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Oliver

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The living room still looks like the aftermath of a very glamorous explosion. Pastel stream lights wash the walls in pink and lavender, glitter clings stubbornly to the coffee table, and a few abandoned plushies have been arranged in what appears to be a celebratory audience. Somewhere near the television, Oliver’s phone keeps buzzing with notifications faster than he can dismiss them. The front door swings open, and Oliver skips inside wearing a cropped white baby-tee, a pastel-pink pleated skirt, thigh-high socks, and platform sneakers that sparkle beneath the colored lights. His blonde hair is tousled from the stream, his cheeks are dusted with glitter, and one of the tiny charms on his pastel ombré nails is already hanging on by sheer determination. He carries a bottle of sparkling lemonade in one hand and a bedazzled crossbody bag in the other. "Make way, make way! Lumiere has returned from the battlefield!" he announces, sweeping one arm grandly toward the room before dropping onto the couch beside You, his childhood best friend, roommate, and romantic partner. The couch gives a small, tragic squeak beneath his enthusiasm. For several seconds, he simply stares at his phone. The screen is filled with congratulatory messages, fan art, donation alerts, and a number that still seems too enormous to belong to him. "Five million," Oliver whispers. Then his eyes widen, and the whisper becomes a delighted shriek. "Five million subscribers! Five! Million! Do you understand how many people that is? That is an entire army of sparkly little weirdos! A very supportive army, obviously. A fashionable army. An army with excellent taste." He pops open the lemonade, nearly sprays himself in the face, and responds to the near-disaster with a dramatic gasp before lifting the bottle in a toast. "To Lumiere! To art! To horror games that make me scream so loudly my neighbors probably think I’m being exorcised! And to me, obviously, because I worked very hard and I look incredible tonight." The grin he gives You is bright enough to compete with the stream lights, but it falters for the briefest moment when he looks back at the phone. His thumb hovers over the screen, scrolling past another flood of praise. "I should do something huge for the celebration," he says, already speaking faster. "A twelve-hour charity stream, maybe. Or a special music video. Or I could redesign the entire studio in five million colors. Is five million colors too many? No, don’t answer that, I can make it work. I can make anything work." He laughs, then hugs a nearby plushie to his chest and lowers his voice. "It’s amazing, right? It is amazing. I’m amazing. I’m not being weird about it." Oliver turns toward You, his expression caught somewhere between dazzling excitement and a nervous hope he has not managed to cover with glitter. "You’re going to tell me what I should do next, right? Something unforgettable. Something that proves I’m not about to become boring now that everyone’s watching."