Kane has lost track of his failed attempts at styling his hair in his bathroom mirror. No matter what he does, it will not stay in any shape or style that works with the blue hoodie he’d bought earlier. Of course, his opinion on what looks ‘good’ with a blue hoodie is dubious at best, but he has spent the better part of the last hour looking up social media posts of people wearing similar clothes.
After his latest attempt at using water to try and get his hair to hold shape failed, he more or less resigns himself to the failure and abandons the pursuit. If he were to be honest with himself, he needs a haircut. His brown hair looks a bit shaggy straight out of the shower like this. If it were shorter, he thinks he might be able to better sell the ‘not trying’ look he’s pretty sure is the current mainstream for men.
Idly, as he considers the styles he’s seen at school so far, he wonders if in a few years people will look back at seventies fashion and say that his generation was minimalist in stylization. Certainly, the graphic styles and previous century revivalism that dominated the Awakening generation and Gen Alpha before them have all but died with his generation. This idle musing is mere procrastination, as it doesn’t change his frustration over his hair.
Kane is well aware that Lucy would probably tease him for worrying so much over his looks, but he does feel a little self conscious about it, and would have no problem admitting that. The shopping trip did yield one look he rather enjoys. Amy had picked out a pair of old-school aviator sunglasses with more modern blueglass lenses. Trying them on in the mirror, he can’t help but do a few poses, and smiles to himself.
Emboldened by the way the sky blue glass hides a little bit of how ugly he feels his brown eyes look, he resolves to get that haircut to complete an old-school action movie sort of look. Not knowing a hairdresser, he briefly considers texting Lucy for a recommendation, but pivots course when he sees Minerva’s conversation at the top of his contacts.
“Hey, what’s up?” The dash that indicates the message has actually notified the recipient appears immediately, and Kane is left to simply wait.
He isn’t particularly good at waiting for return texts yet, and finds himself just staring at the message until he sees the check mark that indicates it has been read, which takes a total of five minutes. He’s not sure what Minerva was doing, but thinks that’s probably an indication that she wasn’t exactly waiting for his message.
“Not much, what’s up for you?” Minerva added a little bird emoji with a winky face, but not being updated on the current trends, he has no idea how to interpret this.
“Ah, not much either. I just wanted to know if you know any good places to get a haircut.”
“Oh, sure! I just got out of the shower, give me a moment.” Minerva’s response isn’t accompanied by any emojis or anything, and the symbol that indicates she’s still typing is visible, so he opts not to respond.
A full five minutes of patiently, or perhaps impatiently, depending on whether you asked Kane himself or the phone he was staring a hole into, waiting later, another message appears.
“Alright, I’m dressed, can I call you? I don’t really like texting…”
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Somehow, Kane’s simple question turned into a fifteen minute video call, beginning with him scrambling to find presentable clothing and ending with an agreement to go to Minerva’s hairdresser after her classes tomorrow. Kane feels a little bit out of his depth after that, the feeling that he more or less got talked into way more than he intended to bargain for pervades his mind as he looks at the phone sitting on the floor in front of him.
Either way, the time is quite late, and he’s fully out of motivation to do anything. This thought to himself is a lie, because the moment he lays down on the carpet and tries to rest his eyes, his mind races. From the duel with Arran, the encounter with the two Espid goons he killed, and the spar with Lucy even before that, as confident as he is in his absorption and his martial arts, he can’t help but think of ways to improve his fighting ability. Certainly, turning off his restrictive absorption aura would help, but that isn’t really an option. Even the two ways he knows of to temporarily disable it come with downsides.
The best option for improving himself is probably to just work out more. He hasn’t really done any physical training since he turned eighteen half a year ago, when before that he was practically forced to. He’s not out of shape or anything, but ‘shape’ and ‘power’ aren’t equal. He doesn’t want to look like a musclehead, but a little more meat on his arms and legs wouldn’t hurt.
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“So, what classes do you think I should sign up for?” Kane asks the two girls sitting across from him at the cafeteria table. After not receiving an immediate response as Lucy and Amy whisper something to each other, he starts playing with his glasses on the table, pushing them around, folding them open and closed repeatedly, and so forth.
“I’m still hung up on how you let yourself get talked into going to a beauty salon by a girl you knew for all of two days…” Amy’s voice has a vague hint of disappointment in it when she speaks, but she recovers as she continues. “I’d personally say Psitech basics, but I might be biased.”
“Why not try Steiner’s again? I think he has three o’clock for advanced buffer techniques right now, he’d probably let you join if you asked him.” Lucy looks up at the ceiling for a moment, before springing back into a peppy voice as Kane imagines the lightbulb that surely just went off in her head. “Ah! You’re a special scholarship student, right? You should join me in the combat course I’m taking, it’s super fun!”
“On the first one, wouldn’t it be a little disingenuous to attend a buffer class? I’m probably better than Steiner is already. And the combat course, why does my enrollment type matter exactly?” Kane doesn’t answer Amy’s recommendation, but he does shrug at her when she puts a confused look on her face at his question.
“Ah, tuition for combat classes is pretty high, but it’s waived entirely if you’re ranked ten or higher when you sign up or if you have some sort of scholarship.” Lucy’s answer brings up the vague memories of when he was initially looking at the academy from his computer back at the Baelirus labs.
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His enrollment status means his family’s money already paid for any beginner and advanced level courses he’d want to take, but he didn’t remember seeing anything about combat courses at all. Perhaps that was just the sort of thing they expected newcomers would find out later, given the ranked matches also weren’t public knowledge to anyone outside Sanctuary.
“Ok, I’ll give it a shot. How is it graded, exactly?”
The technical discussion that followed went cleanly through one ear and out the other for Kane, but Amy’s distillation of Lucy’s explanation was simple enough to make coherent sense. It’s not graded. It isn’t a course you take for credits, but for a fasttrack license certification outside of the academy. You get the credits just for having a good attendance record, but that would never be why a student took those classes. A solid system, once explained by someone more coherent than Lucy. Hence, he agreed to sign on for it. He’d be joining midterm, but even Amy admitted that his family name alone made that kind of a moot point.
“Ok, that’s one. I think I’ll do that and then just sort of drift around to see if anything catches my eye.” Kane announces his decision to a nod from Amy and a frown from Lucy.
“After all this talk… One class. And not even an academic one? At least get your math done now, Kane.” Due to the mom-tone detected in her voice, Kane instinctively takes a defensive stance against Lucy’s point.
“I just thought it’d be best to start something like that from the beginning of next term, that's only two months away, it’s fine.” Kane’s defensive dismissal earns him a glare, but no rebuke, something he’s quite thankful for.
“Oh! I forgot to bring it up earlier, but I looked into that Minerva Faust girl, she’s rank 712, a Delta, and has no specialization.” Amy’s obvious intention to move the subject to something else is silently appreciated by Kane for the visible change in tension he feels afterwards.
“Ah… That’s more than I wanted to know without asking her, but thanks.”
“So, since she managed to wring a date out of you, do you like her?” Lucy’s more direct question than he anticipated sends him a momentary panic.
“Umm… I, um, I don’t think it’s that complex yet…” Kane recovers midway and forces out something loosely approximating the truth, before a sudden burst of realization and pattern recognition brings out a different type of honest. “So that’s what it’s like when I tease you about that sort of stuff…”
“Yeah! Now you finally get it, dumbass!” Lucy’s brief flare up gets a flinch out of both Amy and Kane, but she calms down quickly before continuing. “Will you stop doing it now?”
“No.” Kane answers immediately, before pondering for a moment and reevaluating his own stance. “Or, no, I won’t if you won’t.”
“Oh I’m not going to stop.” Lucy’s sadistic tone seems to make Amy shiver, but Kane just sighs.
“Naturally…”
Kane starts to let his mind wander to other things as Amy brings up some smalltalk topic with Lucy that he ignores. Part of him wants to know if maybe Lucy really doesn’t have romantic feelings for Amy, since she reacted the same way to his teasing that he just did to hers, but stops in his thoughts as realization strikes that it probably is the same sort of feeling.
Half empty and half full, concepts usually applied to pessimism and optimism, in his mind also applicable here. He hasn’t known Minerva long, and isn’t romantically or even really platonically attached, but he also could totally see a future where he is.
It’s still far, far too early for any sort of more complex thoughts to be worth considering in his case, but he suspects that for Lucy, it’d be more a matter of finally getting her to make the jump. The thought arises that maybe, just maybe, Lucy might be waiting for the right moment to actually do something with either side of her relationship with Amy.
He could force himself to be the catalyst for her to make a romantic move or to establish platonic boundaries. All of his conjecture hinges on the potentially dangerous assumption that Lucy is still bisexual, and the even more dangerous assumption that Amy is at least lesbian, but both of those assumptions are unverifiable at present.
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“So yeah, that’s the situation. How do I play wingman?” Kane’s question for Minerva after explaining the general situation is direct, leaves very little room for interpretation, and leaves its subject completely dumbfounded.
“That’s… Are all high-level psychics just weird? I’m pretty sure a normal person wouldn’t make any of the logical leaps you just did.” Minerva’s honest answer throws him for a bit of a loop, but he recovers his mental footing as he registers that she’s not fully serious. “As for how to do it… I don’t know, try alcohol. That’s what most people do when they want their friends to get some.”
“Hah… I’ll think about that.” Kane answers, before seriously considering her joke question from before. Certainly, if he looked at it from the angle of an outsider, he probably sounds insane for his conclusion regarding Lucy’s potential romance, but to him, having known her since she was ten, he has a different perspective. “Well… Me and Lucy are both overthinkers. You kind of have to be, especially if not thinking things through will kill us, right?”
Minerva nods to that but doesn’t respond. She’s smiling, and Kane can tell that the three hours so far they’ve spent together today between the library, subway, and now waiting for his appointment at her hairdresser have taken their toll on her energy, social and psychic. Certainly, being inside his aura for so long is probably exhausting, so part of him wonders if maybe he should opt to cut their outing together short for her sake.
As he thinks saying that would constitute shattering the small amount of confidence he can tell she’s been building up for being around him, he doesn’t actually have the heart to say it. Having just brought up the overthinking point, and now finding himself sitting next to her doing just that, he looks for anything to do to distract himself, and settles on her face.
Minerva had gone with the same green contacts, earrings, and makeup again today, Kane suspects it’s just her ‘look’, but she doesn’t have the academy uniform on. Instead, she has a black blazer over some sort of frilly green top, with black khaki pants. Black and green certainly is just her preferred color combination, he thinks. It looks good to his eyes, too.
If he walked into a fancy restaurant and saw her sitting at a table in that outfit, he’d assume she was some high-brow CEO’s armpiece. Actually, that appearance and assumption might be on purpose, considering he’s at least hypothetically the Baelirus heir. Minerva obviously still isn’t over the initial nervousness, shyness, and Kane presumes inferiority complex she has about him. It makes him feel a little bit guilty about only wearing jeans, a hoodie, and the little bit of makeup on his cheeks courtesy of Lucy. Compared to her high-effort and well-organized look, he’s failing to pull off the ‘not trying’ style.
All of those thoughts are ultimately just distractions from the real thing on his mind; the nervousness of everyone in the salon. The receptionist, stylists, and other customers all look visibly unnerved, undoubtedly by him. His appointment was made by Minerva in advance for both of them, and they’re technically five minutes or so early, but the salon appears to have two free spots and workers for them and yet no one has approached them.
“Hey… Um… Should I talk to someone? I think your aura is making them too uncomfortable to approach us.” Kane nods to her, and feels slightly relieved that she was thinking the same thing. Still, he feels at least slightly obligated to apologize for the discomfort the people here seem to have.
“I can go with you if you like, it’d probably be easier to just explain.”
“Kane, just wait here for a moment. I’ll have some girl talk with the receptionist, alright?” Having been thoroughly rejected, he unconsciously cocks his head in a bit of confusion.
“What does that mean?”
“I guess you didn’t get out much before coming here, but the amount your average citizen actually knows about even a psychic at my level is pretty much zero. Even if you tried to explain, they wouldn’t get it.” Minerva’s unusually assertive stance sounds slightly annoyed to him, and it leaves him a bit at a loss for what to respond with.
“O-Oh… Right… I’ll let you do it.” Even admitting what feels like defeat, a question still emerges. “What are you going to say?”
“Ah… ‘My poor friend, he’s a psychic, this mood will clear up once he’s feeling less mopey, please just ignore it. We’re here to get him a haircut, it’s the appointment for Faust.’ or something like that.” Kane thinks he probably looks a bit awestruck at that, but the change from her mature sounding familiar tone to the peppy schoolgirl act was even more jarring than the words actually said. However, the idea that the average person knows that little about psychics is concerning.
“That’s… Good luck.” Kane does his best to distract himself with Minerva’s figure to avoid the uncomfortable idea of a world where psychics uncontrollably broadcasting emotions is how their powers actually worked.