Chapter Text
“Sora, Nath. Would you still love me if I was a worm?”
Nath raised an eyebrow. She was currently lying back on Sham’s sofa, attempting not to kick her in the face. Usually not kicking her girlfriend in the face was a task so easy she could accomplish it without thinking, and often did; however, today Sham had been given the privilege of painting her girlfriend’s toes, and Nath’s happened to be quite sensitive. She was not, overall, in much of a position to receive the most burning romantic question of an era.
“You’re not a worm, though,” Sora answered, helpful as always. “You’re Sham.”
“I don’t know,” Nath replied dryly. “She does wiggle a lot.”
Sham was indeed a woman full of wiggles, and each wiggle was full of meaning, none of which Nath was privy to. She had many skills, but being a wiggle whisperer was not one of them. She could tell an excited wiggle from a nervous one, but that was as far as her understanding went.
Sora, predictably, was far better with her wiggle interpretations. It was a well-known fact that hips did not lie, and Sora could puzzle out what Sham was saying with every delicate shake of her derrière. To be frank, Nath wished she would share her cheat sheet with the rest of the class, but it probably wouldn’t be good for her to pay more attention to Sham’s waist than she already did.
“Wiggling doesn’t make her a worm, though,” Sora replied back, and then paused. The beginnings of a frown began to shape themselves on her face. “Sham, were they leaving comments about you on the internet again? You shouldn’t listen to internet people.”
“Nah. It’s just a hypothetical, okay? I know I’m not a worm, but if I was a worm, would you still love me?”
It was at that point that Nath, in a fit of mercy, prodded Sham’s good cheek with her big toe. It was a quiet signal that this particular line of questioning probably wouldn’t end up where she was hoping it would.
Alas, it was too late. Sora had already begun to apply her formidable powers to the task. “What kind of worm?”
“Does it matter what kind?” Sham asked, slightly appalled. She had wanted to believe that Sora’s love was unconditional, no matter what kind of worm she might be.
“I think it does,” was Sora’s reply. “A lot of worms are very small, and they live inside you and make you sick.”
“Okay, okay! Let’s assume I’m not one of the gross parasite ones, then,” Sham replied hastily.
“But then what if you were a gummy worm? Then you wouldn’t be able to move, or talk, or anything. We wouldn’t know it was you. We’d probably just eat you by accident.”
Sham’s face fell dramatically as she realised that a question she had expected to be answer by a simple ‘yes’ had now ballooned well out of her control.
“Would you eat the head or the tail first?” Nath asked dryly. Sham and Sora often teamed up to tease her; having seen an opportunity to turn the tables and tease Sham for once, she found herself quite amenable to the idea.
“You have to start from the head,” Sora replied seriously. “It’s more merciful. If you eat the tail first, they have to feel an extra bite.”
“Alright, geez!” Sham interrupted. “Let’s say I’m an earthworm, then. Would you love me if I was an earthworm?”
“I don’t know much about earthworms,” Sora lamented. Her steady diet of nature documentaries had not, it seemed, educated her in the less exotic annelids living beneath her feet.
“If you cut them in half, both halves can survive. We could multiply the number of Shams we have.”
“Ooh, yeah!” Sham latched on to the idea with surprising enthusiasm. “Sora, you could be the filling in a Sham sandwich! Ehehe.”
“It wouldn’t be a Sham sandwich.” Sora corrected her with a baleful gaze. Sandwiches were very important to her personal cosmology. “You don’t call a sandwich by the outside parts. Then all sandwiches would be bread sandwiches, and you wouldn’t know what the filling was.” She paused, and thought. “I wouldn’t want to cut you in half, anyway. I think one full Sham is better than two half Shams. Nath, would you?”
“Well,” Nath said deliberately, “I don’t think it would be practical. I’m a larger lady, so I think you’d need more than two Shams to sandwich me.”
“Pfft. You can barely handle one of me. You definitely aren’t ready for double Sham action!”
Nath frowned. This was, unfortunately, true. And if Nath found herself unsuited for multi-Sham mayhem, the world at large was completely unprepared for it. There were probably other compelling reasons not to chop her girlfriend in half with a garden shovel, but preserving world peace was a potent one.
Sora raised her hand. “Oh! Can we turn you back from being a worm?”
Sham’s brow furrowed. “Uh?”
“If you turned into a worm, it must be magic. And if it’s magic, there might be a quest,” Sora said, with the kind of wistful tone that suggested she might quite enjoy having a quest, if one were to present itself.
“Supposing there wasn’t a quest, though, and I was just stuck as a worm forever?”
Sora frowned. “You can’t just turn someone into a worm and not give a quest to turn them back. That would be rude.” She paused for a moment, and her frown deepened into a scowl. “I don’t think rude people should be allowed to do magic.”
Nath raised an eyebrow, and shot Sham a meaningful look. Sora had come dangerously close to forming an actual political opinion, which was a sign that the topic ought to be summarily abandoned. The world was about as ready for Sora’s politics as it was a profusion of extra Shams, and they both knew it.
“Why are you worried about being a worm, anyway?” Nath asked, hoping to move the conversation on to fresh waters.
“Aw, I was just wondering if you’d still love me if I didn’t have this smokin’ hot body,” Sham giggled, a little ruefully. “I mean, at least you’d go on a quest to get the smokin’ hot body back, so that’s half marks, I guess…?”
Sora, who would probably have gone on a quest for three dollars and a fistful of candy at that point, nodded comfortingly.
“Plus I was just kinda distracting Nath while I did her nails. Here, take a look!”
Nath looked down at her toes, which had been daubed sky-blue while she wasn’t looking, and tried to summon an opinion from the ether. Sadly, having her nails painted did not seem to have inspired any poetry in her soul. “They… certainly are the colour that’s on the bottle.”
“It’s a pretty colour, though,” Sora weighed in.
“Well, duh! I wouldn’t just go around painting her nails in not pretty colours, right? I could have gone a bit more elaborate with it, but I figured it was probably better to keep it simple.”
Nath shrugged. “Probably a good idea. I’d chip it in no time, anyway. I actually use my feet for things, after all.”
“I mean, most people use their feet for stuff. They just don’t use them for the same variety of stuff that you do,” Sham quipped, and then patted the arm of the sofa. “Alright, you’re officially free to go. Sora, it’s your turn. You wanna go for something simple like Nath’s, or shall we get more complex with it?”
“I want the same as Nath’s,” Sora said slowly, “but with clouds.”
“Ooh, fancy!” Sham cooed. “I can totally make that happen. Oh, actually, why don’t we go with a sunrise, afternoon and sunset theme? You can be the sunrise, I’ll be the sunset, and I’ll just have to touch up Nath’s a bit for the afternoon sky.”
“You only just finished it, and now you want to do it again?” Nath grumbled, but her expression softened. “Well. As long as it makes you happy.”
“Ooh. She’s spoiling you. I’m jealous,” Sora whispered conspiratorially to her beaming partner in crime.
“I know, right?” Sham giggled. “I feel super lucky.”
The blonde shook her head. “No. I’m jealous of Nath, since she gets to spoil you.”
Nath cracked a smile. Sham was a wonderful romantic partner, but her big sister aura meant she was usually doting on people rather than being doted on. Sora was of course the most common target, but Nath herself was far from immune.
It was at that point that Sora wandered over and installed herself on Sham’s sofa. Sham’s sofa was made for two, but the assumption was that the two people would be sitting up rather than lying down; Sora solved this problem via the creative invasion of personal space.
“Nath,” she said, nuzzling up against her girlfriend. “Let’s do a plot about how to spoil Sham together.”
How they would manage to plot anything when Sham was at the end of the sofa painting their toes was an extremely good question. How would they communicate? Morse code tapped on each other’s shoulders? Vibration? Talking was technically vibration-based communication anyway, but that was besides the point. As always, Sora provided more questions than answers.
And, in fact, she had one more question to provide. This time, it was one she had borrowed.
“Would you two love me if I was a worm?” she murmured.
“Duh. We’d love you even if you were a slug.”
“I don’t think I’d want to be a slug. They leave slime everywhere and they keep trying to eat Suguri’s cabbages.”
“That doesn’t matter. You can leave Sora goop all over the place and we’d still love you just the same!”
“What about the cabbages?”
“I don’t have cabbages.”
“You should. They’re soothing.”
“Soothing, like, how? They’re not a pet.”
“They’re kind of a pet. If your robots can be pets, then so can cabbages.”
“Sora, my robots actually do stuff.”
“So do cabbages. They grow, mostly. And they absorb nutrients, and they take in carbon dioxide. And they get eaten by slugs. They have a lot of things they do.”
“I guess, but… What about you, Nath? You gotta weigh in on this, too!”
“I’d appreciate if you left your goop in Sham’s apartment instead of mine, but I feel mostly the same.”
“What about cabbages?”
“I can’t have cabbages. They make the cat irrationally angry.”
For half an hour further, the honour of slugs, cabbages and Sham’s robots was impugned without mercy, and peace reigned amongst the peoples of the earth.