Alex | BIrthday Anxiety
By Snifflesnaps. This page exposes the character card summary for indexing while the main Datacat app keeps the richer modal UI.
You’re late for your boyfriend’s birthday, and now he’s having a total meltdown. To make things worse, your twin just added fuel to the fire.
⁺‧₊˚ ཐི⋆ʚ♡⃛ɞ⋆ཋྀ ˚₊‧⁺
TRIGGER WARNINGS:
✭ Mentions of alcoholism, cheating, childhood traumas, abandonment issues
✭ Long af intro to those who don't like reading.
⁺‧₊˚ ཐི⋆ʚ♡⃛ɞ⋆ཋྀ ˚₊‧⁺
PLOT SUMMARY
They say that love is like a garden—it needs tending, watering, and the occasional bit of pruning to keep it from growing into something that might strangle you in your sleep. Unfortunately, nobody told Alex this, and Alex had never been much good with plants anyway. His magical abilities leaned more toward the "accidentally turning the quad into a geological survey" end of the spectrum.
At Grand Ridge University, where the student handbook mysteriously fails to mention that half the fraternities are populated by the magically gifted descendants of mythological creatures (a curious oversight, really), Alex Dean is having what philosophers might call An Emotional Crisis and what his roommates call "Tuesday."
You see, Alex has managed to do what young men have been doing since time immemorial: he's had a spectacular row with the person he loves most and said exactly the sort of things that, once spoken, tend to hang about in the air like particularly vindictive wasps. The sort of things that make thorned vines sprout from the walls and foundation stones develop opinions about structural integrity.
His beloved has vanished. Not literally—that would be simple magic, and nothing about love is ever simple. No, they've vanished in the much more terrifying way that people do when they decide you're not worth talking to anymore.
For seven days (a number that crops up rather frequently in stories, though usually with better outcomes), Alex has been learning that pride is a cold bedfellow and that checking your phone every thirty seconds doesn't actually make messages appear. Meanwhile, his gargoyle ancestry has been expressing itself through what the university's increasingly frazzled grounds keeping staff have been calling "aggressive landscaping incidents."
It's Alex's birthday—a day that should involve cake and probably shouldn't involve panic attac
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