Work Text:
When her lab partner coaxes her into attending a Halloween party hosted by hockey players, Saioa isn’t expecting a good time: she gives into Tess’s wheedling because Tess has talked a lot about her book club besties, and they sound nice enough, and a few selfies with them should be enough to get her mom off her back about not being social enough.
She gets so caught up in the fluid mechanics arguments raging adjacent to the beer pong battles that it’s 2 am before she realizes it. What’s more, there are some dazzlingly deep cuts among the costumes in the crowd. The fellow introducing himself as “a concussion” triggers the most groans (he’s wearing a cardboard depiction of a bell, with the word “RUNG” on a pageant sash draped over it), but her eyes keep returning to the Russian fellow in English Regency garb and a russet wig. He gets asked by dozens of people if he’s portraying a Jane Austen hero, and through most of the evening he wears a smirk as salacious as the one immortalized in the National Gallery portrait of Viscount Corvin.
But, now and then, there’s a small, soft smile, as sweet as honey.