The Waking World had decided to be completely miserable.
Just as they had exited the mall, a freezing, torrential downpour was hammering the central district of the city. The rain was bone-chilling, biting your skin so that it cut straight through your clothes and made the reinforced glass of the high-rises blur with idk.
Sunny hated the rain. He hated the cold even more. But most of all, right at this exact moment, he hated botany.
He was walking down a flooded sidewalk near the East Gate market, looking less like an awakened and more like a disgruntled pack mule. In his left arm, he was holding a massive, heavy bag of potting soil. In his right arm, he was precariously balancing three large, leafy potted plants.
Cielle walked half a step ahead of him.
She had insisted on visiting the agricultural sector. She claimed she needed "live specimens" to study why Waking World flora failed in the Dream Realm, as part of her ongoing, unhinged obsession with forcing tomatoes to grow in the Sanctuary of Noctis. Sunny had tried to say no. He really had. But then she had looked at him with those unblinking green eyes, and ten minutes later, he was handing his communicator to a terrified merchant to buy forty pounds of dirt.
Presently, Cielle was wearing the brand-new, five-figure, bespoke Cloud-Strider jacket Sunny had just bought her.
However, because the jacket lacked custom slits for her wings, she was currently wearing it entirely backward, like a highly luxurious, fluffy hospital gown. To protect the obscenely expensive, hyper-soft material from the Waking World rain, she had thrown her waterproof cloak over the top of it.
Because her back was entirely exposed to accommodate her folded wings, she was still freezing.
Sunny, on the other hand, was wearing a thick, heavily insulated, perfectly tailored winter trench coat.
They turned the corner, navigating around a flooded storm drain, and immediately ran into a roadblock.
Effie and Kai were standing under the awning of a high-end coffee shop. Kai was holding a sleek black umbrella, looking immaculate and completely untouched by the weather, while Effie was wearing a massive jacket that looked like it had been violently wrestled off a mutant bear.
Effie was in the middle of taking a sip from her steaming cup when she saw them.
She stopped. She lowered the cup.
She looked at Cielle's absurd outfit. Then she looked at the three potted ferns balanced against Sunny's chest. Then she looked at the giant bag of dirt.
Her face transitioned from boredom to the profound, incandescent awe of someone who had just witnessed the heavens part.
"Oh my gods," Effie breathed, her voice carrying clearly over the rain. She grabbed Kai's arm, shaking it violently. "Kai. Look. The goblin is carrying foliage."
"I see him, Effie," Kai said, his voice entirely polite, though a blinding, highly amused smile was already breaking across his flawless face.
Effie completely abandoned the shelter of the awning, striding out to block their path.
Sunny let out a long, misty cloud of condensation. "Move out of the way, Euphemia. It's pouring."
"I know we're seeing you two for dinner tonight," Effie beamed, looking at Cielle with a smirk"But I could not pass up the opportunity to witness this in the wild. A wild doofus has appeared! Hi, Cielle! How is the shopping going? Are you enjoying the Doofus?"
Cielle stopped and looked at Effie with polite curiosity. "Yes. He is very useful. He has a lot of money and he carries the heavy dirt."
Effie clapped her hands together, throwing her head back in a loud laugh. "I really love her, Sunny."
"I know," Sunny muttered darkly. "Everyone loves her. Move."
"You hate carrying things," Effie pointed out, stepping right in front of him to inspect the ferns.
"I don't hate carrying things," Sunny lied. A sharp, stinging pain flared in his soul. He winced, his eye twitching. "Fine. I dislike unnecessary physical exertion."
Effie pointed an accusing finger at his nose. "You once made me carry my heavy soul shards on a three-hour traversal through the labyrinth because you said it 'built character.'"
Cielle turned her head slowly. She looked at Sunny. Then she looked down at the three ferns currently resting against his chest.
"That was an entirely different situation," Sunny defended himself, shifting the heavy bag of dirt awkwardly.
"It was raining then, too," Effie noted cheerfully.
Cielle looked at Sunny for one more second. Something very small, but highly significant, happened at the corner of her mouth. It wasn't quite a smile, but it was a softening of her usual flat expression, a tiny flicker of deeply amused realization.
Sunny refused to address it. His ears were burning, though he could blame it on the freezing wind. "We have to drop this dirt off at the house before dinner. We are leaving."
"I'm walking with you," Effie decided instantly, falling into step beside them.
Kai sighed gracefully, seamlessly following behind them and holding the umbrella so it covered Effie. "I suppose we are escorting the greenery now."
They walked for another block, the rain continuing to pour. The wind howled down the street, causing Cielle to shiver violently beneath her cloak. Despite the backward jacket shielding her chest, the chill was biting directly into her exposed shoulders.
Effie's sharp eyes caught the movement. Her protective instincts instantly overrode her amusement. She frowned, looking at Sunny's massive, luxurious winter trench coat, then at Cielle.
"Hey, Doofus," Effie called out, her tone dropping its teasing edge. "Nice coat. Looks really warm. Did you forget to buy your girlfriend one, or are you just enjoying watching her freeze to death?"
Sunny stopped walking.
He closed his eyes. The rain hit his face. He stood there in the middle of the sidewalk, holding three ferns, looking like a man actively carrying the weight of his own infinite stupidity.
He slowly opened his eyes and looked at Effie. Then he looked at Cielle.
"I bought her a coat," Sunny said softly, his voice dripping with absolute defeat. "I just spent five figures on a bespoke Cloud-Strider jacket made of Corrupted under-fur."
Effie crossed her arms. "Then why is she freezing?"
"Because," Sunny said, gesturing weakly with a fern, "it does not have wing slits. Which means she is currently wearing an item worth more than my first apartment completely backward, like a bib."
Effie paused. She looked at Cielle's chest, then leaned around to look at Cielle's back, realizing that the front of the jacket was indeed pressed against Cielle's collarbone under the raincoat.
Effie blinked. "Oh."
"Yes. Oh." Sunny sighed. "I asked her to take it off so we could get it tailored. She refused, because it is 'soft'."
"It is the softest thing I have ever touched," Cielle defended herself, her breath forming a white cloud in the frosty air. "I am not taking it off."
"And now you're freezing your wings off," Effie scolded gently.
"It is fine," Cielle stated. She turned to Sunny, her green eyes calculating. "Put the plants down."
Sunny blinked. "What? Why?"
"Put the plants down," she repeated, her tone leaving no room for argument.
Sunny carefully lowered the bag of dirt and the three potted ferns onto a relatively dry patch of pavement under a streetlamp. He stood back up. "Okay. Now wha—"
Cielle didn't answer verbally. Instead, she stepped directly into his personal space. Without asking, she reached out and unbuttoned the top three buttons of Sunny's very large, very expensive winter coat.
Sunny froze. "Cielle, what are you doing?"
"Now he has free hands, so I can do this," Cielle explained to Effie.
She grabbed the lapels of Sunny's coat and pulled them wide open. Then, she simply stepped inside. She pressed her chest flush against his, wrapped her arms securely around his waist beneath the coat, and rested her chin comfortably against his collarbone.
With a soft rustle, her massive wings flared outward, wrapping forward to completely envelop Sunny's sides and back, shielding them both from the biting wind and the rain.
She immediately began radiating the faint, soothing warmth he had become accustomed to, perfectly leeching the intense body heat trapped inside Sunny's trench coat.
Sunny stood completely paralyzed for exactly three seconds. His arms were awkwardly hovering in the air. His brain was violently short-circuiting.
He looked down at the top of her head tucked neatly under his chin. He looked up at Effie, who was staring at them with an expression of sheer disbelief. He looked at Kai, who had politely turned around to face the street, though his shoulders were shaking with silent laughter.
Sunny let out a long, hollow sigh.
He lowered his arms, wrapping them carefully around Cielle's waist, and pulled the thick material of his coat forward, buttoning it back up around the both of them.
It was incredibly awkward to stand like that, but within seconds, the freezing chill of the Waking World completely vanished, replaced by an intoxicating, suffocatingly pleasant warmth.
Effie stared at the two-headed, four-legged monstrosity of comfort currently blocking the sidewalk.
"You know," Effie said, slowly shaking her head in absolute wonder. "I used to worry about you, Sunny. I genuinely did. I thought you were going to die alone in a shadowy gutter somewhere, probably entirely out of spite."
Sunny glared at her from inside the cocoon of the coat and wings.
"But I see now that I was wrong," Effie continued, wiping a fake tear from her eye. "You aren't going to die in battle. You are going to die of terminal coziness."
"Go away, Euphemia," Sunny ground out, though he didn't make a single move to step away from the girl currently clinging to him like a freezing koala.
"Never," Effie declared cheerfully, spinning on her heel and gesturing for Kai to follow. "I am going to walk with you all the way to your house. I am going to watch you waddle down the street like a giant, heavily armed penguin, and I am going to make loud gagging noises the entire time."
Cielle shifted inside the coat, her muffled voice drifting up to Sunny's chin. "I like her. She is loud. It is very efficient."
Sunny rested his cheek against her wet hair, silently accepting his absolute ruin. "I need therapy," he whispered.
But as he carefully picked the three ferns back up without breaking their embrace, holding them awkwardly to the side as they began to shuffle down the street, his Flaw remained entirely, peacefully silent.