changing my major

~ • ∆ two ∆ • ~

None of that made him gay, and it never will.

"You don't need to watch me make pancakes," Kyle huffed. He was cute when he was flustered, Stan noted, but quickly scratched the thought because Kyle wasn't cute. He was his friend. Well, super best friend, but still his friend and nothing more.

"But you're good at it. And I wanna spend time with you," Stan countered, knowing that what he had just said was probably only half of the reason he found himself watching Kyle's slender fingers wrapped around the long spatula, working tediously with the batter-

God damnit, Stan.

The two stood in silence for a few minutes. Stan was enjoying it, maybe a little too much but that didn't matter to him. He swayed back and forth, holding Kyle's waist in his tight grip as if he were going to disappear and Stan needed to hold him one more time.

Kyle flipped a pancake over skillfully, listening to the sizzling as he continued his humming. Stan had recognized the song - it was from a cartoon that he knew Kyle watched since they sometimes watched episodes together. Steven Universe? He wasn't sure. It sounded nice, though, so Stan didn't say anything about it. Kyle was a nerd, but at least he was an adorable nerd.

"Why do you always hum that song?" Stan asked once he was completely positive it was over. Kyle's voice was like… butter on pancakes? No, that's stupid, he'll have to think of a better analogy than that. He was supposed to be a music guy, but he can't even think of analogies and metaphors to save his life.

"It's from the show I like," Kyle shrugged, "and what I think- well I mean, what I find interesting, is the fact that Rebecca Sugar - the made the show - she said it could be any of the characters talking to any other character. Because we all have flaws and we all wanna be more like someone else."

Stan took a second to process those words. "This whole thing is from a kids show?" he asked with a chuckle.

"Yeah. But the show- it like, teaches kids things that are really important. Mindful meditation, how to cope with feelings of anxiety, how to deal with loss and a lot of other skills that kids will need," the redhead went on, knowing that Stan was only half listening. When Kyle was interested in something, he didn't stop talking about it, and Stan found that absolutely fucking adorable sometimes.

Stan hummed in response, nuzzling his nose into those soft, red curls. No matter how much Kyle hated his hair, Stan would always cherish those scarlet locks until they started to fall out. In the rare moments where Kyle didn't have his green ushanka atop his head, Stan would do anything he could to tangle his hands in those full, bouncy curls. Kyle always told him to stop, without fail, so it was a surprise to Stan when there wasn’t a word about it from the shorter man.

“I like your voice,” Stan said after a second, out of nowhere.

“Were you listening to what I  was saying?” Kyle asked with a slight chuckle. Stan took a second, thinking, before realizing that he was, indeed, only half-listening and had forgotten pretty much everything Kyle said.

“Kinda,” he replied, though it definitely sounded much more like a question than Stan had intended. Kyle just sighed and shook his head, tossing another pancake on the plate next to the stove.

The two stood in silence again. It wasn’t awkward - though, to be fair, nothing was ever really awkward between them. They’d been through everything together; Stan had seen Kyle break down a million times over and knew that the posters in his old childhood bedroom hid a bunch of holes in the wall and Kyle had held Stan’s hair back when he was puking into the bathtub at 3am on a Tuesday night after drinking four or five bottles of beer and crying for hours. If it was quiet, that just meant that they ran out of things to talk about, not that they felt uncomfortable with one another. Stan trailed a hand upwards along Kyle’s hips to his curly hair, twirling one of those curls around his finger and then letting go. As he watched the curl bounce back into place, he heard a small sigh from Kyle. Was he annoyed? Stan didn’t really care, though he felt a little bad if he had, in fact, made Kyle feel annoyed just by playing with his hair.