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"IF YOU USED UP ALL THE HOT WATER AGAIN…!”
Lumine scowled, shifting her things under one arm as she made her way toward the shared bathroom, already bracing herself for disappointment she was almost certain was waiting on the other side of the door. It had been bad enough when there was only one of him. One set of habits. One set of irritations. One singular, persistent problem.
Now?
The situation had multiplied.
Not all at once. Just often enough that the distinction had stopped mattering.
What had started as a jump scare had settled into routine, as if she were simply expected to adjust to several slightly different iterations of the same deeply questionable man and carry on.
It wasn’t.
It absolutely was not, yet here she was, apparently supervising a small collection of mad scientists with overlapping faces, inconsistent behavior patterns, and, in several cases, a complete and utter disregard for boundaries, shared space, and basic resource management.
She pushed the bathroom door open without knocking. Steam rolled out to meet her, thick and immediate, curling into the colder air of the hallway like it had been waiting for an escape.
Of course. Of course there was steam. Of course someone (one of them) had used all the hot water again, as though the concept of limitation simply did not apply when filtered through whatever fractured logic they were operating on. Lumine stepped inside anyway, expression flattening into something dangerously unimpressed as she took in the situation, adjusting her grip with the slow, deliberate control of someone who had already decided she was not going to let this escalate further, no matter how much it absolutely deserved to.
She was met with a shriek, a scrambling of wet limbs, towel and a borderline hysterical Do you MIND?! bouncing off slick tiles and fogged glass. “Unbelievable,” she muttered under her breath, the words quiet but edged, more statement than complaint as she pressed into the room to set her things down with a soft, precise thud. “You’re all the same person. It’s not like I haven’t seen it by now,” she snapped, hands on hips as she turned to shoo… whichever one it was. “And not one of you can manage basic resource allocation? Thought that’d be important for sciency things.” She shouted at the retreating back as she closed the door and engaged the lock that had not been turned prior to her entry to the space. "Damn nerds, don't even know how to use a door lock..."
The sigh that escaped her as she stepped back from the door was seismic. Her shoulders dropped as she set about getting ready for her shower. It had certainly been... a week.
---
Downstairs, Dottore (well, one of him) was in the kitchen, dissecting vegetables with precise, economical movements into what would no doubt be a nutritionally complete, if questionably flavoured, meal. He had already resigned himself to the fact that Lumine would drown it in tomato sauce out of spite.
To his left, another version of himself was doing the dishes with varying efficiency. Across the room, another sprawled on the lounge, reading something that was undoubtedly fictional smut the Traveler had left lying around for anyone to see. A gloved hand rose to his temple as yet another Dottore stormed down the stairs, dripping and wrapped in a towel. This one was just different enough to stand out. Sharper. Tighter. Wrong in a way the others weren’t. "Sigma..." He attempted to cut the blustering off before it began and address the slip hazard that the visibly younger, if chronologically older segment, was leaving in his wake, but he wasn't quite quick enough.
“Explain,” Sigma snapped, voice sharp and immediate as he stopped just inside the room. His gaze swept across the scene, irritation sharpening into something closer to outrage. The towel was still damp, water tracing a slow line down his arm as he gestured toward the lounge.
“Which one of you,” he continued, quieter now and far less forgiving, “has been walking around naked in front of her?”
The giggle from the couch drew his ire immediately.
“You, apparently, brother.”
Alpha turned the page, smirk already in place, not bothering to look up.
The pipes in the house were noisy, and they were all acutely aware of the schedule the Traveler had enforced in a desperate attempt to secure even five minutes of hot water. She was clearly adhering to it now, given the incessant banging echoing through the cottage.
The air went thick enough to cut.
Sigma, still standing there in little more than a towel, clenched his fist, shoulders tensing, teeth grinding as he leaned into the space between them.
Alpha didn’t look up. Another page turned.
Beta ceased his chopping, head tilting slightly as the sudden silence of the pipes, and the sound of approaching footsteps, went seemingly unnoticed by the others.
Ah.
Intervention was imminent.
He might have grinned, if his mouth had ever moved that way.
---
The water had gone cold before she’d had time to decide whether she was going to be annoyed about it, which meant she was. The kind of sharp, immediate irritation that settled into her shoulders and refused to be reasoned with. By the time she stepped out into the hallway, hair still damp and patience already spent, she was operating on the understanding that whatever she walked into next was going to be someone else’s fault.
The voices carried up the stairwell before she even reached the landing. Something about being naked. She lowered the towel from her hair, already twisting the damp fabric with practiced ease.
Target acquired.
Her foot didn’t hit the step wrong so much as lose traction, the smooth wood damp. One more minor sin to add to the list.
She didn’t slow. Didn’t loosen the tight twist of the towel as she aimed.
Crack. Just above the back of Towel Dottore’s right knee. The yelp was satisfying. It did little to offset her annoyance at every version of him using up all her damn hot water. It was her mora paying the rent after all.
Lumine resumed twisting the towel, stepping forward fearlessly and ignoring whatever Doctor it was sprawled across the lounge snickering. Towel Doctor had one hand raised in surrender the other clutching his towel tight, but she wouldn't be deterred. “You’re still not dressed? For the love of your Tsaritsa, aren’t you freezing? I suppose not, since you weren’t the one LEFT WITH NO HOT WATER!” She aimed again as the wet Dottore stumbled backwards with a snarl and a low whine that might have been why me? as if it wasn't perfectly obvious. With her initial target out of range, she turned on the one reading her book and flicked the towel at him. Almost faster than she could track, a hand shot out, catching the towel and pulling both it, and her, closer with a smirk.
"No need to be so cranky Starlight, food's almost ready." Ah, it was the loud one. She glared and relinquished her hold on the towel with a scowl, her arms crossing as she looked toward the kitchen suspiciously. "You really call that food?" The answering chuckle from the lounge and the micro-freeze in the movements of the cooking one was all the confirmation she needed. It was the repressed one cooking again. Wonderful.
The distant thump and rustle of the hot water thief had her head whipping towards the shut door. She was starting to figure them out. Maybe. She was pretty sure these were the same problems from yesterday, but whether all the versions of him were scarily consistent in their inconsistencies or not was yet to be confirmed.
The door cracked open cautiously, and Sigma poked his head out as if expecting an ambush.
Missed opportunity, honestly.
“Oh, Skrunkly, it was you!” she called brightly, a customer service smile plastered across her face that absolutely did not reach her eyes. He was the only one that was easy to tell apart, it made correction easier.
The answering snarl was further confirmation and she turned back toward the kitchen as the sound of plates and cutlery being gathered pulled her attention back to the kitchen. She swept the table clear, bits of relics and artifacts, some shells and flowers she hadn't quite finished counting thrown casually into her pocket dimension to be dealt with later. Plates appeared and everyone migrated to their respective seats. Lumine prodded the food once, testing it.
"It's not poisoned, you know," the repressed one stated blandly as she reached for the sauce bottle.
"And it wouldn't kill you to add a little seasoning." She countered as the the bottle exhaled its contents in a borderline flatulent manner.
There was a specific and exquisite violence in the way Lumine approached her plate. The meal was, as always, nutritionally complete, precisely measured, probably bland, and almost certainly designed to be as difficult as possible to improve upon without a chemistry degree. This, of course, has never once stopped her from waging total war with the bottle of sauce. She upended it with one hand, wielding the bottle like a weapon. Red, viscous, and utterly disrespectful to the original subtleties of the meal, the condiment sluiced across her food in a thick, arterial line. Lumine did not stop until every square centimeter was rendered unrecognisable.
Beta’s eyes narrowed, tracking from the desecrated plate to the bottle in her hand. His jaw tightened, a muscle flickering beneath the pale skin. “The molecular composition of…“ he stopped, adjusted his mask with one precise finger. “That is precisely 37.4% more sauce than the dish was calibrated to accommodate.” The words came out clipped, each syllable as measured as his ingredients had been.
She stabbed into the meal with her fork, twisting it viciously through the bland offering before shoving it into her mouth. “If you actually gave a shit about synergy,” she says, words muffled by food, deliberately letting a bit dribble down her chin, “you’d have salted this properly.” She locked eyes with Beta as she reached across the table, snatching the salt, and dumping a small mountain directly onto the center of her plate. “Some actual fucking flavour wouldn’t kill you.” The salt crystals caught the light as they dissolved into the sauce, her victory crystallising with them. She noted the twitch in his jaw, the almost imperceptible tremor in his hands, and it was intoxicating.
Across the table, Omega was the only one who ate with anything approaching normalcy, though he did so with the slow, deliberate motions of someone who had never really learned how to dine in company and was merely mimicking human behaviour. He watched Lumine’s assault on the meal with a strange, almost fond detachment. At some point, as she was distracted by a particularly heated exchange between Beta and Sigma, who was now out of his towel and still visibly wet, hair dripping onto the back of his shirt. Omega silently reached over, forked a stringy, overcooked vegetable from her plate, and deposited a perfectly cut piece in its place. She registered the swap only after the fact, eyes narrowing, but made no move to reverse it. He was always paying attention. She had never caught him not.
Sigma, for his part, was in a full state of mutiny. “You can’t just take things off other people’s plates!” he spat, voice sharp. “That’s not how dinner works. That’s not how anything works.” He glared at Omega, but the real offense seemed more philosophical than practical. He had spent the last ten minutes picking at his own food with the mechanical determination of someone for whom eating was a solvable problem, not a source of pleasure. He seemed personally affronted that it could be anything else.
Alpha, lounging at the head of the table, cared less about the food and more about the spectacle. He sipped his drink, something definitely not water, since it was the color of cut rubies and smelled faintly of forbidden chemistry, and spoke up only when the conflict reached a particular crescendo. “If this is what dinner is like, I’d hate to see you all at war,” he said, chin propped on one hand. “It’s impressive, in a very specific way.”
Lumine, having finished half her plate in the time it took the rest of them to reach for their first bite, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. “I’ve eaten worse,” she said. “Once spent a week in Mondstadt living off nothing but Sweet Madame. You learn to adapt.” She glanced at Beta, daring him to extrapolate.
Predictably, he did. “You’d die of nutritional deficiency inside of a month,” he said flatly. “The human body wasn’t built for that kind of sugar load. Not even yours.”
She grinned, feral. “Try me.”
The conversation devolved from there, fracturing into smaller, meaner exchanges, each of them sniping at the others with the precision that would’ve been called bullying if it hadn’t been so mutually assured. At some point, Sigma tried to filch a piece of bread, only to have his hand stabbed (gently, but with intent) by Lumine’s fork. Alpha laughed so hard he nearly choked. Omega, having finished his own meal, quietly cleared the table, collecting dishes with a speed and efficiency that suggested he would rather not deal with the aftermath if left to the rest of them.
Lumine propped her chin on her hand, watching the war of attrition unfolding around her. It felt almost nostalgic. She had only had her brother growing up, but if she had more siblings, this was how she imagined it would have gone: constant battle lines, shifting loyalties, chaos barely contained by a thin veneer of routine.
Eventually, when the last insult had died on someone’s tongue and the table lay bare, Omega herded them toward the only real warmth in the house. The fireplace. The little rug before it was frayed and the floor cold, so everyone squeezed in as close as they could. True to form, Omega dropped onto the center spot, and Lumine flopped down beside him. Knees drawn to her chin, she leaned forward, shivering, and let her head fall onto Omega’s thigh, seeking every precious flicker of heat.
No sooner had her teeth begun to chatter than Alpha slipped in behind her, arms looping over her shoulders with all the confidence of someone who had read a manual on human comfort but skipped the chapter on personal space. He pressed her spine against his chest and murmured, “Chilly, Traveler? I’ll take care of that.” Lumine relaxed into his hold, a tired grin playing on her lips, and within heartbeats her lids fluttered shut. It occurred to her, distantly, that they were arranging themselves with the tactical precision of a military operation whose objective was unclear even to its participants.
Beta hovered at the rim of their pile, curiosity warring with caution. Slowly he inched closer, peering at her sleeping face with the clinical interest of someone cataloging a new species. Before he knew it, Lumine’s hand shot out, yanking him into the circle, and just like that, he became her little spoon, accepting this development with the same resigned efficiency with which he might address an unexpected chemical reaction. From the side, Sigma watched with a twitching lip, then heaved himself over Lumine’s hip, curling in like a disgruntled cat desperate for scraps of warmth. The four of them lay tangled around the dying embers, a precarious ecosystem of limbs that somehow achieved equilibrium despite having no natural right to do so.
She did not remember falling asleep, but she woke to the sensation of Beta’s arm awkwardly pinning her against Omega’s chest, Alpha’s hand tangled in her hair, and Sigma curled over her hip like a particularly irritable cat. They were, for the moment, a single ungovernable organism, radiating mutual hostility and body heat in equal measure.
It was, inexplicably, fine.