For the second day: dinner date.


change of plans

Unfortunately their dinner date didn't quite go as expected, and if there were actually any onlookers at the restaurant, they would have assumed that he was crazy—having a meal with a snake that is.


Kinana had many bad habits—namely leaving her headphones in her ears for long periods of times and forgetting they were in there, falling asleep on every moving vehicle she got onto and missing her stop to get off the bus, or texting and walking at the same time.

But there was one habit in particular that Erik couldn't really blame or really admonish her for, and unfortunately, that habit was the worst of all:

His sweet adorable raven-haired girlfriend would every now and then casually oscillate between her human and snake form.

When she first confessed this to him, after his jaw dropped and his eyes widened like saucers upon seeing his newly found friend in college literally morph into a fucking snake in front of his fucking eyes, she explained everything briefly:

"Well," she had remarked, after having turned back into a human with able vocal chords an hour later, while sipping on tea. "It's not like I believe in magic or anything, but one day, I decided to go with one of my friends to a cult meeting, just because we were dared to go, and one of the older women didn't like us. She gave us some look and then tapped my forehead with her finger. Ever since then I've been switching from snake to human. I don't have any other explanation for it."

"Wow, that's fucked up," Erik had told her.

She had shrugged then. "At this point, I've just learned to live with it for now."

And so he accepted her fate ever since then.

At first, it was funny. Weird but funny, and among their friends like Sorano, Sawyer, Laki, Erza, or Jellal, they'd laugh whenever she'd hiccup or sneeze or cough or do something irrevocably adorable before shrinking suddenly into her scaly dark purple other self and carry on doing whatever they were in the middle of doing while waiting for the woman to grow back into her human form.

However, her unpredictable switching between mammalian and reptilian form started becoming more embarrassing—sometimes leaving him kissing the air with puckered and parted lips, just a snake curled up next to him on the pavement; sometimes leaving him carrying all her heavy shopping bags on the way back home from a long day at the mall; sometimes leaving him turning around and talking his head off to the stranger behind him before he realized that she had slithered up his pant leg for safety from getting stepped on—

And sometimes he was just left in the middle of dinner at a fancy restaurant, having ordered an extra round of wine and two entrees with no one sitting in front of him.

Erik sighed.

When the server came back to the table with an open bottle of wine and raised an eyebrow at Erik, the maroon-haired man just nodded.

"Yeah, she ditched me," he simply said. "I'll take the bill now."

He discreetly stuck his leg out to the other side of the table, allowing his no-legged girlfriend slither up his leg to his lap and finally around his right arm, her favorite warm spot to cuddle in while she was in her animal form.

Dinner was still on him however, and although he had the completely untouched food from the restaurant in take-out containers out on his kitchen table, he lay his girlfriend onto the table and made sure that Kinana had something to eat, reaching into his refrigerator for the egg carton and pulling out one of the raw ellipsoids.

Returning to his snake-girlfriend, he held out the egg to her snout, and she flicked her forked tongue at his fingertips graciously before unhinging her jaw wide and letting him place the whole egg into her mouth.

He smiled and tapped her head once he was sure that the egg was on its way down her slender body before he reached into the take-out containers and starting to eat the still-warm human food.

"Happy anniversary, babe," he cooed, with a little tease at the end, wagging a chunk of steak at her.

She flicked her tongue and winded into a small ball of scales—her reptilian way of communicating that she was very sorry about the problem that she caused earlier that night.

"Oh, don't apologize," he said, with a grin, popping the meat into his mouth. "We just had to improvise a teeny bit for dinner."


But actually imagine this as a romcom AU where Kinana keeps turning into a snake at the most inopportune times, lol.

thir13enth