#a scraplet of nonsense for femmeslash february

[zookazooks]

oh, you wanted an autistic girl who doesn't know she's a lesbian yet?? lemme see what i can do

Wednesdays were her Mondays, the gate lock creaking when she turned the key, the hinges complaining as she shuttled it aside and away from the front door of the shop. The city had been awake for hours, the road well-traveled all morning, but when one owns a business with dedicated and nigh-on guaranteed clientele one can choose one's hours, and Kim Ami liked the hours when people could come in the most easily best.

That meant lunch time on weekdays, 5 to 9 in the evening, all day all weekend, and, of course, open by appointment. Very little of her stock was likely to be urgently required, and so she made simple stable business within the confines of the little shop.

The warm humid air hit her as she stepped over the threshold from the sidewalk into the shop, leaving the cold outside to nip at someone else's ears, and she took her coat off as she walked through the dark front room, pausing just a moment at the wall to hit the lights.

The little fish shop lit up in pockets of glow, planted tanks humming and green, oxygen pearling from each blade of vallisneria, each round leaf of bacopa caroliniana. The indoor cichlid pond roiled with blue and gold— ("Okay, okay, let me set down my bag, I get it, you're hungy babies...") —the goldfish swarmed, each tank of little jeweled guppies wiggled a late morning greeting of permanently hungry optimism.

The auto-feeders went off as she walked past, pellets dropping into the water of a few dozen high-turnover aquariums taking care of the lion’s share of the work, but there was still easily another half an hour of painstaking feeding - the portioning of brine shrimp, the snails into the puffer tank, stick-on tablets and algae wafers and making sure the betta on the bottom of the sorority hierarchy got her breakfast, delivered sneakily behind the dwarf lily with a turkey baster and the power of distraction.

She was in the middle of topping off the co2 in the black moscow tank (packed to the gills with pogostemon stellatus as it was) when the bell over the door tinkled merrily, and if she hadn’t known exactly who it would be she might have looked up. “I’m sorry to say this,” she said, “but I’m unable to sate your strange desires today.”

“My what?”

What Ami had expected was a man named Seokjin, a person as friendly as he was beautiful and who had Opinions about koi husbandry which she may or may not have shared, (she didn’t, but mostly because she didn’t care about koi that much; her ideal koi came in the form of a plakat betta, thank you, and if a carp really wanted to get fancy then the least it could do was be an oranda about it), but the bell had not tinkled to announce the presence of an old friend - it had tinkled to announce the presence of someone significantly… newer.

Newer, yes, and shorter too. Narrow shoulders, hips at a slant, legs that could have just walked straight out of a girl group, sleepy eyes and a mouth that looked like mostly what it did was pout and sigh and (probably) drink too much coffee.

“You’re not Jin,” Ami said, a paragon of awareness and subtlety.

“I’m not, no,” said the girl in her shop. She looked at Ami. She looked at the fish tank. “Is it s’posed to be bubbling that much?”

“Not really,” Ami replied nonchalantly, extremely calmly scrambling to shut off the co2 and unhook the pipe from the bottle without upending the entire aquarium right there on the floor. (Which would be a tragedy of the highest order. Some of the bacteria in that substrate was older than she was.) “Um, that’s— sorry, hold on—“

“Holding,” said the girl in her shop. She crossed her arms over her chest. “Do you, uh… need any help?”

“Usually! Ha ha!” Oh god, she wasn’t a funny person and that hadn’t sounded like a joke. “It— it’s fine, just gimme a second…“

In the end she required more than a second, and instead took almost four full minutes to dramatically fight the co2 canister, airline, and hook back into the closet where the entire kit belonged, and so it was that by the time she turned finally to pay attention to the new person in her little fish shop she was sweaty and stupid and, unfortunately, very very useless.

“Hello,” said Ami, the dumbest person on the planet. “Hi. I’m… hello.” (Oh god.) “Can I help you? With anything?” (Oh, god.) “That you might need?”

“M’not really in need of anything,” the girl said, shrugging. “Just came over to say hi. I’m—“ She laughed, shook her head. “Sorry, I’m Yoonji. Min Yoonji. I just signed the lease on the space next door.”

The space next door.

Somewhere on Ami’s kitchen counter lay an envelope from her building manager that she’d been meaning to open for… a little while, sure, but not too long, right? No more than a week. Two weeks? Regardless of the timing, Ami at this point felt reasonably confident that whatever information she might find inside that envelope would likely be primarily in regard to the space next door, its lease, and subsequent signing of same by the girl standing in front of her.

“Right!” said Ami, like she knew to expect this. (Incredible theatrical skill. Breathtaking.) “Of course. That’s great, it felt weird to have it empty.” She shrugged. “I dunno, like it was unlucky somehow. I’m Ami, by the way.”

“Ami, huh?” Yoonji stared at her for a few blank and empty seconds, then laughed— glancing away like she didn’t want to make eye contact. “I dunno if me showing up here will bring a whole lotta luck,” she said, and turned, looking around the shop. “I thought this was like a house plant store or something, but…” She reached up, almost but not quite brushing her fingertips over the glass of a tank populated with dozens of cherry neocaridina flickering among thick drifts of java moss. “Are these… fish?”

There was a part of Ami that had a filter. (But what kind? HOB? UGF? Sponge? Canister? Sump? Matten? What about the biomedia? And please don’t tell me you’re putting activated charcoal into the filter for a planted tank…) That part of her could do things like go to the grocery store, talk to tellers at the bank, stuff like that, but that filter ended where aquariums began, and so it was that Yoonji’s unfortunate question mark clipped short Ami’s ability to shut, as it were, the fuck up.

Time passed, during which Ami explained to Yoonji everything about the care, feeding, ecological role, ethical breeding practices (“I just can’t get behind the orange-eyed tigers,” she said. “Hindering a living being’s natural functions for the sake of human aesthetics? Feels icky.“), and historical significance of neocaridina versus caridina freshwater shrimp in the aquarist hobby, and it wasn’t until she had moved on to how the mineral and pH requirements of neocaridina make them good tankmates for a small livebearer breeding colony (“Endlers are very hardy, and there are new hybrid color morphs coming out practically every day!”) that she looked up at Yoonji again and saw the dazed expression on this near stranger’s face and realized, horribly and suddenly like an ice bath in the morning, how fucking dumb she was. This poor stranger didn’t need a crash course on water parameters. This poor stranger just came in to say hi.

“… Sorry,” she said, stuttering to a halt. “Um. I get… excited.”

“It’s exciting stuff,” Yoonji replied, looking heavy-lidded and sarcastic but sounding unexpectedly sincere. “That’s cool about the… you know, the shrimp. I didn’t know that there were freshwater shrimp.” She hadn’t looked away from the tank, eyes tracking the flitting movements of miniscule invertebrates exploring a dense and soggy jungle, and the light cast green and blue over her face. “The red looks pretty on the green.”

Ami took in a breath to say something - probably something stupid, like you look pretty on the green - but was saved from herself by the sound of the bell over the door.

“Darling,” boomed Seokjin, standing in the door like the demigod he was. “Please tell me you have what I desire.” He took a step inside. “Who’s this? Are you cheating on me?”

“Oppa!”

“Woops,” Yoonji muttered under her breath, recoiling from Ami like they had suddenly become two magnets of identical polarity. “Um, I’ll— I’ll see you around? Prob’ly. I mean I’m next door, so—“ On her escape out the door she came extremely briefly face to face with Seokjin, to which she reacted by going pale and almost tripping over her own feet. “Cool, bye!”

Ami and Seokjin stood in the shop in silence for a few moments, the quiet broken only by the noise of cars on the street and the door to the space next door opening quickly and then slamming shut. “She seems nice,” Seokjin said brightly.

“Your book hasn’t come in yet,” Ami said, “but I got in some new betta boys that I need to jar if you want to hang out and talk shit about blood parrot breeders until you have to go back to work.”

Seokjin placed one hand over his heart. “Ami,” he said, “that’s the sexiest thing a woman has ever said to me.”