Liam de Lioncourt clears his throat.
And you, Zoe [INCOMPREHENSIBLE GIBBERING] (you picked your first-ever last name with care; sure, your friends are probably never gonna be able to pronounce it no matter how hard they try, but 'ey, you picked it for you! The hell are they ever gonna need to call you by it for, anyway? Where are we, England?), sink deeper into your chair, gaping black holes of your eyes turning down their gape juuuuust a bit. Hidden behind your most recent comic - vanity-published, this time, as ugly-ass a term as that is, because hey, sometimes you gotta make a Sophie's Choice between giving your good ol' indie publishers another source of paycheck and, you know, preserving their sanity - your many, many mouths bend and writhe into their best ":3"-shapes. Mouth, eyes and all.
The vampire breathes in.
And finally, finally, about one minute of his eyes meditatively shut, he finally begins to answer the outwardly-simple question you asked the guy.
"Fraught," he says, looking... sooooomewhere below your face, in pretty dang predictable I-will-pretend-I-give-no-damns-about-this-conversation form. "An adjective indicating that a process or situation is plagued heavily by risk or distress - or, risk of distress."
He stops right there. You wave your tentacle for him to keep going.
Both his brow and mouth slant. Right on the dot. "That's it," he says. "I literally just gave you the definition."
"Yeaaaaaaaah, but look - I'm a once-formless eldritch horror, remember? From outside all sense of reality as known to the average monster?" You cut right back in over his beginning to grumble that excuse you, he is not an average monster. "Giving me a literal definition only helps me get ahold of so much! C'mon, you're good at abstract thought, right? I want you to make me feel... how the word 'fraught' makes you feel! What kinds of things can be fraught? What can they be fraught with? What does fraughtness feel like? How's it taste?"
He slaps down his book on the social climate change for insectpeople after the term of First Kafkaite President George Dubia Roach (a subject he's reading up on to inject an extra shot of wokeness to his locust-people seduction game, you've decided in line with a long series of headcanons on his flirting life) and heaves a sigh that is, as with all of his sighs, a release via exhaust of the paradoxical alchemy between abject numbness and eternal suffering. Clearly, he is unimpressed by your ever-further-growing grinning - but, fuck it, what are you trying to do, ask him to prom? Non, non - trying to impress Liam with a grin is a losing battle, anyway.
Hence, you're free to dial up the shit-eating factor higher and higher. The heel of your lowest tentacle starts to bounce in a nice, jaunty little eldritch rhythm.
"Liiiiiiike, can they be frought wiiiiiiiiith... thirst? Does it feel like, I dunno, the unbearable pull between slobbering hunger for some smokin' hot tentacle sex and going back to an ex's sticky, sticky embrace? Does it taste anything like - " A tiny pause, for thought. "...The dozen tongues of the Ghost of Smooches Past?"
You've met them, by the way. Nice monster, if one of the sloppier drunks you've run into in your time, which, mind you is saying something: unholy bacchanals are one hell of a drug.
Now his eyes sharpen right on you. Two narrow, narrow yellow rhombuses. (Rhombi, or whatever you will.)
...That snap right in front of you and make you jump.
As he yanks that comic loose of your tentacles in a series of little pops like the firing of a bubblewrap-popping rifle.
You pull them up to your mouth as the pen you'd been concealing along clatters to the table and you gasp.
He flaps the comic open, fiddling with his glasses, eyes going about twenty degrees sharper. And you know why - ohh, you know why...!
You stick incorporeal fingers into his brain to stretch your way into his occipital lobe and confirm, he's lookin' at it riiiiiiiight where you had it open last: to your pre-fanfic fanfic notes, and bouncy script right across the naked inner thigh of a half-human catboy.
...Not that you needed to look, as he reads what he sees out to you pretty much on the dot.
"'Fraught - denoting a path plagued with the pain of loss and forbidden new pleasures, the tastes of tongues from smooches past and lovers' sticky embraces, the draw of the Dark Realms and addiction begun from a first taste of tentacles. Love may have changed Liam de Lioncourt, the vampire once known as Angelus, but after his last betrayal of his beloved Joy, he is torn between rekindling their romance and his commitment to less-evil and the allure of intrigue drawing him to a new eldritch cutie from beyond realms.'"
Not especially needing to look through his eyes means that... fortunately? Unfortunately? You get to watch his face, instead. And as it twists like he's smelling the effects of a lighter to a bag on a doorstep kicking in, you would be biting your nails if you had them.
He slaps the comic down onto the table. You'd think he'd know that's kind of an insult to your artistic work, but, well, it's too late now. Here the two of you are, lining up a purple frown to a purple frown.
"You wanted me to help you write a description for an OT3 fic between me, you, and Joy."
"Well, yeah!" You turn up the... light? Blacklight? In your smile a bit.
(You can do that, by the way. God knows how many new steamy ideas you've gotten through the ability to turn on the UV lights over a space with nothin' but your adowwubs little smile.)
"You know me - I'm always looking to grow and rewrite my list of OTPs! You've gotta go through a lot of ships to figure out which ones really hit the sweetest spots - and hey, I'm a student at Spooky High, too, aren't I?" Liam looks either incredibly tired or like he's trying to tamp down the kicking-in of a stomach cramp. "My AUs'd be missing something if I left myself outta them, riiiiiiight...?"
"That's beside the point."
...What point?
"My point is, I don't especially think highly of the objectification inherent in your concocting fictional scenarios by which you can vicariously imagine you and me - one of your real, unliving school friends - in raunchy sexual scenarios together."
...Oh, shit, can he read your mind?
(Probably not; that would be silly.)
"Come ooooooon, Liam - it's all playing!" There your mouths go again - all twisting into various catfaces and grins all varying degrees of toothy. This silly, silly stick in the mud...! "A little bit of fanfic never hurt nobody - and I would know!"
"You bringing up my history with Joy isn't my idea of 'playing', either."
...Oh.
Well.
...Your mouth drops half-open, but, like, what can you say? "I'm sorry - it's TV canon already, so I figured it would be fair game?" Weak sauce, Zoe.
Weak sauce.
A statement said by his eyes, up to the ceiling. Like a television aside, coincidentally, but you're not about to tell him that that's what you're visualizing right now.
"That's what I thought," he says. ...And you weren't thinking anything in particular right there, so, no, that isn't a sign that he can, in fact, read your mind. Aaaaaand now he's shaking his head. Heaving out a little grumble through his nose. "Write whatever you want; it's not like I can stop you. Literally. But DON'T go tricking me into being a part of your particular brand of self-indulgence."
As soon as you hear his chair pushing out, you try to call out a little "wait". Sadly, it comes out closer to the sound of a possum being thrown into a wind turbine. You could probably do with popping one more from the bag of ginger cough drops in your backpack.
And also apologizing to the librarian, because hoo boy that was LOUD.
The next thing you know, he's headed for the door. His book on locust sociopolitics dangling from a hand, and your book still lying face down on the table, in a visual representation of some part of your state of mind.
For the most part, though, you're just sitting there in your seat, eyes yawning back open to their full size as pits to the void again as your flesh and ichor veins and viscera squirm and retract and tighten against to each other, shrinking you down into the chair.
Got a little too forward with... you know, openly playing with your friends there, huh? On more levels than one. I mean, you could probably pull another one of your buddies aside and they'd assure you stuffy Liam was just being stuffy Liam, but while you spend the next few periods thinking about how you could have tried to be a little sneakier, or at least gotten on his level a little more, you lose -2 BOLDNESS and -1 CHARM.
But it's all right! It's all right...