MHA #2 | Friday Evening

[defenderofdesmoines]

Annie and Diego had passed a real rite of passage as a long-term, cohabitating couple this evening: they had gone on a date to IKEA.

(And yes, Annie had insisted that this shopping trip was a date. There had been golf pencils and lingonberries involved as well as picking out furniture with umlauts, okay? Date.)

And of course, now, they were back home with their spoils spread out on the floor in the form of a set of unassembled shelves, their associated little pack of hardware, beer (necessary), and the set of directions that Annie was now considering.

"Huh, this is fun. They just use this little cartoon man to tell you what to do," she said, flipping the page over to show Diego. "Probably so they don't have to translate it from Swedish."

Something like that, Annie.

[for the fella!]

Comments

[defenderofdesmoines]

Annie made a little face. "Tasteful knick-knacks," she amended, idly reaching for the little bag to inspect the weird plastic washers that had come with this thing, too. "Less on the stuffed-and-mounted side of things. And hey, as long as we make sure we don't cover every surface with a picture of my face, we'll avoid looking like my mom's house, too."

[knife_bender]

"I wouldn't mind lots of pictures of your face." But he was biased.

[defenderofdesmoines]

"I'm okay with it as long as your face is in most of those pictures, too," Annie decided. She was also biased. "It's sort of weird seeing your own face everywhere in isolation."

Maybe part of the reason Annie took so many pictures with her friends was because she just wanted a record that Annie existed just as much as Starlight did.

[knife_bender]

"True," he agreed. "You wanna hear something weirder? There's, like, painted portraits of us all over the mansion. All of us except Vanya in our domino masks with Dad."

And that one weird portrait that he had put up of Five after he disappeared which Diego still didn't understand.

[defenderofdesmoines]

"What?" Okay, that actually was super strange, yeah. "You had to like, sit for a painting like it's 1850 or whatever? That's so weird. Kind of uber pretentious, too."

Also, like, kind of sad for Vanya again, there.

"Mom just has all my medals and posters and promotional shit up everywhere," she added. "It's more embarrassing than weird."

[knife_bender]

"My dad is super pretentious," he said. "So no paintings of us or promotional shit on the new shelves."

[defenderofdesmoines]

"I would allow a drawing," Annie decided, considering this. "I don't want to rule out a cute caricature of us on a skateboard or something."

[knife_bender]

"Oh, I would love to see you on a skateboard." He had the feeling it would be hilarious.

[defenderofdesmoines]

"I would be amazing on a skateboard," Annie decided, knowing this was completely, utterly false. "I used to love my rollerblades."

When she was, you know, nine.

[knife_bender]

"I bet you looked so cool," he teased. "You could add that to your syllabus to teach people."

[defenderofdesmoines]

"I could," Annie noted thoughtfully. "Good excuse to make people wear some deeply sexy helmets and knee pads."

She was starting to understand that at least thirty percent of teaching -- at last, at this school -- seemed to involve activities designed to be mildly humiliating.

[knife_bender]

"You know what we should have done?" he said. "Put furniture building on the syllabus and have other people do this for us."

[defenderofdesmoines]

"I mean, knowing some of my students last time, that's asking for some very mixed results," Annie noted with a wince. "But come on, this is easy. And we'll be able to say we built it ourselves!"

Assembling basic furniture: an accomplishment held by college freshmen across the nation.

[knife_bender]

"Okay, we can totally do this," Diego said, sitting his beer down. "...where do we start?"

[defenderofdesmoines]

"I think we need both kinds of screwdrivers?" Annie said, showing him the picture. "The X kind and the straight kind. And a hammer. Do we have a hammer?"

This was already going well.

[knife_bender]

"You'd think they put in the box. They put everything else in there." Of course IKEA rightly assumed people had hammers in their house.

[defenderofdesmoines]

"They gave us this?" Annie offered, picking up an allen wrench. "I mean, I don't know why they wouldn't give us all the tools? Maybe we can just use something heavy as a hammer."

Look at that improvisation.

[knife_bender]

"That's a good idea," he agreed. "Especially if you're the one doing the hammering."

She could lift a car so she could also probably be good at that too.

[defenderofdesmoines]

"That's probably a good idea," Annie agreed. "See, the little cartoon man has a buddy, so it seems like they want you to do this with a friend, anyway." Which just made it more of a date, so there. "And then you can handle the screwing."

She heard herself, yes. But how else was she supposed to say that?

[knife_bender]

"It's what I'm good at," he joked, kissing her on the cheek. "Should be wearing my shirt from Wednesday."

[defenderofdesmoines]

"I do like that shirt," Annie had to note, even if she was blushing faintly now. "Playing to your strengths."

He had a lot of strengths, to be fair, but like. Come on.

"Do we have screwdrivers, for that matter?" Did they have any tools?

[knife_bender]

"Don't need them," he said, pulling a knife out of one of his many pockets. You bet your ass he had been wearing his tactical gear to IKEA.

[defenderofdesmoines]

At least Annie was really used to it by now. "How many knives did you take to go furniture shopping?" she asked lightly, leaning over to press an affectionate kiss to his jaw. "A dozen? More?"

She teased, but she had learned since Valentine's Day to appreciate his foresight with how many knives he took on little outings like this. (Besides, an IKEA would actually probably be a really fun place to get into a fight. Annie could do some real damage in their lighting department.)

[knife_bender]

"Around a dozen is probably right," he said with a grin. "We might have been attacked by crazies looking for sales."

[defenderofdesmoines]

"Someday," Annie warned, "we're going to go to a concert or something with a metal detector and you're going to end up getting frisked by security."

And Annie would probably laugh.