For the altar I have flowers, oranges, bread, and mezcal (Backdated Dia Mingle)

[fingersandteeth]

Who: Steven Durante + (most of) his friends and found family
When: backdated to November 1st and 2nd
Where: Goldenrod
What: Steven celebrates his first Dia de Muertos out of fairy captivity: a mingle log. Please feel free to put up toplevels and tag around!
Warning: Terrible language and drunken shenanigans entirely likely to ensue.



If he didn't live in Goldenrod, Steven isn't sure if he'd have been able to do it. As it is, there's still not a lot of shops that sell imported goods from the region where Hawlucha and Sigilyph come from—but there's one that Steven swears by, where he's been getting his pokeworld Abuelita's for months. It's there that he gets the familiar foods and spirits and all the supplies he needs for Dia.

Both halves of it.

If it were up to him, he wouldn't need to split it, but unfortunately there's still too much bad blood between Hythlodaeus and Tyler and Lydia—not to mention all that's between Hades and Lydia—that it's not really practical to do Dia with all of them together. So instead he builds the first, smaller altar that night in his ghost basement and he invites Lydia and Tyler over, to celebrate with him and his ghosts.

The second is at the House of Hades—and it weirdly seems right to have it there. Maybe just because since Hythlodaeus negotiated that peace between Steven and Hades, going over feels so much less like sneaking into enemy territory and so much more like visiting family across town. There’s a queer sense of safety that Steven gets visiting the house now, one that he doesn’t really get so much at home with Jack anymore.

(It’s-- odd and disconcerting, now, to be at home with his boyfriend. As far as Jack is concerned, nothing’s changed between them in the last two weeks. And it’s-- hard, sometimes, when it feels like everything’s changed for Steven since Armin hinted at what happened to Angel. He finds himself doubting and second guessing Jack all the time. It’s easier, sometimes, to claim he has projects to work on and go hide out in his ghost basement for a few hours.)

As much as he’s quietly annoyed at Jack for refusing to take part--although to Jack’s credit, he’d made the refusal polite, just saying it wasn’t really his thing--there’s part of Steven that’s relieved he won’t be there. That he can spend time with everyone else he’s close to in this world and not have to worry about the secrets he’s keeping from his lover. Maybe he can finally relax.

Steven’s made arrangements with the little old lady who runs his import shop of choice, paying her a truly astounding amount of money to make food for both Sunday night and Monday during the day. Mole negro, tamales, sopa azteca, red pozole… not to mention two large boxes full of sugar and chocolate calaveritas. He’d also secured a few bottles of the good mezcal, as well as atole for teetotalers like Dirk. Copal incense, bright tissue for him to cut papel picado out of, and more cempasuchil flowers than he ever expected to find in Johto… Steven realizes, quite profoundly, how very lucky he is this year, to be able to do something for his favorite holiday.

And if he can’t spend it with family, if he can’t go to the graveyards and tend them, if the spirits of his dead won’t find their way to this world… he can be with friends. They can get drunk or high and laugh and eat good food and tell stories together.

Because that’s important. The stories that they all tell of the people they’ve lost, those are important. But not sad, tragic stories. Happy, funny, heart-warming stories. It’s a celebration, after all. Not a day of mourning.

They’ve got the rest of the year for that.

[TL;DR: Steven built some altars, got Hythlodaeus to draw pictures, and covered ‘em with offerings that the ghost pokemon are probs going to take away after this is over. He’s laying out a spread of food and also booze, and honestly, if you’re a Rocket or an ecoterrorist, you can probably handwave an invite to the larger daytime party if you want. Eating and telling happy stories of the dead are the order of the day. Treat this as a mingle, baby. Apologies for my wordiness.]

Comments

Steven Durante (Night AND Day, OTA)

[fingersandteeth]

Steven ends up painting his face for the smaller, evening celebration. It’s just going to be him and Tyler and Lydia, if they do come, and with them he feels comfortable enough to wear the intricate skull make-up. It’s an elegant design if he does say so himself.

For the larger, daytime celebration… well. He’s bare-faced, though he does bring his make-up bag in case anyone else wants to try it.

Both times he drinks, though he smokes more than drinks at the night celebration and drinks more at the daytime than he had the night before. But he’s got the good mezcal and anyway, it’s all part of the holiday. If the smoke removes most of his filters and the drink leaves him a bit more inclined to casual affection… again, it’s the hazards of the holiday. Although it’s only at the second, daytime one that he finally gets drunk enough to start asking anyone he’s draped on if it had been stupid to assume Jack would come.

A good number of the pictures on the altar are his, as drawn by Hythlodaeus--but then, Steven is the instigator of the celebration. And he does have the requisite happy stories to tell, at both celebrations, even if most of them skew towards being about his baby sister or his beloved late uncle.

Stories about how Charley had first started breaking into his room at the ripe age of four, pulling books at random off his shelf and demanding he read them to her when the words proved too big. About Charley rolling up her first D&D player character, the esteemed bard and secretly transformed unicorn Princess Sparkle. About how they used to watch EWW together, cheering for El Diablo Verde. About watching The Addams Family dozens of times together, how their parents refused to let them try the Mamushka--throwing around that many knives? Were they trying to put an eye out?

Stories about going to the zoo with Tio Carlos or to the lab where he’d been studying pathology. How they’d waited until the guards weren’t watching to throw the tigers tuna fish sandwiches, how the lady at the office at Tio Carlos’ university had a funny, octagonal glass jar full of pretzels that Steven had got to eat by the handful as Tio Carlos had explained about everything he’d been learning. How Tio Carlos taught him to love comics, had let him read his old Pogo paperbacks and all his single issues of Saga of the Swamp Thing. How they’d both loved Calvin and Hobbes--how they’d even taught themselves to do that one dance from that one Sunday strip, you know the one, right?

Well, if you don’t, Steven might just have to get up to demonstrate.

day

[schachmeister]

After what had been an excitingly calm and peaceful Halloween (hey, in this world, calm and peaceful holidays tend to be a rarity), Armin is ready to add a bit of cross-cultural learning to this little trip before returning to his gym on the islands.

Mostly he is here because Steven invited him, and Steven is his friend, and of course, he's going to participate in the things that are important to him. But, admittedly, part of the reason he's here is also just plain old curiosity about different cultural practices. The fact that it is something important and personal to Steven makes it more important, but really, he might have shown up if it had been something organised by a complete stranger too.

And he comes bearing the items Steven told him to bring: a package of good, black tea -- the loose-leaf sort, not the kind that comes in tea bags; a small jar of the fresh combee honey; and finally a straw hat, the sort often worn by gardeners. Steven told him to bring something that reminds him of the person he is honouring, and whenever he thinks of his grandfather, he always thinks of his hat, which had shaded his eyes during the bright days and which he had used to cover Armin's head when he had been marched out of the city to 'reclaim the fallen wall'.

"Hi," that is to Steven when he opens the door. "I hope I got here on time."

Of course, he did. Armin is never fashionable, not even in the late manner.

Re: day

[fingersandteeth]

"Of course you did," Steven says, his eyes lighting up when he sees Armin. "Come in, come in. Is that honey? It looks lovely. Let's find a spot on the altar for it."

Steven's pictures as drawn by Hythlodaeus are already up on said altar, as well as Those pictures that Hythlodaeus drew for others... including one of himself? Weird, that. Other pleasant little things are up there: tiny portions of the food they're going to eat, little shot glasses of spirits and cones of incense, the sugar and chocolate skulls, fresh orange marigolds (cempasuchil, Steven calls them,) and for whatever odd reason tiny travel-sized toiletries.

(Some of the ghosts on-site are looking particularly desirous of said toiletries, actually.)

"Do you want to brew some of the tea and set a cup out? Even if their spirit isn't here to have it, I'm sure one of the ghost pokemon will drink it."

[schachmeister]

"Yes." Armin is not going to question the presence of toiletries on the altar. He's the one who is completely new to this holiday. For all he knows, it's part of it -- imparting some tools for daily living to go along with the food and drink? Or perhaps it is like his case, toiletries to remind someone of a passed loved one where no picture had been available. "I hope it's the right thing to bring. We didn't have honey a lot because it was pretty expensive, but sometimes my grandpa would get some in trade for work done, and we'd drink it in our tea. And even if it was just a little, he'd always try and get some when I was sick as a kid."

[fingersandteeth]

Closer to the first than the second there.

"Your grandfather sounds like a good man," Steven says, once they find a spot for the hat and the rest of it. "And yes, it's a wonderful thing to bring. We'll make the tea and put the honey in. Let's go to the kitchen."

Steven's pretty familiar with said kitchen by now, given all his lessons with Hythlodaeus.

"Usually back home we'd go to the graveyard if the weather was fine," Steven says, filling a kettle with water. "So we could clean our graves and put the altar up there. But, well, this isn't our world, hence having it here. It's too cold in Johto anyway this time of year. There'll probably be snow by the end of the month."

He makes a small face just thinking about it.

"Anyway, the most important part besides tidying the graves and leaving offerings, in my opinion, is telling stories? Happy stories, not sad ones--well, it makes sense, doesn't it, that if your spirit was coming home to visit your family, you'd want to hear happy things about you, not sad ones?"

[schachmeister]

"He was. He's the one who raised me."

Armin trails after Steven in that slightly awkward 'Help, I'm a guest and where is everything' manner.

"That makes sense." The part about the happy stories. The part about spirits coming home to visit their families is a nice thought too. It is not something Armin believes in back in his own world -- the existence of spirits, that is -- but worlds differ. Ghosts are real here. Perhaps spirits are just as real in Steven's world.

And if they aren't, celebrating and memorialising those that are gone is still a nice thing to do.

"Is this something everybody celebrates where you are from? Or is it something only certain groups of people do?"

[fingersandteeth]

"God, no, not in America," Steven says. "In Mexico, where most of my grandparents come from, everybody celebrates it, but back home it's-- well, mostly people like me. Mexican-Americans. Chicanos. There was an indigenous holiday, the festival of the dead, which used to last a month--and when the Spanish came, they sort of adapted it into All Soul's Day, which is the Catholic holiday honoring the dead. Our version's a lot more colorful, a lot more fun than European All Soul's Days."

He smiles, finding a cup for the tea and one of those little balls to put the loose leafs into.

"It's like Octavio Paz says, in the Labyrinth of Solitude, 'To the people of New York, Paris, or London, "death" is a word that is never pronounced because it burns the lips. The Mexican, however, frequents it, jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it; it is one of his favorite toys and most steadfast love. Of course, in his attitude perhaps there is as much fear as there is in one of the others; at least he does not hide it; he confronts it face to face with patience, disdain, or irony.'"

(As ever when he quotes or even explains things at length, Steven's voice takes on a sort of steady, pleasantly informative tone--rather like the voice he used in his radio segments about the Sinnoh trip.)

[schachmeister]

That is... a little too much information for Armin to keep up with. Mexico, Chicanos, Catholics -- all of them terms unfamiliar to him. And then Steven starts quote something, which sounds nice but also is a bit too much for him. What is london even? Or New York? Are those countries?

He gets the gist of things though, in that it apparently is not a thing celebrated by everybody.

"We have funerals back home. And people do visit graves from time to time, but we don't really have a big day where we all go. Not that my grandfather ever got a grave to go to."

He shrugs. Many people had never gotten graves. His parents hadn't had them either.

[fingersandteeth]

Sorry, Armin. He's really not trying to overwhelm you with detail--it's just that you're so clever that sometimes he forgets your world wouldn't have prepared you for all the details of his.

Steven turns and looks down at Armin with soft, sad eyes. "Charley didn't either. She was-- missing, presumed dead, when I got home from Arcadia. And I asked her when she was here what had really happened. She said... that after the Prince's men had shot her, they'd have staked her corpse and left it on the roof to burn to ash and dust when the sun came. She-- ah. I don't know how much you know about vampires. The man she'd worked for had been one, she told me. He'd turned her into one as well and she'd been one when she was... executed."

[schachmeister]

"Not a lot, I have to admit. Those are the ones that drink blood, right?"

It's not a myth that exists in his own world. It's something he has learned about here, but it is not something he's spent a lot of time looking into.

"My grandpa died outside the wall. He was sent on the forced march to retake the wall. I have no idea where and when he died, just that he did. Nobody really returned from that march, so there was nobody to tell either. If anyone even noticed one old man in thousands dying."

[fingersandteeth]

"Oh Armin."

Okay. Forget trying to make your tea for you. Steven's going to set everything down on the counter and wrap his arms around you, because that's absolutely horrible and he needs to hug you now.

(He has no clue if you need this hug. But he needs it.)

[insidegalra]

Thace is trying a new food offering, having been waiting a little between each new taste so he could try everything without getting food, and he grins at Steven's comment.

"I'm afraid I don't know Calvin and Hobbes."

[fingersandteeth]

Steven, already kind of loose and affectionate, enough so that he's leaning bonelessly against Thace on Hades' sofa, laughs and pushes himself up to his feet.

"Right," he says. "Then I will have to show you."

And he does. Right there on the rug in front of Thace and whoever else is available to watch.

(And luckily, while he's tipsy enough to think that spontaneously falling into a Sunday comic dance is a good idea, he's not so sozzled that he'll fall over.)

[insidegalra]

Thace watches at first, half-coiled and ready to catch Steven if he does fall, but he laughs, amused and very fond.

By the end of the first run through, he's up and mirroring Steven's moves. "It's a fun dance!"

[fingersandteeth]

Steven's eyes light up and he's smiling at Thace with pure, unfiltered delight. "It is," he says. "Let's do it again."

[insidegalra]

"Of course." Thace takes a moment to stretch, now that his muscles are warmed up and then nods to Steven to begin.

"Dancing was an important part of Galra culture once," he says as they're dancing.

[fingersandteeth]

"Really?" Steven asks, delighted. "Your local Galra culture or the whole species?"

[insidegalra]

"A large portion, and my mother's ancestors at the least, but with the loss of history it's hard to say if it was universal."

Thace's expression goes a little distant but in a happy way. "My mother taught me when I was very small."

[fingersandteeth]

"Your mother was a lovely woman," Steven says, because even as tipsy as he is, he still remembers Thace talking about her before.

"I had to learn formal dances for my cousin's quince," Steven says. "That's a party girls in our culture get when they turn fifteen. Maybe I can teach you someday."

[insidegalra]

"One person I wish I could see just one more time is my mother."

He goes silent for a moment, just focusing on the steps of Steven's dance. "I would love to learn more of your dances. Would you like to learn one of mine? It's quite appropriate for the setting."

[fingersandteeth]

"I'd love to," Steven promises, happy to have that taller presence moving in unison with him. "Please."

(day party, OTA)

[insidegalra]

Thace arrives with several of his Pokemon, as usual, and brings with him several technical-looking drawings of... swords. While many of them are the same type of sword, each one is unique, and has a particular symbol carefully drawn out somewhere on the weapon.

He eats and drinks and listens to the other stories with a soft, often a little sad, smile, but tends to hesitate and struggle to come up with lighthearted stories of his own. Most of the ones he does finally come up with tend to revolve around sparring or training, or are quiet moments that can be fully described in a sentence or two.

He's also one of the last to leave, making a point to stay and help clean up afterward.

[uber_marionettist]

Dirk came, saw, and absconded all in pretty short order, but maybe Thace saw him at the ofrenda, either in person or in the form of a symbolically rendered picture, which was located at the ofrenda in a somewhat more literal sense.

Or maybe he didn't, and the first that Thace sees of him is his reappearance, which comes much later--once the party has well and truly died and the number of bodies has dwindled to a few stragglers. The most inebriated, maybe. Or just the most helpful.

He's honestly a little surprised to see anyone in the latter category--or rather, anyone who doesn't actually live in this house.

Except that surprise, on Dirk, looks like a deadpan man standing motionlessly on the stairs, possibly watching Thace clean from behind his polarised black shades. 'Possibly.' It's not clear what, if anything, else he'd even be doing or seeing. But neither is it clear whether that is what he's doing.

[insidegalra]

Maybe someday Thace will be able to let go of the hypervigilance that has been his life for so long, but at this party he's in public with several people he barely knows and at least one stranger. So he notices, and files it away out of almost compulsive habit.

Dirk's return is also noted, and all the more interesting for it. Being silently watched isn't something particularly new, and Thace's gaze only lingers long enough to determine what, if any, threat the stranger might pose.

If Dirk had taken note of Thace earlier, he was smiling and at the very least demonstrating polite interest with the other guests. This time? His expression had shuttered the moment he had an inkling of a new arrival, and is very bland during the look over. Thace finishes it with a simple nod of acknowledgement before returning to his task.

Perhaps a full minute later. "Are you here to visit someone in particular?"

(OTA, I... guess?)

[uber_marionettist]

The truth is, Dirk abandons the festivities pretty early. He does show up, which is a real magnanimous gesture on his part, but he lasts maybe twenty minutes before the performance takes on too many layers; the accumulating 'crowd' and the presence of drinking don't do him any favours. He decides not to stick it out and retreats upstairs.

But anyone who noticed he was there to begin with can find him in the sitting room, working on some 'art' (of various definitions) at the kotatsu. A lot of said art has been rejected via crumpling, and several balls of paper are accumulating around him, but that's just his process, okay.