#also tanuma's most comfy pajamas have ratty sleeves for the aforementioned reasons

[owletstarlet]

Hi! Could you do devil's food chocolate for natsume and tanuma?? Many thanks 🌸

(From the ice cream flavors headcanon meme.) Devil’s food chocolate was a headcanon about vices.

So I’m not gonna attack either of their more serious deep rooted personal issues this time, let’s go at it from an inconvenient-personal-habits angle. (Which, disclaimer, are not bad or wrong in themselves or make you bad and wrong, especially if it’s a symptom of anxiety like Tanuma’s— but, like I said, inconvenient for the characters themselves.) 

So the Tanuma headcanon is that when he gets really anxious he’ll start subconsciously picking at loose threads, buttons, or hems on his clothes. It’s something he tries really, really hard not to do, because he feels awful about damaging clothes his dad paid for, but I can Absolutely see him having been the sort of little kid who’d get a hole in his jeans by accident and then within half an hour it’s quadruple the size and his whole knee is visible. Or  him at twelve years old coming home shamefaced with all the buttons popped off his uniform sleeves because he’d had a panic spiral over having to give a class presentation. 

So it’s not often so severe now that he’s older, but he’s pretty adept at minor clothing repairs (buttons, hemming, fixing little holes), a skill which Natsume’s very grateful for after he’s been roped into Miscellaneous Youkai Shenanigans. (I’m envisioning more than one occasion where Natsume’s totally exhausted and tucked up in a quilt sipping tea while Tanuma sews half the buttons back onto a very rumpled and grass-stained shirt.) I think it’s a sign Natsume eventually figures out to watch for, if Tanuma starts plucking at his sleeves worrying at his shirt hem, that he’s way more stressed or upset than he’s letting on (or has even noticed himself, like for example if he’s in a noisy crowded place and getting overstimulated).

So the my idea for Natsume is that, especially as he hits college age, he’d fall into the trap of “each can of terrible vending machine coffee I chug is the rough equivalent of one hour’s worth of the sleep I didn’t get, right?” If he’s dealing with youkai bullshit du jour and college classes or a part time job (or, like I like to think, also learning some potentially life-saving skills from a few exorcists at the same time)…vending machine coffee tastes like ass but it’s cheap and it’s always right there. He’s never had it in the manga, but he does when he and Shigeru have their pottery-class-bonding time in the anime so I’d say he at least doesn’t mind the taste. As of canon high-school-era we know he already needs way more sleep than he’s getting, and he also hates letting people down, so once the daily tasks and responsibilities are increased, welp. Caffeine it is.

I’m imagining one day where he’s like. Huh. That’s odd, why do I feel shaky and nauseous and bad for no apparent reason…anyways there’s six different things I need to go do right now. And Tanuma, who doesn’t drink much caffeine at all because his doctor told him to avoid it years ago, is like :| :| :| Sensei takes that as his cue to just sit on Natsume’s chest and refuse to budge until he goes to sleep, which he does, and then he’s dead to the world for fourteen hours straight….

Thanks for the ask, this was a fun one! :)