#eating disorders ref cw// (inexplicit but still)

[amorremanet]

10 facts about Sara Grace?

“ten facts about my characters” meme

1. Her birthday is March 20th, 1993 — she was born on the Pisces side of the Pisces/Aries cusp (the Cusp of Renewal), on the day that The Secret Language of Birthdays (Gary Goldschneider & Joost Elffers) calls, “The Day of the Labyrinth.”

Unlike most of the other characters (whose opinions on astrology differ but largely boil down to, “It’s silly, but it’s harmless”), Sara Grace actually cares about it and kind of does believe in it. She can’t decide if she agrees with the, “It’s silly” crowd, if she genuinely believes, or if she wants to believe in it so much that she’s made herself feel like she genuinely believes.

2. She and Lucy have been dating for a little over two years by the time they get introduced about midway through the first book, and Sara Grace…… she doesn’t NOT care about their anniversary? But she puts more effort into their matching Halloween costumes.

Their first Halloween together (2013), she was the fem!Mulder and Lucy was Scully.

Last year (2014), Sara Grace was Ariel and Lucy was her “kinda experimenting with butch but really unsure of herself in it and also trying not to be too obviously gay because her parents are on Facebook and privacy settings are a crapshoot” fem!Eric.

This year, they’re planning to go as Lady and Lady Macbeth — i.e., Sara Grace will be the Lady Macbeth we all know as Lady Macbeth, and Lucy will be her “still unsure about this butch thing but curious and trying it out” fem!Macbeth.

Mulder and Scully was a joint idea, inspired by one of the sororities on their campus holding a, “dress as your favorite 90’s TV characters”-themed Halloween party, but the other two Halloween costumes were all Sara Grace’s idea.

3. Her full given name is Sara Grace Nichelle Kelley — with “Sara Grace” being a double-name like “Mary Ellen” or, “Seung Gil” or so on. Her mother picked all of it out, Nichelle for Nichelle Nichols (…because Amanda is an old school Trekkie), and “Sara Grace” because she always wanted to name her first daughter, “Sara Grace,” and then thought it was extra amusing after she married Bryce Kelley, because the spelling might be different, but it made her name sound like the better-known maiden name of Princess Grace of Monaco.

Sara Grace herself has mixed feelings about this. Like, on one hand, it made using her full given first name hard to successfully do when she was in trouble because Amanda and Bryce never stopped kind of finding the, “Grace Kelley” part of their first daughter’s name hilarious (and “Sara Grace Nichelle Kelley” is admittedly kind of a mouthful, so it also wasn’t ideal for when she was in trouble).

But on the other hand, it’s made Sara Grace kind of hate things like going to the DMV or filling out forms, because other people will notice the, “Grace Kelley” thing and find it funny or cool, and yeah, it was pretty cool for a while when she was younger — especially because she totally wanted to be a princess when she grew up and still kind of has a Thing for princesses, and hey, her Mom named her after a real life princess, kind of — but now, it’s just tedious.

Like, please, she’s either “Sara Grace” or, “Ms. Kelley,” not the full thing, if it can be avoided, please, please, please.

(And this isn’t an in-universe fact, but OOCly, Sara Grace was named for my older goddaughter, and her surname came from my aunt [who is the mother of both of my goddaughters], I just added the ‘E’ because I’ve always seen, “Kelley” more often for when it’s a surname, and then I read the whole thing and saw the “Grace Kelly” business and went, “lmao, I’m keeping it”)

4. Sara Grace’s mutant superpowers are primarily based in either speed and, well, grace (as in: balance, equilibrium, steadiness, etc), OR in sound.

She’s not quite a potentially game-breaking speedster on the level of the Flash or XMCU!Quicksilver, but a big reason for this is that she hasn’t ventured out into mutant superheroics. Up until she makes the choice to do that in the story, she’s been one of the mutants who just want to go to school or work, hang out with their friends, watch The Daily Show or whatever they like, and live their lives without all of the crime-fighting stuff — so, she hasn’t trained everything up as much as she could do.

What this means is that…… yeah, she’s still fast, and it still falls outside three standard deviations of the human mean, even though she’s not a trained sprinter or anything (which is the most common test for, “is this thing a mutant superpower or is someone just really good at whatever they’re doing”), but she’s not as fast as she could be and doesn’t always have the hang of things like stopping, maneuvering at high speeds, not getting hit in the face by insects, etc.

Her biggest reason why she initially didn’t want to run headlong into superheroics came down to protecting and taking care of herself, because her abilities have serious downsides that can be difficult for her to manage and that can be really stress-inducing. But they’re also going to be under the read-more because they involve why it sucks to be a speedster who’s struggled with eating disorders.

Her sonic powers are a bit more trained up, partly because it’s easier to do that without getting on the wrong side of what she is and isn’t allowed to do with her class of superpower license — and partly because, although she’s primarily a dancer, she does love to sing and she’s usually pretty vocally expressive.

For the most part, she tends to limit her use of these powers to the ones that have cool potential uses but are a lot less awesome than, say, debilitating super-screams (which she can do, but would usually prefer not to, not least because she’s not trained up in it so she can’t really control it).

Like, one of her favorite party tricks and “getting to know you” ice-breakers is admitting she’s a mutant just enough to do a perfect imitation of different celebrity voices (as in, “you could have experts compare a legit recording of any given celebrity to Sara Grace’s superpowered recreation of their voice, and the experts would almost definitely NOT be able to tell the difference, because superpowers”)

Lucy first noticed her because Sara Grace was at a party being hosted by mutual friends, and during some game that Lucy wasn’t actually participating in, one of the other players asked Sara Grace to do a William Shatner voice and read some selection for a purple prose-y bodice ripper…… and she did, and it was awesome, and Lucy had to go find out who that girl was, holy shit

But yeah. All up, Sara Grace has the potential to be a serious power-house — she’s not going to get quite to Flash-levels of game-breaking speedster, but that’s on the world-building, not her, because there are some things that super-speedsters can do that I’m just not letting anybody do — but when she’s first introduced, she lacks training.

Even without training, she shouldn’t be dismissed as a possible threat (which Conrad is going to do, but in fairness, the only team members he sees as potential threats are Seb and Josie, because Josie is a telepath like Conrad and ruling Josie out as a threat might require Conrad to admit that maybe he’s not that great, and if you ask Conrad, Seb can’t overpower him or get any kind of jump on him, not least since he’s proven himself to be incredibly vulnerable to telepathy, but he might ruin things with his insistence on refusing all of Conrad’s offers to team up as proper nemeses in the name of the Greater Good and by being all concerned about other people and shit)

Like, seriously. If you ask Conrad: Todd, Stephen, Margot, and Pete are in no way threats to him because none of them is a mutant, and the only reason that he deigns to acknowledge them at all is that Sebastian insists on being a bleeding heart weirdo and won’t let Conrad ignore them

Lucy isn’t a threat to him because she’s inexperienced and confused and more likely to hurt herself than anyone else because she tries to run headlong into things like she lives in a Silver Age comic book and then gets in over her head and reality kicks her in the shins and takes her lunch money

Alexandra isn’t a threat because her ability to resist any telepathic attacks isn’t as strong as Conrad assumed it was at first, and she tries harder to stick to the rules than any of the other major cast members, save Holmes, who kinda has to respect the rules because he’s the resident boss man

(—this is not actually true of Alex, and the fact is that she favors her own personally determined code of ethics over externally imposed rules, but Conrad is wrong about a lot of things, so…… his opinions are just bad in general, so it’s not exactly weird that he’s wrong about Alex)

Julian, Annie, and Dylan aren’t threats because they’re on the same team as Conrad, despite all of them having some major disagreements and differences of opinion with him, and even when S.T.R.O.M.A. gets Dylan (which they would not have done if not for Conrad tipping Julian and Annie off about a bust that S.T.R.O.M.A. and the DEA are collaborating on, but completely forgetting Dylan as more than, “Julian’s sidekick who constantly looks like he’s only two seconds off from crying, whatever, Julian will handle it”), Conrad doesn’t think it’s any kind of problem because he assumes that these three are his minions and that, all disagreements aside, their loyalty is absolute

This………… really doesn’t work out so well

And you’d think that Conrad might get a reality check after getting arrested before Julian does and before Annie is even properly on the radar as more than, “one of the daughters of that one douchebag who’s trying to get the Republican nomination; she’s the party girl to her eldest sister’s Responsible Adult With A Cool Head and her twin’s, ‘well she wants to think she’s a serious journalist but lbr she just has a webshow where she yells at people and throws a lot of conservative buzzwords around like she knows what she’s talking about’”

—and you would be wrong. Like, yeah, you would be completely wrong.

But Conrad’s refusal to get a reality check is a totally different story

and Sara Grace isn’t a threat to him because she’s nothing but a pretty face with an anxiety disorder, who��s too scared of her true, untapped power to use it, even in the name of the Greater Good, and too scared of her own potential to accomplish anything, and probably just pretending to be a lesbian because she wants to piss off her parents or she thinks it makes her more interesting to guys or something

………Actually, Amanda and Bryce have never been anything but completely supportive, and Sara Grace has no interest in making men find her interesting because (and this gets complicated, Conrad, so you might want to sit down) she is not attracted to men

But, again, Conrad’s opinions are usually fifty shades of wrong and gross, so him dismissing Sara Grace as a potential threat because she’s untrained and has an anxiety disorder is just another example of him being completely full of shit

5. Okay, so. I want to try to keep this one brief, because I’m doing it last and this post is already long enough that it’s starting to make Firefox lag on me while I’m typing and there’s a lot of potential angst in this post already. But one of the things that a lot of people don’t acknowledge about a lot of superpowers, especially speedy powers, is that it’d take a LOT of calories to fuel those. Even in some works where they do deal with it, they underestimate just how much energy it would actually take.

To be fair, I’m not going to manage this perfectly either because at a certain point, you have to suspend some parts of real-world physics and biology to make superpowers work, and it’s just not feasible to have almost all of your mutant heroes and villains constantly hooked up to IV lines so that they don’t die of malnutrition by simply existing while having superpowers

But I am going to deal with it more than a lot of superhero stuff tends to do, and Sara Grace is one of the characters who has more problems with it than average.

The big reason why she has more problems than average is that before her mutant abilities fully manifested (which was when she was about 17), she dealt with an eating disorder. This is also a big reason why she wound up not going into dance professionally, because one of her biggest triggers was how much pressure she felt to force her body to fit certain ideals and standards — and dude, she’s 5’10” and has been really tall for her entire life, so it was even harder to do this, because she was basically trying to restrict her diet and starve herself down to a weight that would’ve been on the low side for someone with her build who was six inches shorter

—but by the time her mutant superpowers started to manifest in full, Sara Grace had actually done really well in her therapy and treatment (and unlike some of the other characters who’ve dealt with similar kinds of struggles, whether ED’s or the more general, “problem where there’s some very obvious unhealthy manifestation that needs to get dealt with, but there are a lot of underlying emotional issues you need to address too”), and she had gotten to a place where she felt more or less okay…… and suddenly, superpowers everywhere

Like, it was hard enough for her to adjust her diet and her routines to accommodate the most basic-level, “existing with superpowers even if you don’t really use them that often” stuff, and then she knew she’d have to be adjusting to college in the near future — and she really, really didn’t want to end up in a hardcore relapse

So, from her perspective, the choices here kind of boiled down to, “You can get more training and a license that lets you be what is basically a superhero and help people, but do it at the expense of your own health,” and, “You can pass on that and take care of yourself” — and she picked taking care of herself

By the time she gets another choice to get involved in mutant superheroics or not, Sara Grace is at a more secure place than she was at 17/18, and she’s going to acknowledge that this is a potential risk but it’s one that she feels up to handling.

She’s not going to be wrong, but it’s going to be a mixed bag for her, mostly because…… well. She’s a human being and this means that she can’t perfectly predict anything, so there are some things that she’s prepared to deal with, some that she knew might happen and wasn’t entirely prepared for but she’s better equipped to handle them than she would’ve been back at 17/18, and some that totally blindside her

But she’s going to grow and deal with things because…… well, that’s what fictional characters do

6. Her top three favorite songs for karaoke night are “I Will Survive,” “Baby One More Time,” and “Can’t Take My Eyes Off Of You” (if she can get Lauryn Hill’s version of it, then awesome, but if not, then any version of it will work just fine)

She has learned, however, that she should not try to sing “Freakum Dress” at karaoke while tipsy.

Honestly, the conclusion that Sara Grace should’ve drawn from the incident that led to that lesson? Was, “don’t try to do some complicated dance moves in hella high heels while so drunk that most other people would be flat on their asses, which for you means that you’re too drunk to pay attention to where your feet are, so you get tangled in the wires and fall over in the middle of your song”

But she was singing “Freakum Dress” at the time, and while she doesn’t generally do karaoke night while drunk most of the time anyway, she primarily took it to, “Don’t do drunk karaoke with ‘Freakum Dress’ as your song” because if you ask her, she only tried to do such complicated dance moves because she was singing “Freakum Dress”

That…… isn’t necessarily true, but it’s also not entirely untrue, either? It felt true to her at the time, at least.

She has also learned that making Lucy do a duet of, “Don’t Go Breakin’ My Heart” won’t work exactly how she imagined that it would, because Lucy isn’t quite tone-deaf? But she can’t really sing that well, either, and in Sara Grace’s daydream that led to her doing this, they sounded great and had perfect harmonies and it was totally awesome…… but in reality, Lucy was off-beat and off-key, her tone wasn’t that great, and it was still pretty fun, but okay, her girlfriend can’t sing, lesson learned

7. She wouldn’t call herself the, “selfie queen,” exactly…… but literally only because she would prefer to be the, “selfie princess,” because yeah, okay, she has adult goals and dreams now (she’s working toward becoming a therapist with a specialty in art therapy), but she still kinda wants to be a princess when she grows up

8. As far as superpowers licenses go, Sara Grace has one that has more allowance for power incontinence and for using her abilities in to help out in emergency situations, but that is closer to the, “I’m seriously not going to do more than use heat vision to reheat my coffee, I don’t want this and would prefer to ignore it”

Power incontinence is like… okay, example: if Superman were minding his own business but one of his Kryptonian allergies got aggravated and he sneezed out ice breath or something? That would be power incontinence.

The term, in-universe, is usually used to cover things that might happen when someone can’t fully control their powers (e.g., Seb has to work to figure out what makes La Bête tick and get control over his beast-mode shifts)

or things that might happen in highly stressful situations (e.g., Josie usually has their telepathic and empathic abilities pretty well-controlled but can start slipping when they’re dealing with a lot of shit if they aren’t properly taking care of themself emotionally; and Yael might be in her eighties and one of the most respected mutants on the planet, but she still has a tendency to make electronics with magnetic parts start malfunctioning when she gets really angry)

This comes in handy because it covers things like all the times when Sara Grace doesn’t mean to rely on her super-attuned send of balance but she also can’t really turn it off

Like, if she were ever in the position to do so (which she doesn’t plan to be, but that’s another story), she could pass the physical parts of field sobriety test while totally drunk, but she’d stumble on anything that involves any talking to the officer

Because her body might be way more stable than it should be but that won’t rein in how easily distracted she gets when she’s drunk (like… no, honey, the officer did not ask for you to do your dramatic reenactment of Det. Olivia Benson’s entire personal history through wherever you are in watching SVU if you aren’t up to date on it, complete with doing Mariska Hargitay’s voice, and this really isn’t helpful)

…and being able to walk in a straight line while her head is reeling and her perception is distorted doesn’t mean that she won’t be slurring her words

—And if she had a more restrictive license, she could get in trouble for relying on her super-balance in this situation because in most places, “using superpowers to pass a field sobriety test, even if you don’t actually pass it” would count as more than, “I just want to go home and use heat vision to reheat my coffee”

Not that this means that having coverage in her license type is a guarantee for her or anybody, because unfortunately, as we already know, way too many cops in the U.S. are complete fuck-wads against anyone who isn’t a straight, non-disabled, gender-conforming white guy

And since Sara Grace is a black femme lesbian who has mutant superpowers and no arrest record but some past involvement in protests and social activism, she would personally rather not test whether or not any given cops would be deterred from trying to charge her for violating the terms of her superpowers license by the fact that hers covers her super-balance because she cannot turn it off

Her introductory scene is actually going to address these fears, somewhat. See, Sara Grace and Lucy are brought into the story’s narrative on October 15th, 2015 — a Thursday evening, which they had planned to spend at an open-air concert at a park in Baltimore, and then they wanted to go back to Lucy’s together because she’s lived at home after their graduation in May, but her parents are out of town and the only other member of the Murphy family who might come around is Damien, who already knows that Lucy and Sara Grace are together.

Incidentally, that Thursday evening was also going to be date-night for Seb and Stephen, who were going to the symphony because Seb’s parents had tickets that they couldn’t use and eldest brother Max would need a third for his daughter (and for the show to not be at 8PM on a school night), sister Addie doesn’t have anyone she’d actually want to take, and middle brother Ambrose moved to Vermont when he got a job teaching at a private school up there. Much like Lucy and Sara Grace, Seb and Stephen really just wanted to have a nice time together.

Sucks for them, though, because there was a supervillain attack at the concert.

I’m still hammering out the exact details of what actually happens in said attack, but the really important point, plot-wise, is that the perp (who wound up apprehended pretty quickly) wasn’t acting of his own free will, but had gotten telepathically taken over and forced to do it by everyone’s least favorite douchebag, Conrad.

That’s not immediately apparent, though, and for the time being, Sara Grace is more concerned with the shit that’s going on right now — a list that includes:

how she used her powers to try and get some of the other civilians out of harm’s way

how the supervillain of the day tried to stop her and wound up with damaged eardrums because Sara Grace screamed and couldn’t control how powerful it was

(it’s frankly a miracle that it only hurt the supervillain, since one of the potential risks of sonic abilities is how they can affect people other than the intended target and Sara Grace wasn’t consciously targeting anyone)

how she and Lucy wound up incapacitating the villain long enough for cops to get him in cuffs so they could eventually hand him off to S.T.R.O.M.A. officials (which is a GOOD thing, yes, and this kind of situation should fall under the emergency provisions that Sara Grace’s license has, but she’s incredibly wary and also kind of an anxious mess following all of this, so that wariness gets magnified by a power of ten)

and how Lucy did so with powers she didn’t even know she had, got injured in the process, and then passed out while her healing factor kicked in, but was still injured enough to get stitches after getting taken to the hospital

So, suffice it to say, Sara Grace is not exactly in the best and calmest state of mind when a beautiful dark-skinned woman (who kind of looks like she’d gotten home, taken off her work clothes, gotten relaxed, and then abruptly had to throw them back on…… largely because that is exactly what happened to Alex tonight) asks her to please leave her girlfriend’s bedside for a couple minutes, then brings her into the hallway, where she introduces Sara Grace to a really tall white guy in a nice suit and another white person who’s only slightly taller than Sara Grace, looks more like a guy than not, and has barely-noticeable lace on the trim of their collar, and all three of them pull out S.T.R.O.M.A. identification

Like, her immediate fear here is, “Oh, shit, are you going to arrest me, I didn’t do anything wrong, did I, hey, I can cite all the rules that say what I did was okay, I keep up on all of this…… did I do anything wrong? Did my screaming hurt someone else or something? What’s going on?”

……Actually, based on all the witnesses they’ve already heard from, Alex, Josie, and Seb are not even thinking of bringing Sara Grace into custody for anything. They more or less get why she’s scared (given that Alex and Josie have both dealt with S.T.R.O.M.A. officials being seriously unethical about recruitment and making it seem like they had to accept recruitment or get slapped with charges for violating their licenses, they’re REALLY not interested in doing that to someone else, especially not a terrified girl who’s trying really, really hard to talk tough and not doing as well as she could if she weren’t currently an anxious mess)

They’re literally just here to (loosely in order, but it’s really not official): 1. see if Sara Grace and Lucy are alright, or as alright as they can be after this horrible experience (which, frankly, most people aren’t prepared for because most supervillains don’t do this kind of out-in-the-open, Silver Age bullshit);

2. thank both of them for their assistance in saving lives and preventing more injuries and destruction;

3. collect their statements about the evening’s events, which neither of them is not obligated to give but they’d appreciate it anyway (and Sara Grace in particular has Alex’s promise that, whatever Sara Grace decides, Alex will do everything that she can to make sure that no one twists that choice to use it against her when she acted like a heroine tonight and should be praised, not punished);

and 4. offer them some information on counseling services, if they want it.

Like, the reason why Seb heads in to see Lucy alone is that Sara Grace does decide to share her recollection of what happened, but she’s still pretty tense as she tells it, so Josie asks if she’d feel more comfortable going to a different room, rather than a sofa in a visitors’ lounge, but her response is that she’d feel more comfortable if it was one-on-one or two-on-one, instead of three-on-one

Since Seb is standing, and more so because he’s the tall white guy, who Sara Grace can’t get a read on right away, so she’s not sure how she feels about him right now and, at the moment, that makes her feel uneasiest about him being around, Josie asks him to go see if the evening’s other heroine is alright and up for a talk

And Seb doesn’t mind because…… hey, if it makes Sara Grace feel a little less ill-at-ease after what she just went through? Then it’s not a big deal. He might mind a little more if he knew exactly who he’s going to see, but he literally only heard that Sara Grace’s girlfriend is named Lucy (which is a common enough name that he doesn’t even think, “Oh, she could be the Lucy who I used to know”)

—But this is only about four months after he went through his own episode of, “suddenly, superpowers everywhere, then S.T.R.O.M.A. gets involved and oh holy shit,” so while he’s definitely not in the same boat as Sara Grace, he appreciates that her comfort > his, right now

So, yeah.

Sara Grace is going to spend her introductory scene being an anxious mess and trying to keep it together, only to probably succeed for a while and then end up crying on either Alex or Josie, because she’s 22 and even after being reassured that she is absolutely not in trouble, she’s just had a very stressful evening when it was supposed to be a relaxing night with her girlfriend without Lucy’s Mom and Dad there to be homophobic and force the two of them to act like they’re Just Gals Being Pals, Totally Not Lesbians Or Dating Each Other, Nope, and she’s scared for herself and scared for her girlfriend and now that she’s thought about the idea that her scream could’ve hurt an innocent person, she’s scared that it might’ve happened, and jesus fucking christ, she’s a champ for making it all the way through her statement to Josie and Alex before she cries, I’d like to see any hypothetical naysayers do better in her position

9. Although she didn’t go into dancing professionally, like she wanted to when she was younger, dancing is still one of her favorite forms of stress-relief. Much like how Lucy sometimes hits a wall where she needs to tap out and go play Tetris until she can handle things like an adult again, Sara Grace hits walls where she needs to tap out and go work out her feelings and clear her head, and she prefers to do so with dancing, when she can.

Oddly enough, her love for dance made people think that she might be autistic when she was younger, even though she isn’t, while Lucy, who actually is autistic, went completely unnoticed

See, one of the more common and easily noticeable stims that kids on the spectrum engage in sometimes? Is walking on your toes for no reason that makes itself readily apparent to allistic adults.

Sara Grace, as a kid, wasn’t actually trying to walk on her toes. She was just in love with her kiddie ballet lessons, to the point that she turned every moment when no one stopped her into an excuse to practice something that she’d learned in class, and it sometimes looked like she was walking on her toes to the adults who had no idea what was going on.

Which led to her parents getting her tested, and granted, those tests are by no means 100% reliable…… but in this case, when the psychologist who talked to Sara Grace went, “Yeah, she isn’t autistic, she’s just really into her dancing and invested in giving it her all,” Dr. So-and-So happened to be right

10. She’s a cat person. If she could have a hundred cats without it becoming an issue for some reason, she would totally have a hundred cats, and then probably try to have more.

As it stands, she already has two of them — a tabby shorthair named Valerie (whether she named Val after the Zutons’ song or Valerie Brown of Josie and the Pussycats will depend on when you ask her, because Sara Grace has said both things before, as well as, “I don’t know, I just thought she felt like a Valerie, y’know?”) and a fluffy black longhair named Peppermint Patty (who doesn’t look like the Peanuts character and the resemblance between them is only apparent to Sara Grace, but when she found Patty at the shelter, she went, “You remind me of Peppermint Patty, that’s your name now”)

—and about the only reason she doesn’t have more babies is that it would cost money, and her current internship may not be unpaid but it still doesn’t pay very well. (Strictly speaking, the cousins she lives with would prefer it if she didn’t try to bring another cat home because of space concerns, but Sara Grace insists that she could find a way to make it work.)

Like, seriously? Much like Seb isn’t usually allowed to go to an ASPCA shelter alone because he might try to adopt yet another dog (even though he already has six and would have seven if his Chewie hadn’t passed away in March 2015), Sara Grace is not allowed near a shelter without a chaperone because she might try to do the same with kitties. When they get to know each other, they won’t be allowed to act as chaperones either, because Margot, Lucy, and Pete correctly assume that they’d enable each other, rather than act as impulse control.

Stephen is sorta kinda allowed to act as chaperone, but only for one of them at a time. It could be either one (though he’d have an easier time telling Sebastian that he doesn’t need another dog, simply because…… dude. six. it’s enough, you’re good.)

(Also, while Stephen likes all of his boyfriend’s dogs, he’s somewhat less fond of things like, “accidentally startling a nine-pound Yorkie because Achilles decided to take a nap on top of Stephen while he was taking a nap and Stephen didn’t notice”

or, “being woken up by a corgi-husky crossbreed trying, maybe succeeding but maybe not, to jump up into bed with Seb and Stephen, and trying to make Stephen come play with him, because Oscar has decided that Stephen is the new non-Seb favorite (at least, he’s tied with Seb’s Mom) and no, no, no, it’s not time for sleeping, it’s time for playing”

or, “eventually, trying to have an ~intimate moment~ — whether that means sex or not — with his boyfriend, only to get interrupted by Oscar waddling into Seb’s bedroom like he was invited by virtue of his Dad and New Favorite both being there, or by pit-mix Lola sticking her head in like, ‘Do you guys need anything? Snacks? A condom? Let me know!,’ or by Achilles whining at them for attention because he feels ignored”

—but that’s sort of beside the point, which was just that…… Yeah, no, Stephen would have a way easier time telling his boyfriend not to adopt another dog than he would, if he tried to tell Sara Grace that she doesn’t need another cat)

Anyway, Stephen won’t be allowed to chaperone both of them to the ASPCA shelter at once, because his reason will get overridden by how cute both of them are when they start looking at cute animals, and Sara Grace started getting teary about this one cat who’d been rescued off the streets after going through some vaguely defined Hell that Stephen didn’t hear all the details about, and Seb got making heart eyes at a little Jack Russell mix because they reminded him of his first dog (Toby), and Stephen tried to tell them not to, okay, he really tried, but they were being so cute and the animals’ stories were so sad and that’s why the team has two new animal companions???

—Fortunately, that’s never going to happen for realskis, because the rest of the team will veto the idea before it even gets off the ground, but…… yeah.

All three of these characters are actual facts adults, I swear

They just can’t act like it very well around cute things and especially not if the cute things involve animals

Sara Grace is also going to be low-key jealous that Seb can kind of talk to animals (…it’s not quite that simple, but that’s how this ability of his looks to her), and at some point, she’s probably going to ask him to translate her cats for her because she really wants to know that Peppermint Patty and Valerie know that she loves them, and then, she will be told that it doesn’t really work that way, but okay, he can try to do his best for her, if it makes her feel better? :/

And it does make her feel better, Seb. Thank you.