Wow I'm back? I'm on a roll no you just missed writing and this is an equivalent of a trash food binge

Anyways so I've always shipped Dactyl and America so humour me please and wondered how Dactyl might deal with herself bc she's so intuitive, perceptive, and logic-driven (but not as much as Aegaeon and Lysithea)

Not sure which AU this sweet little thing goes into bc I really wanted to write something sweet and romantic and didn't care for plot. It's a drabble in five parts and each one keeps getting longer. For the sake of posting more often, I'm deciding to post each section separately instead of all at once.

I'm horrible

Anyways, you know the drill:

Ida "Dee" = Dactyl

Alfred "Al" F. Jones = America

Matthew "Mattie" Williams = Canada

Callisto "Callie" = Aegaeon

Astrid = Iliad

Little cameos of their friends? I'll add them to the reference list as I write. Who knows which one will decide to poke in and say hello.

—

Getting to Know You: Chapter 2.1 (in which Ida keeps catching sight of a cute stranger in a coffee shop with the sky in his eyes in every sense of the word)

I.

The first time she catches sight of him, he's striding into the coffee shop with quiet confidence, comfortably dressed in a white hoodie and light wash skinny jeans with holes in the knees. His shoes, which looked good for some kind of sport (basketball? He was certainly tall enough) were red and white with dark blue stars. A black leather backpack hangs off of one shoulder as he leans back a little to contemplate the Starbucks menu in the little time that he has before the barista asks for his order.

The surrounding background music is too loud for Ida to catch what he says, but she watches him tap his card and move to the side to wait for his order. She knows she's been staring, but she hasn't seen his face yet because of the large white hood and the tuft of dark blonde hair poking out like an unkempt antenna intrigues her. Her short story lies untyped under her fingertips, forgotten for the moment, until she takes a hand away to bring her cooling flat white to her lips.

She absentmindedly nibbles the red marks of her tinted lip balm on the lid before taking a sip. The stranger has still somehow managed not to show his profile, even after a creepy amount of staring. He has now pulled out a phone and was fiddling with it before a pair of earbuds were pulled from his kangaroo pouch. He plugged them in and Ida's eyes followed his hands as they vanished in his hood, presumably to shove the other end in his ears.

Pity, she thought idly. The café music, though generic, was quite nice. He also had nice hands, with long fingers. A voice in the back of Ida's mind asked if he could play an eleventh on a piano.

She glanced at the hand that was still resting on her keyboard. She could reach a tenth at best, and only barely. In front of her, another girl bumped a binder onto the ground with a clatter. Cursing lowly, she (a college student?) hopped off of the high chair and began to pick up her spilt papers.

Ida reluctantly peels her eyes away from the (cute) bald eagle plushie hanging off of a zipper on the backpack and bends down to gather some sheets that had drifted to a stop near her feet. A quick glance told her that they were half-completed second-year physics homework and she straightens to hand them to her neighbour. The girl takes them with a quiet "thanks" before she is sitting again with sound-cancelling headphones over her ears.

Ida notes the bags under the girl's eyes and feels a combination of worry and sympathy. She was a student once, too, was one still. The feeling is fleeting and she returns her attention to the attractive stranger that she was forced to admit to herself that she was a little interested in.

She wants to approach him under the guise of getting some sugar, but it's a fleeting feeling too.

Ida is met with blue eyes a shade too deep to be sky blue. Her heart skips a beat like missing a step on the staircase and it's a little awkward until she offers a faint smile and focuses on the page in front of her again.

He had messy bangs, messy sprout of hair sticking out of everything, and friendly but curious eyes with interest piqued by the sudden noise of plastic hitting tile. She hadn't banked on him being drawn to the binder as she was.

He also looked young, maybe a year or two older than the poor physics girl who was now stabbing at a calculator.

Does staring at an undergraduate student as a graduate student on gap year make her a creep? Ida sure hoped not.

"Alfred Jones, grande dark roast!"

She waits until Alfred Jones has swept back past her out the door, curious blue eyes sweeping over her and her unfinished short story, before she lifts her eyes from the screen again.

—

So, how was that? I've always hated writing anything close to feelings and really am not good at it, but it's a necessary part of fics. This hasn't been edited and I'll likely be back to do so, depending on when I have time and how long parts IV and V turn out.

I also don't read enough outside of global health journal articles to write a character like Ida/Dactyl lol gotta get on that over the summer

The words are like rabbits. They just keep multiplying

Anyways, I'll stop rambling. Let me know if you have any thoughts?