The tea candles next to them are reaching the end of their wicks. They've been here for a while.

In both anticipation and habit, Rodi’s fingers keep going over the keyring in his pocket, though his old apartment's keys have been missing for years.

He's not the only one reaching for objects of comfort. Spiritually cleansed yet not bodily so, Olive starts looking for the cigarettes in his coat. Rodi watches this with a slight melancholy in his smile. He can't share one with Olive anymore, ever since he's been wearing those useless patches on his arm. He offered himself either the humiliation of being a quitter, or the embarrassment of dropping dead young due to his excesses. Either the crystals or his new sense of self-preservation found the latter worse.

He wonders who Olive gets to share smokes with now, what trite things they would discuss over them.

"Have you ever told any of your lovers about Alterna?" Rodi rests an arm on the bar.

Olive's eyes go wide. "Oh god, no. I wouldn't want to scare them off."

"See, that's where our difference is. I would've started with that. First date filter."

"I don't want the responsibility of turning them crazy, once they realise they've always been living with the Liquid Crystals," Olive sheepishly grins. He had a short but intense existential crisis upon finding this out.

"Only I could handle the truth, huh?

The curt reply smacks Rodi's ballooning ego. "No. But you were crazy from the start."

Somehow flattered by the observation, Rodi leans harder into his propped elbow, eyes squeezed in his smirk.

"You have to admit, you like a bit of crazy."

It makes Olive pause with the pack between his fingers. He flips it in his hand, reminding of the flairs with his tools behind the bar, just like he learned from Rodi. He inhales, gaze affixed on his perpetual fiancé, suddenly unsure if he should cut the night here with his cigarette break.

The tingles and butterflies start bulldozing Rodi's insides. Routine would have them eagerly leaving at this hour, escaping to their home's confines. With that no longer an option, he's rediscovering the hunt and chase, how these get his hearts pumping.

"I guess it was fun figuring you out," there is fondness in Olive's tone and eyes.

The loaded morning afters come to their minds, though they were more often afternoons.

There was a brief time when Rodi could predict how he'd find himself upon waking: glued to Olive, covering as much of his bare skin with his partner's. The world was slower and calmer in his arms. One of Olive's hand would be guarding his hearts. Another would be shielding his mask from the stray dash of light about to bother him, beaming from the curtain that wasn't entirely pulled the previous night.

After returning from their night of toil, they loved to watch the early dawn turn the sky's silver light to gold. While this spectacle happened in their bedroom, they would sometimes draw out their after-hours in languid, sticky warmth. There was tongue and sweat, and then the blackout into the pillows. They would discover as they woke up that bedsheets weren't ever pulled over them. Any adjustment in their position made them cold, so they avoided moving too much while they reanimated.

However, a surprising pull dragged Olive from his warm spot, closer into Rodi's back. Before he got to complain, Olive felt Rodi clasping his hand, intertwining his fingers between the gaps. Notedly, Rodi had never done this. His hand used to recoil whenever Olive tried weaving fingers.

"I hate how guys will just start doing that shit, as if they're entitled to it," Rodi explained during his first time with Olive. He treated the gaps between his fingers more intimately than his own dick.

Yet there he was, weaving fingers and squeezing them closer to the hearts. If it wasn't peculiar enough, Olive also felt Rodi going over with his other hand, tracing around the tips of his fingers and knuckles idly. Olive's fingers, although void of any jewellery, were precious enough for Rodi to obsess over.

"Damn your hands. You're so lucky to have them."

A muffled laugh sounded against Rodi's back. "...Sure." Olive was too groggy to bother asking.

Isandro wasn't dramatic for nothing: he really thought Anthos' hands were priceless. His hands felt like all the petals and leaves he was maintaining and curating. They raised countless glasses made to perfection over Mimosa's bar mats. They lightly grazed and pushed intensely when it came to his ever-changing ways to love.

Olive quietly enjoyed how Rodi's fingertips felt on him. He fell back asleep with his nose buried into the warm skin. But a less tender yank and alarm kept him from snoring. It was time to leave. Duty called. Inkfish craved their nocturnal outings, and Mimosa had to provide.

The Inkopolitan Underground speeded them towards the heart of the Plaza. They sat next to each other, a blessing at rush hour. Everybody was returning from work. They were doing the opposite.

Often, Rodi observed the wider world while killing time on his commutes. He stared at others' hands and fins, so he wouldn't upset anyone if he stared at their faces. But he still stared a bit too intensely, causing some commuters to notice.

He was too engrossed in it to care. There was something about the five-digit hand shape to be so common among the Mollusc Era species that turned upright. Their ancestors used claws, suction cups, tendrils to carve out their survival. So, why did they form such a far-removed shape? After all, inklings were shapeshifters.

Rodi hummed a guess under his breath: it had to do with love. He was in a pretty good mood, to have thought something so hopeful. It seemed afterglow was still hanging on him.

In his mind, the palm and digits became the greatest representation of love: connected, part of one, working together, yet moving independently. Their ability to both make and break mirrored the bliss and pain he kept cycling through with Olive. His skilled hands defined him as a bartender, so he'd be nothing without them. It's why he despised turning basal, feeling powerless with just his tentacles.

This romance for the hands halted when he realised its digits would always follow the palm, regardless where they wanted to go. Unlike their hyper-mobile tentacles, hands were much more limited by their own flawed design. Yet, they chose to wear it. There was latent consciousness in this unconscious choice.

In parallel, he descended into the image of him treating each of Olive's digits like ice lollies the previous night, so all the waxing philosophical got confused in this lust and dissolved into the many other disjointed feelings blissfully swimming in his brain.

He kept himself busy with them until they arrived in the city centre. An outsider's eye would never be able to figure why Rodi had a conceited face while gawking at their hands. Though he'd give the reason away while toying with Olive's hands.

Before their stop, Rodi pressed Olive's ring finger from every angle, and a hot-cold flash followed through the taller inkling's body. The train carriage's quiet made Olive hesitate, though he was too surprised not to ask. "...Are you sizing my finger?"

The pomegranate eyes were caught off-guard, but his sharp, heavy-lidded mask disguised them in nonchalance. "No... What?"

Present-day Olive talks through an unlit cigarette in his mouth, while he closes his pack. "That had to be a lie. ...Right?"

Rodi gets up and leads the way for Olive towards the exit. They have gone through this motion so many times before, that they don't need a cue to go outside.

"I can say anything and you'll believe it anyway," he gets smug again, turning his head behind in his walk. After all, he is one of the lucky ones to absorb the crystals that convinced many Alternans that they'd reach the surface one day.

Huffing and rolling eyes, Olive gives a small push to Rodi's head, turning it back towards the exit. They weave their hands as they walk out of the bar.