[ti]private[/ti]Ta lane eddyr raa as janno

Seems they found a Manx proverb for this.

Pace had been sinking for just about the past twelve hours. As bright as the sun, he'd felt, when he'd been with Percy. And how could he not? They'd chatted like old friends, they'd laughed and joked, had a real life conversation in real life, where they would stood next to one another and looking at eachother in real life. It was more exciting than a great many things Pace had done, especially recently, and it was wonderful, and that terrified him.

He'd sat silently in his hotel room for half the night, having gotten caught in his thoughts halfway through getting dressed and then spending hours laid down with only one arm in his shirt, staring up at the ceiling.

"Oh shit", he'd said, out loud, and then grabbed his phone to text Percy out of the blue. He just couldn't do it - go out for drinks. A personal environment, just two people, and there would be drink involved. Pace was the kind of drunk who played his fingers with someone else's fingers, and kissed necks and invited people to his room. Pace was the kind of drunk who'd sit so close at the bar his legs and the other person's practically intertwined like tentacles, where his heart would thrum so hard you could hear it, feel it, above the shitty music that bars insisted on playing too loud. Pace was the exact type of drunk who fell in love, and the exact type of sober who didn't believe in any of that nonsense; which meant that he was the exact type of hungover to text his flings and apologise, promise they could stay friends and then ghost them forever.

And he didn't want that with Percy. Any of it - he didn't want to fall in love, or hurt his friend's feelings, or fuck him, or ever be without him, or ever have to be with him. It hurt his head like he'd been drinking all night. So in a shot of fear and desperate hunger, he'd texted Percy and let him know that they should just go to the con together, instead. That seemed suitably sexless, perfectly platonic. Just a thing that friends did.

So he was here, now, alongside Muin like any other time, in life or in-game. When they'd first met up, he'd even put his arm around him for a little while, for good measure - just to make sure that his sweet British friend knew that his sudden change of plans hadn't come from anything bad. The last thing Pace would have wanted was to make Percy feel like he didn't want to get drinks with him, because he didn't. Er- he did. Or... he didn't? It was best left unsaid for now.

"Stamps? Uh- I'm missing.... ttttttwo?" He thought for a moment, hand quizzically stroking a beard that Pace didn't have - he dedicatedly clean shaved all those Egyptian genes away to a silky smooth finish on the regular, after all. "Oh-" he looks down at the ding from his phone, then nods "...missing just one now, actually" he notes, as the SEER STAMP pops up on his app.

"The shops sound fun, right?" And Pace certainly wasn't joking, they sounded great! He had, however, wiped out a good deal of his savings just getting here, so the actual money he had left for buying knick-knacks was minimal. It'd still be nice to look around, though, surely. "You should get yourself a Rowlet. Little figurine or something, or..." He beamed at Percy like a flashbang "...or a plushie? A real fat one? If you can squeeze it in your luggage before you head back, that is"

“A Rowlet!” Pace repeats, smiling. His own mind twitches with the idea of Percy’s home - without a doubt it’s meticulously, clean, maybe even one of those awful places where everything’s all white and clean. Having a big fat Rowlet roosted up on a bookshelf where everything else is divided by genre and organised alphabetically within was a funny concept to him. It also made him want to ask about how Percy decorated his bedroom, to see if it was at all like the idea he’d cooked up in his mind, but that would come across weird, surely, or even that he was asking for other reasons entirely.

But then he’s stopped by the fact that actually, Percy doesn’t like Rowlet. Or at the very least, not enough to be his bestest most favoritest. Pace tilts his head, labrador style.

“Oh, don’t you? I thought that was your main guy in the game. So which do you like most, then?”

He looks around them, taking in the second-day crowd. “Not sure. I…” he pauses. His job was good, he would always be the first to admit that, but it wasn’t enough that Pace had to stop worrying about spending frivolous things, that he still lived in a crappy apartment, that he… certainly wasn’t Percy. With his good job and his beautiful pinterest house. It was all in Pace’s mind, but, it wasn’t hard to tell that Percy probably wouldn’t get it. And what if he didn’t like Pace being poor? And, more importantly, why did Pace care so much?

“...I’ll probably get a little thing, maybe, pop it on my bookshelf. Maybe… a bird pokémon” Pace turns back to Percy’s gaze, smiling brightly, as though that bout of anxiety had been nothing more than a single wisp of breeze.