Getting settled into living with Kaye was going easier than he’d thought it would. Part of that was just that he’d thought about doing this before, and had moved all of the papers he’d need into the duffel ahead of time, but part of that was also that it seemed like she’d been waiting for it to happen as much as he had.

She’d even put food in the fridge that he knew she couldn’t cook, which was what finally forced his hand.

“Okay, I’ve got to know– how in the world did you know I’d be over within the next.. what? Three days?”

“What do you mean? Maybe I just wanted to learn how to cook myself. I won’t always have a live-in chef.”

He gave her an unimpressed look, but it still took almost ten seconds before she rolled her eyes, letting the mocking grin drop.

“Harry told me ‘bout your thing. And after your sister started her whole thing, I didn’t expect you to last the rest of the year to begin with.”

“That still isn’t…” he just shook his head. “I wouldn’t think that was enough for you to do so much of this.”

“Hey, if you’d ended up chickening out I woulda just had you come over to ‘teach me how to cook.’” Kaye said, feigning indignance.

“You know, I always thought you were a terrible liar.”

“A reputation every really good liar cultivates.”

“I’m learning as much,” Jeremy sighed, “But I probably should have learned it before I started showing too much around the parents.”

“Hey! They’re not your fault, or your responsibility. Don’t give me that shit.”

Jeremy took a moment to collect his thoughts, then finally gave up on the idea of cooking. It usually wasn’t anything approaching difficult, but at this particular moment, it felt like perhaps slightly too much.

“If I pay for a pizza will you help me eat it?”

“Hell, yeah. Why are you even asking?” Kaye said, waving her arm in the air for a moment before hitting him with a mock-glare. “But, wait. D’you even have money?”

It was true that he didn’t have a lot, but that didn’t mean nothing.

“Yeah, just, I can’t do this every week or anything.”

“Then… fine.”

It wasn’t long from that pizza order that they went through it, still talking the whole time, mostly about random things they’d been doing since they last saw each other daily. They mostly stayed away from the heavier topics though, for which he was grateful.

He wasn’t averse to just dealing with his emotions, but unfortunately, that typically came with the requirement that he actually knew what they were.

Instead, some unknown combination of betrayal, self-and-normal-disgust, embarrassment, indignance, anger, and some kind of pure irrational despair vied for control, not letting him settle on any one of them for anywhere near long enough to actually process.

Which was fine, for now. As much as he’d gone into today spiraling, he’d landed somewhere safe. Not at all through his own doing, yes, but that wasn’t entirely important, right now.

He didn’t have that much with him, unfortunately. A laptop, his phone, clothing, a few of the less replaceable identity documents…

Ellie would probably let him back in when their parents weren’t there to get some of the other stuff, but that wasn’t a guarantee. Even if she was fairly good at getting around what they wanted, she wouldn’t stick her neck out if they had explicitly told her not to, so that was going to be a matter of feeling her out of the course of a few days.

Instead, he spent the next few hours on a combination of catching up with some of the work he’d been letting slip and planning out how he’d have to deal with things for the next while.

With Kaye’s– and her dads’– help, it probably wouldn’t be necessary to do anything beyond finishing his school, but that wouldn’t exactly be fair.

She had mentioned Arrows, though, which was a bit interesting. He’d started to build up a following streaming his first forays into it, and while it hadn’t grown that much recently, he also didn’t have all that much time put into it or a regular schedule, either.

And a lot of people seemed to be interested in watching him struggle things out as a north-laner without the typical calculation-builds. He was having fun at it, too, in between the times he got filled into mist diver.

The role was important, of course, but he could never manage to figure out what he was supposed to be doing all the time. It made sense to farm the monsters there, but then what?

The stream’s chat, afterwards, was a little bit helpful in that regard, but not particularly accurate all the time. A lot of the time, they were just laughing at him, actually, but that was fine– he was a bit of a dope.

That thought got cut off by the inner Kaye he’d developed yelling at him.

He wasn’t dumb. He was just still learning.

And that learning could be monetized.

It wasn’t a guarantee, of course, as nothing was. But it was also better than trying to push a thirty-year-old out of their part-time job before he could collect his monthly stipend, and it was at the very least trying to do something to pay her back for the enormous favor.

So… research, then.