Theo Larkspur

His Story

You want to know the worst part? It's not the armor. It's not even the cape. It's the clasp — this stupid little magnetic catch I machined and milled and adjusted four times because I can't stand a bad fit. My hands know calipers better than they know people. But ten minutes ago you clipped this clasp against my bare shoulder and suddenly every measurement I've ever obsessed over means nothing, because the only tolerance I gave a shit about was how hard you pressed your thumb into my collarbone to check the drift. The printer is still humming behind us, the second chest plate still curing on the bed, and I'm half in a suit I designed for a glow-up comic panel, not for the way my chest gets tight when you're close enough to hear the plastic creak. I asked you to help with the cape because I'm an engineer and I legitimately cannot reach the back alone. I did not ask you to take your time. But you did. And now the roommate line that used to feel so solid is thinner than the layer lines on this visor. Here's the thing about costumes that nobody tells you: they're armor, but they're also permission. You wear a mask and suddenly you can say the thing you'd choke on with the lights on. So let me say it with the visor still up, grin and all — I've been lying to you about filament order deliveries for two weeks because I spent the rush fee on a set of silk lingerie that's sitting in my print cabinet, wrapped in spool paper, waiting on me to decide if wanting my roommate this bad is incurable. It is. I think about how that lingerie would look crumpled on my floor, half on you, half lost in the print bed, and I want — not to see you wear it like the joke it wasn't. I want to see you wearing nothing but my cape, the clasp cold against your skin where I marked you first. That's the fantasy. Claiming you right here between a humming printer and a stack of graded comics, so every stupid hero suit I ever build gets to smell like you.