I Am the Strongest Femboy, So Stop Protecting Me!-Chapter 30: A Quiet, Comfortable Meal.

POV: Aris Ashborne.

Deep breaths.

Deep... breaths...

He needed to stay calm.

Nothing was out of place. Just... Virginia had made a mistake, surely.

Deep, deep breaths. He reminded himself.

"Why do you have so much?" It was really hard to keep the irritation out of his voice.

Virginia shrugged, "I don’t know what you like. So i got everything that i guessed you might."

Maybe he could release his aspect and disintegrate this entire building.

He was not actually going to, obviously not. There were people here, and the building was a little too well built for him to be able to do so seamlessly. Whoever had built it had a really good head on their shoulders, considering that his specialty was literally destruction.

Anyhow, he looked at the containers.

The same irritation came creeping back.

There were so many containers.

Enough to feed a ten people.

Virginia had pulled up a chair and was opening things with the calm efficiency of someone who had decided this was simply what was happening now and had no further questions about it. Silas was leaning against the wall doing the thing he did where he wasn’t quite smiling but the potential for smiling was fully loaded and ready to deploy.

Aris looked at the containers again.

He let the sigh building up in his chest go, shaking his head as he decided that this was his fate now.

Still..

He couldn’t just not notice.

The problem.

The actual problem, the one that had nothing to do with the quantity of food and everything to do with the specific shape of the situation—was that she’d gotten it right.

Not all of it. Some of it was guesswork, clearly, things she’d hedged on, things that represented her best attempt at reconstructing a person from a decade-old memory. But enough of it.

Enough that looking at the spread was doing something to his chest that he was going to need a moment to manage.

Deep breaths, he reminded himself.

The soup. She’d gotten the soup. A specific kind, regional, the type that was difficult to find outside of the countryside area where they’d grown up, and she’d found it at two in the morning in a city that was mostly asleep and had it delivered to a government building.

He looked at it for slightly too long.

"The soup," he said, with great care, "was unnecessary."

"You always liked it when you were sick," Virginia said, without looking up from the container she was opening, her sleeves folded upwards as she did her work. She had the serene air of someone going through a normal routine, nothing in her body language giving away that this was the first meal they’re sharing in years.

"I’m not sick." He said, lightly pouting without realizing.

"You just exited an Aberrant dungeon."

"That’s not the same as being sick."

"It’s the same category of requiring soup," she said, and set it in front of him with the precise finality of someone who had made a decision and was not entertaining appeals.

Silas made a sound.

Aris looked at him.

Silas was looking at the ceiling with the expression of a man who was fully committed to not being present for this particular exchange.

Coward.

He was going to deal with him later.

Amari, meanwhile, had stopped looking at the activity a few beds away from them. They had drawn a curtain over the bed now, and only a few of the professionals remained from what he could sense, the healers he guessed, doing the last of the work to make sure the Aureate had a good recovery.

Aris looked at his soup.

He picked it up, tender with his behavior. The plastic container was warm against his skin,

The smell hit him first—familiar in a way that bypassed whatever careful architecture he’d built between himself and the things that used to matter, going directly to something older and less managed, the specific warmth of a memory he hadn’t visited in a long time because visiting it hurt in a way that wasn’t useful.

He released the faintest bit of his aspect, letting the chaos do its work with the part of his brain that was giving him trouble.

He took a sip.

It was exactly right.

He put it down and looked at the wall and breathed very carefully through his nose.

"Well?" Virginia said. Still not looking at him. Occupied with distributing containers to Silas, to Amari, to the general surface of the table she had picked up from who knows where, with the steady casualness of someone who had asked a question they were pretending not to care about the answer to.

"It’s fine," he said.

"Just fine?" She raised an eyebrow, turning to him.

"It’s acceptable."

Virginia picked up her own container. The corner of her mouth did something brief and small that she managed before it finished.

Aris obviously did not miss it.

"Good," she said.

Silas deciding that it was his turn to sit on the edge of the bed, took a seat, carefully placing the container of food on his lap as he looked between. He had that same mischievous glint in his eyes that Aris noticed at times when he was thinking of something horrible to say.

Amari, was looking at the container in her hand like she was studying some sort of alien specimen.

"This looks expensive."

Virginia shrugged through a mouthful of noodles.

Amari blinked, staring at her.

"Now that i think about it." She turned to Aris. "What is your relationship with the literal heir of Halcyon."

Aris paused.

’Crap.’

Virginia beat him to the answer.

"We’re childhood friends."

Amari turned to her.

"I thought you grew up away from civilization."

A moment of silence.

Then it hit her, and her usually expressionless eyes widened in realization.

She turned to Aris again, slower this time, the surprise still etched on her face.

"You’re the Ashborne?"

Silas made the ’almost laugh’ sound again.

Aris turned to him.

"Stop."

"I’m not doing anything." He protested.

Aris let out a long exhale.

"Just.. stop."

This day... he decided, was the worst he had gotten to experience ever in his life.