Ara leans back in appreciation, nodding and taking another extended breath.

“That’s hot,” she releases. It returns to a flat metal sheet.

“What does it do?”

“Mmmh, it’s just one of my takes on paper mechatronics. I was excited about the potential applications of my origami designs. There’s a magnet at the center that I can manipulate.”

Almost as if someone were taking a string and tugging at its edges, the design carefully bends itself together into a different form: a small, miniature paper airplane.

“Isn’t it cute?” Haseul gushes. She nudges at it gently with a finger, coaxing it into folding outwards again.

“Cute. Very you.”

“Thank you. It keeps me company while I’m working.” Ara indulges her interest in the tiny invention, examining it as if she were inspecting the world’s most brilliant piece of art.

Haseul sets the device down on the table, once again changing the shape of the metal into that of an abstract fractal-like design. With the belated realization that her eyes were sliding shut with newfound-drowsiness, her words slipped out in a slur, “This pattern ‘minds me of you.”

Ara takes one look at her, wrapping one arm around Haseul and tugging her to rest against her side. Ara’s body serves as the perfect pillow. Haseul nestles in between her heat and the blankets.

“‘Mm awake,” Haseul murmurs.

“I know you are.” Ara thoughtfully takes Haseul’s glasses from her eyes to set them down carefully on the table, picking up something else.

“Do you mind if I finish this?” Ara asks, holding the joint Haseul couldn’t finish earlier.

Haseul shakes her head. Listening to the ‘tink tink’ of the flint strike, her ears watch for the sparks, for the grey ephemeral smoke eating paper and plant, and spewing ashes.

“Don’ let an’thing stop you.” She doesn’t know if Ara hears her in the fog.

Pressed this close, Ara’s herbal-infused scent entangles in Haseul’s thoughts, and the seductive softness tempts her to rest. Feeling the rhythmic organic machinery expanding... and contracting, Haseul drifts off higher and higher as she imagines the coils of smoke fill into Ara’s lungs… and leave.

Further and further.

Until she’s gone.

A/N Bettaowl: This is the first fic K_morpho and I legitimately wrote together on, it was fun. :D

As an update on the next chapter of the mascot au, it's been stalled for a while, now. Once winter break comes we'll both have time away from college to write, so it'll be out by next year at the latest.

Thank you for reading!

Bettaowl: twitter and curiouscat

K_morpho: twitter