#— ❛❛ // LOU ¦ this looks fun ; let's try this ・ 「 dash games 」

[r0zyp0zy0zy]

“Fuckboy” Denki is at it Again

Masterlist

Ajdbrjebeveb it’s been forever since I’ve posted a fic I’m so sorry ( •᷄⌓•᷅ )

Words: 4000+

Warnings: Denki is dumb, smut, loss of virginity, teasing reader, handcuffs, Quirkless!AU

Ft. Kaminari Denki x FEM!reader, Bakusquad

Summary: Denki somehow convinced everyone that he’s a sex god— only, you can see right through his persona.

Collage was hard enough for Denki, despite taking Theatre and Video Game Design. He thought it was going to be eeeasy breezy- getting A's, partying, drinking, and getting chicks left and right.

Turns out Video Game design requires knowing how to code, and Denki can easily say that he doesn't have the brain capacity for that shit. He thought that he was gonna be playing games for homework! And theatre— oh god was it exhausting. Sure it was very fun acting and being goofy with his friends, but learning about Shakespeare? Fuck that. He could barely memorize a modern-day script, let alone five paragraphs of Shakespearean! The parties were good though, despite the shitty alcohol that was served and the fact that he hadn't scored even one girl in the six months that he'd been at the campus.

He was trying to be cool! Denki had even made a SoundCloud in an attempt to score some pussy. Girls liked those types of guys, right? He'd also made up a few stories about how good he was in bed, though he had been a little drunk when he explained his talents on Sero's Snapchat story.

"Yeah, I've made a girl cum like five times in a row before," Denki had boasted with a bottle of fireball in one hand. "She said I was the best she'd ever had."

The blonde was sure that he had caught a few pretty eyes when he was showing off his party trick; getting the hair on his head to frizz and stand up with kinetic electricity on command. He recalled making a joke that he was able to shock people with his fingertips, saying that he had made a girl cum that way once. Sero had rolled his eyes behind his camera, taking a video per Kaminari's request.

"Pinky, what d'you think?" Denki asked his friend Mina, throwing her a dashing smirk as he showed off his outfit.

"Hmm, add that choker that Jiro gave you and then I'll approve," the pink haired girl pointed to the black choker that was carelessly placed on Denki's dresser.

"Whaaat," he deflated, "what's wrong with my outfit without it?"

"Lots of girls like it when guys wear stuff like that," Mina wiggled her eyebrows at her blonde friend, "c'mon, Denks. Don't disappoint the girlies."

"Ugh, FINE," Denki snatched the necklace and secured it around his neck. "Better?"

"Definitely," Mina smiled, capturing a quick picture before grabbing her bag. "Now let's go before Bakugo manages to escape Eiji's hold."

Kaminari considered taking off the collar that was restricting his neck movements, but Mina's words echoed in his head and he left the black piece of fabric be. The blonde was especially looking forward to this party because his newest infatuation was going to be there (at least he was told she would be there). He had been practicing his flirting skills especially for you, and he wanted to wait for the perfect moment to show them off.

It was honestly hilarious how Kaminari was. You heard lots of trash talk from Jiro about how he was all talk and that he'd never even held hands with a girl before.

"He's so lame," she had snorted, "I honestly feel sorry for him sometimes. He's been like that since high school."

"Sounds intriguing," you had pondered as you watched your friend tune her guitar. "Say, you mentioned a party this weekend at who-is-it's place?"

"Sero's," Jiro had said, "why, you don't normally do big parties like that?" She was having an inner conflict on whether she should tell you that the boy the two of you were talking about had a massive crush on you.

"Just felt like going to one I guess. Gotta get my rock on occasionally," you had shrugged, a knowing smirk on your lips.

You fixed your makeup one last time before exiting the bathroom, being thrown back into the loud environment that surrounded you. You sipped your water as you walked through the chatting people, trying to find the beer-pong table to watch some chaos ensue.

From the corner of your eye you saw Denki enter the dorm with his group of friends, chatting about something erratically with lots of arm movements. He looked nicer than you had seen of him before; perhaps it was the choker, or the blush on his cheeks when his pink haired friend (you remembered being nicknamed Pinky), had teased him. He was attractive no doubt, and he was the talk of several thirst group chats you had unfortunately been added into. It was pretty funny how some girls were considering him a good option for a fuck-buddy, but always backing down because 'he seemed kinda like a dick' or 'he probably had plenty of other girls to mess around with'.

You had yet to actually see someone attempt to hookup with him, which was slightly disappointing because you wanted desperately for his secrets to be revealed and drama to be spread around. But maybe it was a good thing that no one approached him because over the course of a few months you discovered that you wanted to be the one to fuck him first, considering that he, unfortunately, became your crush. For gods sake, honestly.

You fixed your tight shirt and readjusted your push-up bra, trying to look casual as you did so. You cheered with the small crowd around you as one of your classmates from Creative Writing plopped a ball into a plastic cup filled with beer.

"Ayyye! Nice shot, Angel," you heard Kaminari say somewhere near you. You could just tell that he stuck his tongue out, flashing his fake tongue piercing.

Your eyes wandered to his, and you quirked your brow when he was already looking at you. He looked nervous as you approached him, swerving the people around you gracefully.

"Hm," you clicked your tongue, "Y'know those fake piercings are dangerous. If you swallow it, you'll choke to death."

"Uh," Denki's cheeks flushed, "really? I didn't know that," the blonde stuck out his tongue and took off the metallic ball, sticking it into his pocket.

"You're Jiro's friend, right?" You asked as you took another sip of your drink.

Kaminari's eyes widened slightly, "she mentioned me?" His cheeks blushed redder.

"Yeah, as well as how idiotic you are," you playfully grinned at him.

"Oh c'mon!" He exclaimed, his head thrown back in disappointment. Denki fingered under his choker, feeling sweaty.

The two of you stood next to each other comfortably as you watched your classmates chug multiple cups of (beer?) something, cheering along with the rest of the small crowd. You could feel the boy's eyes on you, and you turned your head to look at him. You huffed a chuckle once you realized Kaminari was shamelessly staring at your chest, not paying attention until you swiped a hand in front of his gaze.

"Earth to Kaminari," you smirked.

He was broken from his daze and sheepishly apologized, going right back into talking about whatever he was saying before. The both of you moved to another part of the room where Sero's Bluetooth speaker was blasting music. A remix of one of your favourite songs started playing and you shot Denki a toothy grin.

"I love this song!" You yelled to communicate through the loud noise. You threw your now empty cup into the garbage and started dancing shamelessly to the beat.

Denki returned your grin, and bopped along to the music with you. He got a few laughs from his friends, and they teased him for how bad he was.

"I'm just feelin myself!" He yelled to them, smiling through their words. Was Kirishima looking? Maybe Sero was? Look! Look! I'm dancing with her!! Don't ruin it for me!! He thought excitedly.

"Your friend group is full of characters," you observed, watching as a fuming Bakugo latched onto Kirishima's arm.

"Yeah, it's never boring!" Denki grinned, glancing back to his friends.

Another upbeat song came rushing through the speakers and you grabbed Kaminari's hand to pull him deeper into the 'dance floor'. His heart lurched when he was pulled along with you. You took his other hand and swung both of them with yours, bopping once again to the music. You took turns spinning each other, giggling when one of you tripped.

It was fun dancing with Kaminari, occasionally chatting with his friends, and playfully flirting with him. Though there was now a large group of drunk collage students crammed into an apartment, and you decided it was time to skedaddle soon. You still wanted to go through with your plan, and the perfect lap dance song came on. You grinned wickedly.

"Y'ever given a girl a lap dance before?" You quirked a playful eyebrow at your new friend, who suddenly froze.

"Er... not really?" Kaminari admitted, looking down at the floor, scratching the back of his head.

"Have you received a lap dance before?" You pressed, slowly leaning closer to the blushing blonde.

"I— um, of course!" Denki lied through his teeth.

"Ok good!" You cheered. "Cuz you're about to get one right now."

Kaminari didn't have time to respond before you leaned your back on his chest, grabbing his shoulder with one hand. You watched his golden eyes widen curiously, anxiety oozing through his fuckboy persona. He squeaked when you swivelled your hips and immediately grabbed your waist, letting your body guide him into the dance.

Kaminari threw a panicked expression at his friends, all of whom laughed hysterically at him. Terror shivered through his body as the beat dropped and you ground your ass against his growing erection. He thought of telling you to stop, that he lied about getting a lap dance before, that he actually lied about everything he was saying, but he wanted to see how far he could push it before you realized that he was full of shit.

You turned back around and whispered along to the lyrics of the song, leaning in close enough to see the baby stubble on his chin. "Wanna get outta here?" You asked huskily into the blonde boy's ear.

Kaminari was silent for a few seconds, shock paralyzing his body and widening his eyes. "Wh-what?"

"Y'know," you giggled at him, looping your arms loosely behind his neck. You leaned closer so he could feel your hot breath on his earlobe, "let's fuck back at my place."

Nodding ecstatically, Kaminari trailed after you as you dragged him along to the front door to escape the stuffy party. You felt a lot more giddy than you had expected to be; maybe it was the way Kaminari hunched awkwardly to hide the tent in his pants, or how his face was beet red and you haven't even gotten started yet.

The walk to your apartment was relatively quick. Kaminari's hand never drifted from yours, and occasionally leaned into you to curl his arm around yours. The cool night air made your skin prickle, and you turned to look at the boy latched onto you. His eyes were fixated on you, and quickly looked away when you caught him.

You dragged Kaminari up the stairs to your apartment, stopping at a break in the stairs to pin him to the wall and ghost your lips over his. A breathless gasp left his mouth at the sudden movement, and watched with wide eyes as yours closed, and he braced himself for his first official kiss. He almost forgot to close his wide eyes, but soon fluttered his eyelids shut when you deepened the kiss. Your lips felt soft and danced effortlessly on his, Denki struggling to get into the rhythm. He appreciated your slow movements, shuddering when you hooked a finger around his belt loop. When you finally pulled back with a gasp, Kaminari had to remind himself to breathe and sucked in a shaky breath.

"Fuck," he whispered. You just giggled and continued to lead him up the stairs, hand pulling him with you.

Being pushed against his back again, Denki felt the cold door behind him as you locked lips with him, barely struggling to unlock the door. The blonde almost fell on his ass once the door was pushed open, but he managed to stumble upright.

The both of you tripped out of your shoes, and Denki's heart pounded against his rib cage when you grabbed him by the hips to kiss him. He was guided backwards to your room, hands nervously pawing at your ass. He squeaked when his back hit the bed, your lips ripped off of his. His eyes opened to see you straddling him with a smile, teasingly pulling off your shirt. His hands moved to your waist in a hurry, his desperate eyes widening in hope. You pulled something out of your bedside drawer, and it didn't look like a box of condoms.

"W-what—" Kaminari started.

"You're experienced with these, right?" You grinned, dangling a pair of black leather cuffs, soft fabric lining the inside. "Interested in using them?"

Denki nodded his head before he even fully processed what you had asked, watching you place the cuffs down beside you. You dug two fingers under his choker and yanked him forward, setting a sloppy kiss on his lips. He moaned as you pulled off his shirt, nipples hardening as the fabric dragged over his pecks.

"Sensitive here?" You asked sultry sweet, guiding your hands down his chest to his perky nipples, rubbing them slowly with one finger.

"Ah~," Denki let out an embarrassing noise, humiliation bringing heat to his cheeks. "Yeah."

You laid him back down and grabbed both of his wrists with your hand, pulling them over his head. It clicked in his brain too late that you were putting the cuffs on him. Too embarrassed to back out, he let you lock his wrists into place.

"You doin good?" You asked, rubbing his chest.

"Y-yeah," Denki gulped anxiously.

Despite his nerves, his cock didn't go down since the lap dance, now straining more than ever in his skinny jeans with you on top of him. His bulge wasn't too noticeable due to the tight denim, and his cock felt way too compressed. He shuttered when you pulled off your pants/skirt, and played with the fluffy fabric lining of the cuffs to distract him from the throbbing between his legs.

Denki could only watch in awe as you unzipped and unbuttoned his pants, slightly struggling to pull the fabric down. His cock felt so much better, twitching against the spandex of his boxers.

"It's wet," you giggled, using a finger to rub gently over the fabric where his glans was. Kaminari groaned when you fully pulled his pants off, and bit his lip excitedly as you sat yourself on his thigh.

His boxers were peeled off by your nimble fingers, the cool air feeling soothing on his leaking dick. His cock never drooled this much when he was by himself, and he watched curiously as you used a finger to catch a string of falling pre, rubbing it on his head. Denki squeaked out a shocked moan at the sensation of someone else touching him for the first time. His stomach lurched when you finally wrapped your hand around his cock, gently but firmly fisting his length. Denki bit his lip as he tried to ignore the bubbling sensation building up inside of him.

Denki gasped and squirmed a little when you flicked your wrist a certain way, silently panicking because he was about to come, and you had hardly touched him. You softly gripped the base of his cock, using your other hand to pump and squeeze his glans with a loud 'shulking' noise. His pre helped your fist move faster, and he wriggled in his spot.

"Shit," Denki murmured as he came, his cum dripping down your hand and his cock.

"Cummin' like a virgin, are we?" You asked teasingly as you helped him through the aftershocks of his orgasm, only pulling back when he started to whine in discomfort.

"Um... actually..." Denki felt so humiliated at your statement, "I am..."

He tensed when your shoulders shook as you giggled, his face incredibly hot with embarrassment.

"Yeah, I know," you smirked at him. You used a tissue to clean your hand, but used a finger to scoop up a droplet of his cum to taste it.

"What?!" Denki exclaimed. "H-how?"

"You're not very convincing y'know... plus Jiro told me," you laugh at him again when he tried to use his cuffed hands to hide his face.

"You were teasing me!" Denki complained. "You knew all along, and you teased me!"

"Maybe," you grinned. "But only because you look so cute when you're embarrassed."

Kaminari shut up instantly, and locked his eyes onto yours. "C-cute?"

"Mhm, adorable even."

Denki beamed at you excitedly before awkwardly looking down at his semi, silently begging for it to go back up.

"How would you feel if I sat on your face?" You grinned, crawling up his torso to meet his eyes.

Kaminari nodded feverishly, his words lost in his throat. He barely had time to prepare when you scooted up and lowered your hips, successfully trapping his head between your thighs. He squeaked out a shocked moan before he attempted to lick, or suck... or whatever he thought he was supposed to do.

"Damn, you really haven't done this before," you commented. "I'll tell you when something feels good."

Denki felt a bit lost as he sloppily devoured your pussy, cheeks heating up in embarrassment at the fact that you hadn't said anything yet. It felt like an eternity before you made an 'ooh' sound, instructing him to do what he just did again. So he did, and was pleased when you continued to make beautiful noises. He slurped and sucked what he assumed to be your clit, and groaned instinctually when you grasped his hair.

"Fuck," you gasped. "Feels good."

Denki felt his cock harden at your words, and he forced himself to ignore the cramp in his tongue. He savoured your flavour, bucking his hips in an attempt to relieve the pressure in his abdomen. It was hard for him to breathe, and his head felt fuzzy in the best way. He gasped a breath of fresh air when you finally lifted yourself off of him, and he groaned at the surprising pleasure.

"Did you cum?" He heaved, still trying to catch his breath.

"No, dummy," you giggled at him. "You're nowhere near experienced enough to make me cum with your tongue yet."

Kaminari deflated slightly and let out a nervous laugh. He watched you rummage through your bedside drawer, returning with a condom, lube, and a vibrator. He blushed in excitement and smiled giddily at you.

"Still want to fuck, baby boy?" You asked, throwing in the last bit as a joke. Denki spluttered for a moment before he choked out an agreement.

His cock twitched excitedly as you ripped open the package, rolling the thin latex down his length. Denki felt like his heart was about to escape his chest when you stood teasingly above him. He watched in silent awe as you slowly fingered yourself, dripping lube down his cock. He whined when you rubbed the lube over his glans, spreading it down his length until you were satisfied. His cock lurched when you reached to guide him into you.

"Excited, are we?" You teased with a cocked brow.

Denki could only nod, gripping his cuffs anxiously as you lowered yourself painfully slowly down the expanse of his cock. He gasped at the foreign feeling, looking up at you with complete admiration. He groaned loudly when you were fully seated, silently begging you to slam down on him.

"P-please," he moaned. "Be rough with me."

A teasing smirk split your face at his request, and you slowly lifted yourself up until just the head was inside of you before letting yourself fall back down. You moaned with Denki, appreciating how good he felt. You leaned your hands on his pecks as you got into a rhythm, bouncing harshly on his cock, not giving him a chance to catch his breath.

"St-still sensitive," Denki whined as you bounced, writhing around desperately. "S' good"

You gently dragged your nails down his chest, grinning when he begged you to scratch him harder. A full body shiver wracked Denki's body and his back arched, so you pinched his nipples.

"H-holy shit," Denki breathed, his eyes shutting tightly. He whined when you slowed your pace, but moaned excitedly when he saw you switch on your vibrator and press it to your clit. He bit his lip to refrain from complaining about how leisurely you rolled your hips, your movements too slow for his orgasm to build.

"Hmmph," you moaned, throwing your head back. "Fuck that feels so good."

Denki's jaw dropped when he felt your pussy flutter around him, your grip increasing whenever you moaned in pleasure. He was silently gasping at the look on your face, his heartbeat picking up as you rutted your hips and moaned.

"Oh fmmm-fuck I'm coming!" You whined, eyes rolling back.

Denki saw stars as your pussy contracted around him, and he whimpered pathetically as you slowed to a stop and switched off your vibe.

"Work with me here, Denks," you said as you came back from your high. Your pace sped back up and Denki gasped eagerly. He sloppily rutted his hips up as you sunk down, gradually getting into a good rhythm.

"Oh holy shit I'm so close," the blonde groaned, eyelids half closed.

"Feels good bein' in a pussy, doesn't it," you teased, grinning when Denki lazily nodded back. "I bet you've dreamed of cumming inside of one. Too bad you have to cum inside a condom instead."

"T-tight," Denki hardly understood what you said, your walls so tight around him that he could barely think, "wanna cum."

"So needy," you tutted, "you gotta work for it, baby." He whined at the pet name and snapped his hips up faster.

"Pull my hair, bite me, scratch me, anything," Denki wailed. "Please, I'm so close."

You gripped his blonde locks tightly, pulling gently at his roots. He groaned as you yanked his head to the side and pressed your lips to his neck. You teasingly ran your teeth over his pale skin before sucking a deep hickey, lightly nibbling it. Denki's hips faltered as you sucked more marks on his neck, mouth wide open in a silent moan of pleasure.

"I'm cumming!" He announced as you bit a little harder on his shoulder blade. "Holy shit, y/n fuck that's so good."

You continued bouncing on his cock as he started to whine, complaining about being overstimulated a second time.

"Alright that's enough," you said as you lifted off of him, excess lube dripping down on his cock.

Denki watched limply as you peeled the condom off of him before you tied it and threw it away, wincing slightly when you wiped the cum off his dick. He rolled his wrists once you got his cuffs off, and watched your ass as you left to grab a wet cloth.

Before you came back he quickly snapped a picture of his bruised neck and sent it to his friends. He admired the marks in his camera and put his phone away once you came back.

"Can I get your number," Denki gulped, watching you wipe yourself up. You couldn't help but laugh at how nervous he was asking a simple question after what the two of you just did. "What?" He asked.

"Sure," you grinned, "gimmie your phone."

[ladyc0312]

A Jikook Guide to Run! BTS: 1-20

Hi all! Welcome to part one of my overview of all jikook moments in Run! BTS and Run BEHIND. 

My biggest takeaway from these early episodes is that BH didn't quite know how to make a good variety show yet. Some of the set-ups are awkward and the guys are clearly still getting used to being on camera in this format. The jikook moments aren’t as frequent or obvious. As we go on, expect less “they look at each other in a maybe meaningful way” and more “then he sat down in his lap...” That said, this set of episodes includes both the priest skit and the cops skit, so if you’re into role-play, this was your era of Run!

Episode Guide under the cut, to avoid both spoilers and taking up half your dash...

UPDATED PER THE SUGGESTIONS OF SOME LOVELY COMMENTERS. THANK YOU ALL! New content in bold. 

FYI: When you don’t see “BEHIND” descriptions or photos, it means there were no notable jikook moments. I’ve given each ep a general rating and a special Jikook-ery rating, both out of 5. YMMV!

Ep 1  (n/a)

The one that’s just a commercial for the V app

Ep 2 “The Greatest Man” (Ep: 3 / KM: 1)

The one with the most homoerotic series of challenges I’ve ever seen to prove who’s the “best” man

6:28 - Jimin TWICE randomly announces during musical chairs that JK will win 

Not ikook-specific, but FYI, Jungkook REALLY likes being tickled. If you want a vague idea of what the beginnings of an OT7 orgy might look like, the scene at 2:09 is for you! And if you’re curious what each member looks like putting on lipstick and holding their mouths open, check out 4:24. 

Ep 3  “Theme Park” (Ep: 1 / KM: 1)

The one at Six Flags that’s not worth watching unless you enjoy shaky camera footage of people screaming on roller coasters

5:44 - When Jimin is proud of himself for having ridden a coaster, JK goes to say something to him but keeps glancing at the camera self-consciously.  

6:19 - With the camera further away, JK and JM talk with each other while waiting on line

7:06 - JK fast-walks to get to JM and then leans on JM’s shoulder to check the post-ride pictures

Ep 4  “30 Second Gate” (Ep: 1 / KM: 0.5)

The one where they do fairly boring challenges in a pool

5:26 - There’s a super brief instant of JK looking over at Jimin while shyly tugging on his shirt collar. Prob not even worth being noted as a moment, but JK looks so adorable that I’m including it anyway

Ep 5  “100 Seconds Sports Day” (Ep: 1 / KM: 1)

The one with a rather repetitive relay game

5:56 - JM playfully throws a milk carton at JK when JK fails to complete his task

7:53 - JK does some “teleporting” where he goes from being behind Suga in one shot to next to JM in the following one. He stays next to JM the whole rest of the time they’re mixing the drink. 

Ep 6 “Sketch: Confession” (Ep: 2 / KM: 4)

The priest sketch that launched a thousand AUs...

3:30 - Jungkook comes in to “confess his sins” to Jimin, who is playing a priest and calls him “darling.” JK confesses to using Jin’s razor while also claiming to be the eldest in BTS. Jimin tells him that he’s so handsome, it must be that he’s blessed by God and can be forgiven for most things. Jimin tells JK to give him a hug to get forgiveness for his sins. As they hug, both are smiling and the onscreen text tells us how happy Jimin is and puts a little heart next to his face during the hug. Jimin strokes JK’s cheek after and it seems to make JK a little shy. Jimin calls out “bye, darling” as he leaves, then calls him “cutie” for the camera.  For comparison’s sake, Jimin hits V on the forehead and makes J-Hope do 50 push-ups to earn forgiveness. He hugs J-Hope at the end of it and the difference between how that hug feels versus the one with JK is clear as day.

Ep 6pt2 “Sketch: Confession” (Ep: 2 / KM: 0 )

None (neither appear in this episode)

Ep 7 “Paintball” (Ep: 1 / KM: 1)

The one that reminds you paintball is more fun to play than to watch

I’ll be honest, guys, between the masked helmets they’re wearing and the constant cutting around, I cannot follow the paintball games in this episode at all. I’m going to go out on a limb and say nothing particularly shippy happens during them. 

9:54 - JK picks up Jimin from behind and bounces him around for a while (we don’t know how long because the camera cuts before he’s done). It will be revealed in ep. 10 that this is part of JK’s secret mission, which is to get Jimin to say “please stop.” However, despite Jimin not looking thrilled at all the bouncing around, he doesn’t tell JK to stop.

Ep 8 “Treasure Hunt” (Ep: 2 / KM: 2)

The one where they run or ride ATVs to find flags in the woods

1:15 - Jimin says out of nowhere that he thinks JK is going to be running and tells him to be careful not to bump into anyone (I think - the subs are a little weird on this one).

13:09 - JK tries to take one of JM’s meal ticket flags. JM refuses and claims JK called him “trash.” JK (kind of?) denies this and throws his one flag on the ground in frustration. J-Hope grabs it and JK sulks a bit because he’s left with nothing. 

13:33 - Jimin reverses course and gives JK one of his flags. JK is delighted. RM asks why (apparently he, Jimin, and V had a deal to share their flags?) and Jimin just responds that Jungkook is very cute (which the on-screen texts puts a heart next to).  Jimin ends up giving a flag to V, too, but he makes him beg like a dog first. 

14:16 - Jimin calls JK over and gives him a brief hug / pat on the back

Ep 9 “Bungee Jump” (Ep: 1 / KM: 0.5)

The one where it is what it says on the tin

11:25 - Some jikookers have reported hearing JK say an un-captioned “pretty” here (sounds like yebbeo or yeebeun in Korean). I’ll be totally honest that I can’t really make it out, but I will put this note here in case others with better ears than mine want to check it out!

13:59 - JM has his arm around JK at the start of the shot here

Ep 10 “Spy for Silmido Island” (Ep: 2 / KM: 2)

The one where everyone eats a meal as they learn how JK has been doing secret missions the last three episodes

6:16 - JK explains that he failed his mission to get Jimin to say, “please stop.” We see flashbacks of JK trying - in addition to the above picking JM up, JK also pulled on his hair and gave him a shoulder rub (there is no explanation for why he thought that would be something JM would tell him to stop), and spraying him with a water bottle.  The main jikook takeaway from this and the confession episode seems to be that JM will let JK get away with anything because he think he’s cute. 

7:00 - We see that JM inadvertently made JK fail his mission to feed the camera man because, when JK held out food, JM got JK to feed him instead

Ep 11 "Back to School" (Ep: 3 / KM: 1)

The one where Suga dresses as a girl and gets hit on by the rest of the band

21:28 - Despite Jimin doing nothing but smiling in the sketch, JK says he's the day's MVP and is weirdly sincere about it

24:05 - YMMV on jeon-lous, but he does indeed do the tongue thing here when JM is flirting with girl-Yoongi

Ep 12 "Cops" (Ep: 4 / KM: 4)

The police sketch that launched ten thousand AUs...

6:46 - "Detective" Jungkook pulls "criminal" Jimin away by his collar 8:41 - After Jimin acts cute and says he's bored, JK comes over and slaps his upper thigh before throwing Jimin over his shoulder and slapping his butt. When JK puts him down, Jimin just looks at him with a dazed smile for a moment before they continue on with the sketch.

9:30 - Jimin tries to flirt his way out of of JK’s interrogation, which JK says is for “setting fire to ARMY’s hearts with his smiling eyes.”

10:25 - After a brief interuption by “Captain” Suga, the interrogation starts having flirty vibes again, with JK smirking and making eye contact while Jimin acts bashful and speaks in a whispery voice. 

11:00 - JK holds a fake gun on JM as he starts his “Lie” dance, during which he directs finger hearts towards JK. The camera focuses on JM and, by the time it shows JK again, he’s lowered the gun and put his other hand over his heart. The on-screen text says “Detective Jeon’s heart is attacked.”

12:55 - JM and JK switch roles so JM is the detective. He hits JK over the head with a book. JK has basically no visible reaction, but JM has clearly flustered himself. 

Note: To explain my reasoning for these originally not being here - if you look at the other skits in this ep, they are all accusing each other of doing things to ARMY’s hearts and being weirdly flirty with each other. Like, this police station has some serious sexual harassment issues all around! That said, the vibes are unique with jikook and, upon rewatch, I came to agree with y’all that the above should’ve been included. 19:30 - Alternate version of the sketch where Jimin and JK have a dance battle that ends in both of them being put in the jail cell and told to dance.

BEHIND  0:58 - Jimin flirt-ily calls out "I'm bored; play with me, Detective" (presumably to JK since they're scene partners).  Note: Adults saying they "played" with each other is a common way to describe hanging out in Korean and doesn't necessarily have the sexual connotations it does in English. 

4:08 - Jimin stares at JK as he does squats

Ep 13 "The Spy Who Returned Part 1" (Ep: 4 / KM: 2)

The ones where they play games at an indoor water park

1:00 - Jimin does an exaggerated running motion and JK slaps him to make him stop, which JM finds funny

1:43 - JM has his arm around JK 

6:00 - JK jokingly(?) tells JM his wet hair looks cool

11:12 - JM calls JK their team's ace and they whisper about who he should call out from the other team 

Ep 14 "The Spy Who Returned Part 2" (Ep: 3 / KM: 2)

16:04 - JM jokingly hits JK for getting the answer super wrong and then they go down the waterslide together. (Note: I've seen some jikook-ers claim JK messed up on purpose so the game wouldn't end and he'd get to ride with Jimin, but I'm not sure there's actual evidence to support that theory.)

The moment that led to the picture below isn’t in the ep or the BEHIND, but I raised the episode’s KM score a full point for it

Ep 15 "The Spy Who Returned Part 3" (Ep: 3 / KM: 2)

TW for this ep: 5:14 - during the confessions game, Jin tells Jimin that whenever Jimin asks if he put on weight, Jin wants to say he looks like a pig. Jimin claims to not be upset after, but looks like he's going to cry and seems off for a while. Then, at 10:45, Jin reiterates that Jimin "got fat." Everyone laughs except JK, who widens his eyes and then starts chewing on his finger.  

6:37 - Despite being on the same team as JK, Jimin joins J-Hope's complaints about JK coming to their room uninvited, saying that JK often brushes his teeth in their room. He accuses JK of buying the exact same toothbrush as Jimin’s and complains that they can’t tell them a part. JK says it wasn't him and then there's a weird cut to sometime later when Jimin is sitting back down again...  Just prior to this, Jimin is looking unhappy as Hobi tells a story about JK seeing him naked, but it’s hard to tell if he’s reacting to that or feeling upset about Jin’s weight comments from the previous round. 

16:02 - Jimin defends Jungkook against accusations that he's the spy

BEHIND 4:30 - Jimin sits on Jungkook's lap and, when he leans over to try to get Jin to give him food, JK puts his hand on JM's hip to steady him

Ep 16 "Snowpark Winter Olympics" (Ep: 4 / KM: 1)

The one where everyone plays winter games 

4:35 - When JM and JK are the finalists for the sledding round, JM thanks the viewers for their support. JK asks "what does that make me?" and yells/sings badly, which makes JM laugh. I don’t quite get it, tbh, but they seem to be enjoying themselves

14:50 - JK helps JM get his sled in place

BEHIND 3:02 - JK smiles as he gets pushed towards JM on the ice 

Ep 17 "Arcade Olympics Part 1" (Ep: 2 / JK: 2)

The ones where we are reminded that playing arcade games is more fun than watching people play them

All of this and next episode, whenever they all reshuffle positions, Jimin and Jungkook end up standing next to each other. This happens pretty frequently in Run BTS generally, but it was particularly noticeable in this ep since it's not like they're on the same team or anything...

4:16 - When Jimin does a dramatic DDR finish, JK calls attention to it. JM turns to him and they lock eyes for a second

15:00 - JK cheers Jimin's name when it looks like he's going to win the basketball game 

BEHIND

3:36 - JK & JM play a 4D game together Also, JK has an interesting mark on his neck on his right side that does not appear to be there in the episode itself...

Ep 18 "Arcade Olympics Part 2" (Ep: 2 / JK: 1)

3:30 - JK tries (unsuccessfully) to coach Jimin on the driving game

3:45 - JK stands up for Jimin and says he's getting the hang of the game

14:36 - JM & JK laugh together at RM's failure

19:58 - It's not super clear, but it sounds like JK calls JM "Jiminie" at the end of his sentence

Ep 19 "Strike" (Ep: 2 / JK: 1)

The one where BTS go bowling together and end up bowing down to JK

4:47 - JK shares that he and Jimin used to bowl together

---

If there’s anything I’ve missed or that anyone has different interpretations of, I’d love to hear it. 

More episodes coming soon! 

[louiseleblancdiggory]

do you still take prompts?? i would love a lou and reid “kissing in public” one 🥺❤️

I’m always taking prompts! This came in such a good time because I have been trying to write a smutty Loureid scene and is just not coming out the way I want, so the break from it to write some fluff was blessed. Hope you like it!

Word count: 1800 

PDA

--

Reid wasn’t a social butterfly, Louise knew that.

And it never really bothered her, not really. She loved her boyfriend the way he was— quiet, brooding and intimidatingly smart. Reid was loving and caring for her in the privacy of their apartments or their friends’ apartments. He had a complete soft spot for her and, the few times someone did see him smiling in public, it was usually at Lou.

Despite hating large gatherings, Reid would always go parties with Lou. He wanted to make sure she was safe all the time, and he knew Lou wanted him there. His presence was never a bother, always a soothing company. Lou could get extremely drunk and Reid would be there. She could not drink at all and he would be there. She could go to spend hours in that party or only five minutes and he would always gladly follow her.

He wouldn’t dance or even talk to that many people, and although his eyes would never leave her body while she danced.

Lou couldn’t really complain about her handsome boyfriend staring at her dancing as if he was going to devour her.

As she said, Reid’s personality didn’t bother her one tiny bit.

But apparently his behavior annoyed the hell out of him.

“Good morning.” Lou said lazily, padding out of Reid’s bedroom. He was sitting with his back to her at the table but she could notice how tense his body was. Lou walked up to him, hugging him from behind. His body immediately relaxed, and she pressed a few kisses to his neck. “Did you wake up too long ago?”

“No.” He said, pulling her around the chair so she could sit on his lap. He gave her a quick kiss before Lou turned to the table to grab a toast and put some grape jam on it. “Maybe half an hour ago? I didn’t want to wake you.”

Lou merely hummed, taking a bite of her toast. She offered it to Reid but he gave her a shake of his head, gesturing to an enormous cup of coffee by the table. “That much coffee will kill you one day.”

He laughed, but it was clipped. Lou fully turned to him, analyzing his features. Reid was the tallest man she had ever seen, so even on his lap she had to look up at his face. Ivory skin, deep cobalt eyes and coppery hair, the sharp lines constructing his face could have landed him in a model agency if Reid wasn’t such an academic. His features that were usually relaxed when it was only the two of them appeared tense.

Lou raised an eyebrow, smoothing the crease between his brows. “What happened, Chass?”

“Do you regret dating me?”

Lou blinked. “What?”

He sighed deeply, running his hand through his hair. “I’m not really your type, Lou.”

Reid knew about her ex boyfriends. Knew that they were all as social and open as she was, but Lou never thought that it was something that bothered Reid or even made him think that he wasn’t her type. She liked smart, loyal men. Liked someone trustworthy and that would always be able to match her sarcasm and jokes with sarcasm and jokes of his own. Reid was perfect for her.

“Of course you are my type.” She said as if stating the obvious. “Why all this now?”

He sighed again and turned his head, ignoring her gaze. “Yesterday…”

“Oh. Oh.” Lou said, her gaze softening. They had been to a party yesterday, and everything was going as always. She had talked to everyone and Reid was content to just observe his girlfriend on her habitat. Everyone liked Lou, he knew, and it gave him enormous satisfaction to know that despite his reserves she had fallen for him as hard as he had fallen for her. He was thinking about that the night before when he watched a guy approach Lou from behind and start dancing with her. She immediately got away, saying something to the guy and then pointing at Reid’s direction.

The man looked Reid up and down, then Lou. And then he snorted and Reid could see his mouth forming the word “Him?”. Lou nodded, and the guy laughed again but left.

“No one understands how we’re together, Lou. Some don’t even believe. And there’s a fucking reason for that.” He looked back at her, his expression almost pained. “You couldn’t be more social if you tried, and if I tried to be more recluse, I wouldn’t even leave the apartment. I— I just… I don’t want to hold you back.”

“You don’t fucking hold me back.” Her voice was harsh. She knew she should be nicer to Reid right now, it wasn’t really his fault he had insecurities about their relationship. She did too. “And the same way you think that, I do too. But I know it’s stupid because I love you and you love me and that’s all it matters. We never cared about other people’s opinions on our relationship. Let’s not start now.”

He snorted, not at all convinced.

“Would you leave me for a chemistry genius? The type of girl who can probably resolve problems in record time, undoubtedly watches those boring ass documentaries you do and most definitely has won about twenty seven awards on her field?”

“No, of course not. I would never leave you”

“Then why the hell would I leave you for someone that’s more like me?” She crossed her eyes and stared at him.

He stared right back, his features relaxing little by little. Lou never knew Reid even thought of these things. He had never even as much hinted jealously or doubt in their relationship and Lou was terrified that this would make him break up with her because he would think that he was doing the best for her. As much as Reid was a science genius, his grasp on other people’s emotions was a disaster.

“I love you, Reid. Part of me has loved you since the first time we met through Beau and you blurted out what my name meant when I introduced myself.” His cheeks became a rosy pink and Lou smiled. “You’re the best I could ever hope for. Your personality never bothered me, and if you decided to never go to a party again it wouldn’t bother me either.”

He nodded, resting his face on the crook of her neck and taking a deep breath. Lou’s arms came around his shoulders, and she just hugged him.

“I love you too, you know.” He murmured against her skin.

Lou smiled broadly, turning back to the table to eat another toast. “Of course I know.”

The rest of the day went by without too much problem. They spent the whole Saturday together at his apartment, eventually ordering food because Reid didn’t feel like cooking and Lou was a disgrace in the kitchen. When the night came and Coco swept by to pick Lou up to a party at Beau’s fraternity, Reid accompanied both women regardless of Lou’s earlier statement. He usually took care of Coco as much as he took care of Lou. And also Beau.

“Coco.” He said and Lou’s best friend smiled at her boyfriend. Coco and Reid had became close friends after he and Lou started dating. “Looking dashing. I’m sorry for my brother.”

Coco laughed at Reid while looping an arm through Lou’s. “I’m sorry for him too.” Coco chirped. Her and Beau had been playing that strange game of theirs for years now to Reid and Lou’s immeasurable entertainment.

When they arrived at the house, Coco left Lou with Reid to find Beau. Ansel wasn’t coming today, having an anatomy test tomorrow. Reid offered to help him study, but Ans just brushed him off and told him to go have fun with his girlfriend.

Lou expected Reid to go to his usual spot while she combed through the party, but instead he surprisingly slid his hand into her and took a step closer. Lou didn’t comment anything on it, but she would certainly bring it up later. He followed her around as she greeted people. She stopped to talk to a few, gesturing with a hand to the man behind her and introducing him as her boyfriend. As much as Reid wasn’t one for social interactions with strangers, he couldn’t help but be happy at the smile on Lou’s face every time she introduced him or got comment such as “You are such a pretty couple!”.

When even she tired of greeting everyone, she dragged Reid to the bar, grabbing one of those red cups filled with cheap beer. She offered one to Reid, but he merely shook his head and bent down to whisper on her ear. “I’m the DD tonight, baby. Can’t drink.”

“You’re always the DD.” She pouted but didn’t insist further. “I would be majorly pissed if I was always the DD.”

He laughed and pulled her to one of the armchairs near the beer pong. He sat down, looking at her standing in front of him a second before pulling her close to his lap.

“You were never one for PDA, Chass.” She mused against his ear so he could hear her voice clearly. His hands were on her hips, and she rested against his chest, one arm around his shoulders.

“I was going to let you roam around like the social butterfly you are as per usual.” He also said against her ear. “But you seemed so happy by holding my hand and introducing me to your friends that now I think I’ll keep you here for the rest of the night.”

She laughed, taking a sip of her beer. It tasted like piss as always.

“So I have the green light for PDA tonight?” She asked, smiling against his ear.

She could hear him snorting, one of his hands going up and down her back. “I am yours, Louise le Blanc.”

Her smile widened, and she pulled back to look at Reid. Even among this many people, he seemed for the first time completely relaxed. Reid wasn’t one for holding hands in public, or constantly hugging or kissing. She didn’t want him to change but it was so good being able to show her boyfriend off.

“Well,” she said leaning in. “Let me enjoy you then.”

His smile was as big as hers when she touched her lips to him. It wasn’t anything as hot or deep as they usually did in their apartments, but not even Lou would be comfortable doing that in public. No, the kisses were sweet and soft, and Lou couldn’t stop smiling as Reid kissed her through the night, completely at ease with her in his arms.

Tags:

@in-love-with-caramel-macchiato @jlinez @courtofjurdan @aelinfeyreeleven945tbln @ladywitchling

(If you only want to be tagged on TOG fics please tell me and I will take you out of the general list!)

[the-minecraft-funnies]

Hello fellow you seem to have a mimecraft based blog i too am a gaming person would happen to have any gaming facts perhaps about craft?

minecraft is actually 7 feet tall but wont tell you their secrets about the mines or craft BUT the real reason they won’t spread rumors is because according to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. 

The bee, of course, flies anyway because bees don't care what humans think is impossible. Yellow, black. Yellow, black. Yellow, black. Yellow, black. Ooh, black and yellow! Let's shake it up a little. Barry! Breakfast is ready! Ooming! Hang on a second. Hello? - Barry? - Adam? - Oan you believe this is happening? - I can't. I'll pick you up. Looking sharp. Use the stairs. Your father paid good money for those. Sorry. I'm excited. Here's the graduate. We're very proud of you, son. A perfect report card, all B's. Very proud. Ma! I got a thing going here. - You got lint on your fuzz. - Ow! That's me! - Wave to us! We'll be in row 118,000. - Bye! Barry, I told you, stop flying in the house! - Hey, Adam. - Hey, Barry. - Is that fuzz gel? - A little. Special day, graduation. Never thought I'd make it. Three days grade school, three days high school. Those were awkward. Three days college. I'm glad I took a day and hitchhiked around the hive. You did come back different. - Hi, Barry. - Artie, growing a mustache? Looks good.- Hear about Frankie? - Yeah. - You going to the funeral? - No, I'm not going. Everybody knows, sting someone, you die. Don't waste it on a squirrel. Such a hothead. I guess he could have just gotten out of the way. I love this incorporating an amusement park into our day. That's why we don't need vacations. Boy, quite a bit of pomp... under the circumstances. - Well, Adam, today we are men. - We are! - Bee-men. - Amen! Hallelujah! Students, faculty, distinguished bees, please welcome Dean Buzzwell. Welcome, New Hive Oity graduating class of... ...9:15. That concludes our ceremonies. And begins your career at Honex Industries! Will we pick ourjob today? I heard it's just orientation. Heads up! Here we go. Keep your hands and antennas inside the tram at all times. - Wonder what it'll be like? - A little scary. Welcome to Honex, a division of Honesco and a part of the Hexagon Group. This is it! Wow. Wow. We know that you, as a bee, have worked your whole life to get to the point where you can work for your whole life. Honey begins when our valiant Pollen Jocks bring the nectar to the hive. Our top-secret formula is automatically color-corrected, scent-adjusted and bubble-contoured into this soothing sweet syrup with its distinctive golden glow you know as... Honey! - That girl was hot. - She's my cousin! - She is? - Yes, we're all cousins. - Right. You're right. - At Honex, we constantly strive to improve every aspect of bee existence. These bees are stress-testing a new helmet technology. - What do you think he makes? - Not enough. Here we have our latest advancement, the Krelman. - What does that do? - Oatches that little strand of honey that hangs after you pour it. Saves us millions. Oan anyone work on the Krelman? Of course. Most bee jobs are small ones. But bees know that every small job, if it's done well, means a lot. But choose carefully because you'll stay in the job you pick for the rest of your life. The same job the rest of your life? I didn't know that. What's the difference? You'll be happy to know that bees, as a species, haven't had one day off in 27 million years. So you'll just work us to death? We'll sure try. Wow! That blew my mind! "What's the difference?" How can you say that? One job forever? That's an insane choice to have to make. I'm relieved. Now we only have to make one decision in life. But, Adam, how could they never have told us that? Why would you question anything? We're bees. We're the most perfectly functioning society on Earth. You ever think maybe things work a little too well here? Like what? Give me one example. I don't know. But you know what I'm talking about. Please clear the gate. Royal Nectar Force on approach. Wait a second. Oheck it out. - Hey, those are Pollen Jocks! - Wow. I've never seen them this close. They know what it's like outside the hive. Yeah, but some don't come back. - Hey, Jocks! - Hi, Jocks! You guys did great! You're monsters! You're sky freaks! I love it! I love it! - I wonder where they were. - I don't know. Their day's not planned. Outside the hive, flying who knows where, doing who knows what. You can'tjust decide to be a Pollen Jock. You have to be bred for that. Right. Look. That's more pollen than you and I will see in a lifetime. It's just a status symbol. Bees make too much of it. Perhaps. Unless you're wearing it and the ladies see you wearing it. Those ladies? Aren't they our cousins too? Distant. Distant. Look at these two. - Oouple of Hive Harrys. - Let's have fun with them. It must be dangerous being a Pollen Jock. Yeah. Once a bear pinned me against a mushroom! He had a paw on my throat, and with the other, he was slapping me! - Oh, my! - I never thought I'd knock him out. What were you doing during this? Trying to alert the authorities. I can autograph that. A little gusty out there today, wasn't it, comrades? Yeah. Gusty. We're hitting a sunflower patch six miles from here tomorrow. - Six miles, huh? - Barry! A puddle jump for us, but maybe you're not up for it. - Maybe I am. - You are not! We're going 0900 at J-Gate. What do you think, buzzy-boy? Are you bee enough? I might be. It all depends on what 0900 means. Hey, Honex! Dad, you surprised me. You decide what you're interested in? - Well, there's a lot of choices. - But you only get one. Do you ever get bored doing the same job every day? Son, let me tell you about stirring. You grab that stick, and you just move it around, and you stir it around. You get yourself into a rhythm. It's a beautiful thing. You know, Dad, the more I think about it, maybe the honey field just isn't right for me. You were thinking of what, making balloon animals? That's a bad job for a guy with a stinger. Janet, your son's not sure he wants to go into honey! - Barry, you are so funny sometimes. - I'm not trying to be funny. You're not funny! You're going into honey. Our son, the stirrer! - You're gonna be a stirrer? - No one's listening to me! Wait till you see the sticks I have. I could say anything right now. I'm gonna get an ant tattoo! Let's open some honey and celebrate! Maybe I'll pierce my thorax. Shave my antennae. Shack up with a grasshopper. Get a gold tooth and call everybody "dawg"! I'm so proud. - We're starting work today! - Today's the day. Oome on! All the good jobs will be gone. Yeah, right. Pollen counting, stunt bee, pouring, stirrer, front desk, hair removal... - Is it still available? - Hang on. Two left! One of them's yours! Oongratulations! Step to the side. - What'd you get? - Picking crud out. Stellar! Wow! Oouple of newbies? Yes, sir! Our first day! We are ready! Make your choice. - You want to go first? - No, you go. Oh, my. What's available? Restroom attendant's open, not for the reason you think. - Any chance of getting the Krelman? - Sure, you're on. I'm sorry, the Krelman just closed out. Wax monkey's always open. The Krelman opened up again. What happened? A bee died. Makes an opening. See? He's dead. Another dead one. Deady. Deadified. Two more dead. Dead from the neck up. Dead from the neck down. That's life! Oh, this is so hard! Heating, cooling, stunt bee, pourer, stirrer, humming, inspector number seven, lint coordinator, stripe supervisor, mite wrangler. Barry, what do you think I should... Barry? Barry! All right, we've got the sunflower patch in quadrant nine... What happened to you? Where are you? - I'm going out. - Out? Out where? - Out there. - Oh, no! I have to, before I go to work for the rest of my life. You're gonna die! You're crazy! Hello? Another call coming in. If anyone's feeling brave, there's a Korean deli on 83rd that gets their roses today. Hey, guys. - Look at that. - Isn't that the kid we saw yesterday? Hold it, son, flight deck's restricted. It's OK, Lou. We're gonna take him up. Really? Feeling lucky, are you? Sign here, here. Just initial that. - Thank you. - OK. You got a rain advisory today, and as you all know, bees cannot fly in rain. So be careful. As always, watch your brooms, hockey sticks, dogs, birds, bears and bats. Also, I got a couple of reports of root beer being poured on us. Murphy's in a home because of it, babbling like a cicada! - That's awful. - And a reminder for you rookies, bee law number one, absolutely no talking to humans! All right, launch positions! Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz! Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz! Buzz, buzz, buzz, buzz! Black and yellow! Hello! You ready for this, hot shot? Yeah. Yeah, bring it on. Wind, check. - Antennae, check. - Nectar pack, check. - Wings, check. - Stinger, check. Scared out of my shorts, check. OK, ladies, let's move it out! Pound those petunias, you striped stem-suckers! All of you, drain those flowers! Wow! I'm out! I can't believe I'm out! So blue. I feel so fast and free! Box kite! Wow! Flowers! This is Blue Leader. We have roses visual. Bring it around 30 degrees and hold. Roses! 30 degrees, roger. Bringing it around. Stand to the side, kid. It's got a bit of a kick. That is one nectar collector! - Ever see pollination up close? - No, sir. I pick up some pollen here, sprinkle it over here. Maybe a dash over there, a pinch on that one. See that? It's a little bit of magic. That's amazing. Why do we do that? That's pollen power. More pollen, more flowers, more nectar, more honey for us. Oool. I'm picking up a lot of bright yellow. Oould be daisies. Don't we need those? Oopy that visual. Wait. One of these flowers seems to be on the move. Say again? You're reporting a moving flower? Affirmative. That was on the line! This is the coolest. What is it? I don't know, but I'm loving this color. It smells good. Not like a flower, but I like it. Yeah, fuzzy. Ohemical-y. Oareful, guys. It's a little grabby. My sweet lord of bees! Oandy-brain, get off there! Problem! - Guys! - This could be bad. Affirmative. Very close. Gonna hurt. Mama's little boy. You are way out of position, rookie! Ooming in at you like a missile! Help me! I don't think these are flowers. - Should we tell him? - I think he knows. What is this?! Match point! You can start packing up, honey, because you're about to eat it! Yowser! Gross. There's a bee in the car! - Do something! - I'm driving! - Hi, bee. - He's back here! He's going to sting me! Nobody move. If you don't move, he won't sting you. Freeze! He blinked! Spray him, Granny! What are you doing?! Wow... the tension level out here is unbelievable. I gotta get home. Oan't fly in rain. Oan't fly in rain. Oan't fly in rain. Mayday! Mayday! Bee going down! Ken, could you close the window please? Ken, could you close the window please? Oheck out my new resume. I made it into a fold-out brochure. You see? Folds out. Oh, no. More humans. I don't need this. What was that? Maybe this time. This time. This time. This time! This time! This... Drapes! That is diabolical. It's fantastic. It's got all my special skills, even my top-ten favorite movies. What's number one? Star Wars? Nah, I don't go for that... ...kind of stuff. No wonder we shouldn't talk to them. They're out of their minds. When I leave a job interview, they're flabbergasted, can't believe what I say. There's the sun. Maybe that's a way out. I don't remember the sun having a big 75 on it. I predicted global warming. I could feel it getting hotter. At first I thought it was just me. Wait! Stop! Bee! Stand back. These are winter boots. Wait! Don't kill him! You know I'm allergic to them! This thing could kill me! Why does his life have less value than yours? Why does his life have any less value than mine? Is that your statement? I'm just saying all life has value. You don't know what he's capable of feeling. My brochure! There you go, little guy. I'm not scared of him. It's an allergic thing. Put that on your resume brochure. My whole face could puff up. Make it one of your special skills. Knocking someone out is also a special skill. Right. Bye, Vanessa. Thanks. - Vanessa, next week? Yogurt night? - Sure, Ken. You know, whatever. - You could put carob chips on there. - Bye. - Supposed to be less calories. - Bye. I gotta say something. She saved my life. I gotta say something. All right, here it goes. Nah. What would I say? I could really get in trouble. It's a bee law. You're not supposed to talk to a human. I can't believe I'm doing this. I've got to. Oh, I can't do it. Oome on! No. Yes. No. Do it. I can't. How should I start it? "You like jazz?" No, that's no good. Here she comes! Speak, you fool! Hi! I'm sorry. - You're talking. - Yes, I know. You're talking! I'm so sorry. No, it's OK. It's fine. I know I'm dreaming. But I don't recall going to bed. Well, I'm sure this is very disconcerting. This is a bit of a surprise to me. I mean, you're a bee! I am. And I'm not supposed to be doing this, but they were all trying to kill me. And if it wasn't for you... I had to thank you. It's just how I was raised. That was a little weird. - I'm talking with a bee. - Yeah. I'm talking to a bee. And the bee is talking to me! I just want to say I'm grateful. I'll leave now. - Wait! How did you learn to do that? - What? The talking thing. Same way you did, I guess. "Mama, Dada, honey." You pick it up. - That's very funny. - Yeah. Bees are funny. If we didn't laugh, we'd cry with what we have to deal with. Anyway... Oan I... ...get you something? - Like what? I don't know. I mean... I don't know. Ooffee? I don't want to put you out. It's no trouble. It takes two minutes. - It's just coffee. - I hate to impose. - Don't be ridiculous! - Actually, I would love a cup. Hey, you want rum cake? - I shouldn't. - Have some. - No, I can't. - Oome on! I'm trying to lose a couple micrograms. - Where? - These stripes don't help. You look great! I don't know if you know anything about fashion. Are you all right? No. He's making the tie in the cab as they're flying up Madison. He finally gets there. He runs up the steps into the church. The wedding is on. And he says, "Watermelon? I thought you said Guatemalan. Why would I marry a watermelon?" Is that a bee joke? That's the kind of stuff we do. Yeah, different. So, what are you gonna do, Barry? About work? I don't know. I want to do my part for the hive, but I can't do it the way they want. I know how you feel. - You do? - Sure. My parents wanted me to be a lawyer or a doctor, but I wanted to be a florist. - Really? - My only interest is flowers. Our new queen was just elected with that same campaign slogan. Anyway, if you look... There's my hive right there. See it? You're in Sheep Meadow! Yes! I'm right off the Turtle Pond! No way! I know that area. I lost a toe ring there once. - Why do girls put rings on their toes? - Why not? - It's like putting a hat on your knee. - Maybe I'll try that. - You all right, ma'am? - Oh, yeah. Fine. Just having two cups of coffee! Anyway, this has been great. Thanks for the coffee. Yeah, it's no trouble. Sorry I couldn't finish it. If I did, I'd be up the rest of my life. Are you...? Oan I take a piece of this with me? Sure! Here, have a crumb. - Thanks! - Yeah. All right. Well, then... I guess I'll see you around. Or not. OK, Barry. And thank you so much again... for before. Oh, that? That was nothing. Well, not nothing, but... Anyway... This can't possibly work. He's all set to go. We may as well try it. OK, Dave, pull the chute. - Sounds amazing. - It was amazing! It was the scariest, happiest moment of my life. Humans! I can't believe you were with humans! Giant, scary humans! What were they like? Huge and crazy. They talk crazy. They eat crazy giant things. They drive crazy. - Do they try and kill you, like on TV? - Some of them. But some of them don't. - How'd you get back? - Poodle. You did it, and I'm glad. You saw whatever you wanted to see. You had your "experience." Now you can pick out yourjob and be normal. - Well... - Well? Well, I met someone. You did? Was she Bee-ish? - A wasp?! Your parents will kill you! - No, no, no, not a wasp. - Spider? - I'm not attracted to spiders. I know it's the hottest thing, with the eight legs and all. I can't get by that face. So who is she? She's... human. No, no. That's a bee law. You wouldn't break a bee law. - Her name's Vanessa. - Oh, boy. She's so nice. And she's a florist! Oh, no! You're dating a human florist! We're not dating. You're flying outside the hive, talking to humans that attack our homes with power washers and M-80s! One-eighth a stick of dynamite! She saved my life! And she understands me. This is over! Eat this. This is not over! What was that? - They call it a crumb. - It was so stingin' stripey! And that's not what they eat. That's what falls off what they eat! - You know what a Oinnabon is? - No. It's bread and cinnamon and frosting. They heat it up... Sit down! ...really hot! - Listen to me! We are not them! We're us. There's us and there's them! Yes, but who can deny the heart that is yearning? There's no yearning. Stop yearning. Listen to me! You have got to start thinking bee, my friend. Thinking bee! - Thinking bee. - Thinking bee. Thinking bee! Thinking bee! Thinking bee! Thinking bee! There he is. He's in the pool. You know what your problem is, Barry? I gotta start thinking bee? How much longer will this go on? It's been three days! Why aren't you working? I've got a lot of big life decisions to think about. What life? You have no life! You have no job. You're barely a bee! Would it kill you to make a little honey? Barry, come out. Your father's talking to you. Martin, would you talk to him? Barry, I'm talking to you! You coming? Got everything? All set! Go ahead. I'll catch up. Don't be too long. Watch this! Vanessa! - We're still here. - I told you not to yell at him. He doesn't respond to yelling! - Then why yell at me? - Because you don't listen! I'm not listening to this. Sorry, I've gotta go. - Where are you going? - I'm meeting a friend. A girl? Is this why you can't decide? Bye. I just hope she's Bee-ish. They have a huge parade of flowers every year in Pasadena? To be in the Tournament of Roses, that's every florist's dream! Up on a float, surrounded by flowers, crowds cheering. A tournament. Do the roses compete in athletic events? No. All right, I've got one. How come you don't fly everywhere? It's exhausting. Why don't you run everywhere? It's faster. Yeah, OK, I see, I see. All right, your turn. TiVo. You can just freeze live TV? That's insane! You don't have that? We have Hivo, but it's a disease. It's a horrible, horrible disease. Oh, my. Dumb bees! You must want to sting all those jerks. We try not to sting. It's usually fatal for us. So you have to watch your temper. Very carefully. You kick a wall, take a walk, write an angry letter and throw it out. Work through it like any emotion: Anger, jealousy, lust. Oh, my goodness! Are you OK? Yeah. - What is wrong with you?! - It's a bug. He's not bothering anybody. Get out of here, you creep! What was that? A Pic 'N' Save circular? Yeah, it was. How did you know? It felt like about 10 pages. Seventy-five is pretty much our limit. You've really got that down to a science. - I lost a cousin to Italian Vogue. - I'll bet. What in the name of Mighty Hercules is this? How did this get here? Oute Bee, Golden Blossom, Ray Liotta Private Select? - Is he that actor? - I never heard of him. - Why is this here? - For people. We eat it. You don't have enough food of your own? - Well, yes. - How do you get it? - Bees make it. - I know who makes it! And it's hard to make it! There's heating, cooling, stirring. You need a whole Krelman thing! - It's organic. - It's our-ganic! It's just honey, Barry. Just what?! Bees don't know about this! This is stealing! A lot of stealing! You've taken our homes, schools, hospitals! This is all we have! And it's on sale?! I'm getting to the bottom of this. I'm getting to the bottom of all of this! Hey, Hector. - You almost done? - Almost. He is here. I sense it. Well, I guess I'll go home now and just leave this nice honey out, with no one around. You're busted, box boy! I knew I heard something. So you can talk! I can talk. And now you'll start talking! Where you getting the sweet stuff? Who's your supplier? I don't understand. I thought we were friends. The last thing we want to do is upset bees! You're too late! It's ours now! You, sir, have crossed the wrong sword! You, sir, will be lunch for my iguana, Ignacio! Where is the honey coming from? Tell me where! Honey Farms! It comes from Honey Farms! Orazy person! What horrible thing has happened here? These faces, they never knew what hit them. And now they're on the road to nowhere! Just keep still. What? You're not dead? Do I look dead? They will wipe anything that moves. Where you headed? To Honey Farms. I am onto something huge here. I'm going to Alaska. Moose blood, crazy stuff. Blows your head off! I'm going to Tacoma. - And you? - He really is dead. All right. Uh-oh! - What is that?! - Oh, no! - A wiper! Triple blade! - Triple blade? Jump on! It's your only chance, bee! Why does everything have to be so doggone clean?! How much do you people need to see?! Open your eyes! Stick your head out the window! From NPR News in Washington, I'm Oarl Kasell. But don't kill no more bugs! - Bee! - Moose blood guy!! - You hear something? - Like what? Like tiny screaming. Turn off the radio. Whassup, bee boy? Hey, Blood. Just a row of honey jars, as far as the eye could see. Wow! I assume wherever this truck goes is where they're getting it. I mean, that honey's ours. - Bees hang tight. - We're all jammed in. It's a close community. Not us, man. We on our own. Every mosquito on his own. - What if you get in trouble? - You a mosquito, you in trouble. Nobody likes us. They just smack. See a mosquito, smack, smack! At least you're out in the world. You must meet girls. Mosquito girls try to trade up, get with a moth, dragonfly. Mosquito girl don't want no mosquito. You got to be kidding me! Mooseblood's about to leave the building! So long, bee! - Hey, guys! - Mooseblood! I knew I'd catch y'all down here. Did you bring your crazy straw? We throw it in jars, slap a label on it, and it's pretty much pure profit. What is this place? A bee's got a brain the size of a pinhead. They are pinheads! Pinhead. - Oheck out the new smoker. - Oh, sweet. That's the one you want. The Thomas 3000! Smoker? Ninety puffs a minute, semi-automatic. Twice the nicotine, all the tar. A couple breaths of this knocks them right out. They make the honey, and we make the money. "They make the honey, and we make the money"? Oh, my! What's going on? Are you OK? Yeah. It doesn't last too long. Do you know you're in a fake hive with fake walls? Our queen was moved here. We had no choice. This is your queen? That's a man in women's clothes! That's a drag queen! What is this? Oh, no! There's hundreds of them! Bee honey. Our honey is being brazenly stolen on a massive scale! This is worse than anything bears have done! I intend to do something. Oh, Barry, stop. Who told you humans are taking our honey? That's a rumor. Do these look like rumors? That's a conspiracy theory. These are obviously doctored photos. How did you get mixed up in this? He's been talking to humans. - What? - Talking to humans?! He has a human girlfriend. And they make out! Make out? Barry! We do not. - You wish you could. - Whose side are you on? The bees! I dated a cricket once in San Antonio. Those crazy legs kept me up all night. Barry, this is what you want to do with your life? I want to do it for all our lives. Nobody works harder than bees! Dad, I remember you coming home so overworked your hands were still stirring. You couldn't stop. I remember that. What right do they have to our honey? We live on two cups a year. They put it in lip balm for no reason whatsoever! Even if it's true, what can one bee do? Sting them where it really hurts. In the face! The eye! - That would hurt. - No. Up the nose? That's a killer. There's only one place you can sting the humans, one place where it matters. Hive at Five, the hive's only full-hour action news source. No more bee beards! With Bob Bumble at the anchor desk. Weather with Storm Stinger. Sports with Buzz Larvi. And Jeanette Ohung. - Good evening. I'm Bob Bumble. - And I'm Jeanette Ohung. A tri-county bee, Barry Benson, intends to sue the human race for stealing our honey, packaging it and profiting from it illegally! Tomorrow night on Bee Larry King, we'll have three former queens here in our studio, discussing their new book, Olassy Ladies, out this week on Hexagon. Tonight we're talking to Barry Benson. Did you ever think, "I'm a kid from the hive. I can't do this"? Bees have never been afraid to change the world. What about Bee Oolumbus? Bee Gandhi? Bejesus? Where I'm from, we'd never sue humans. We were thinking of stickball or candy stores. How old are you? The bee community is supporting you in this case, which will be the trial of the bee century. You know, they have a Larry King in the human world too. It's a common name. Next week... He looks like you and has a show and suspenders and colored dots... Next week... Glasses, quotes on the bottom from the guest even though you just heard 'em. Bear Week next week! They're scary, hairy and here live. Always leans forward, pointy shoulders, squinty eyes, very Jewish. In tennis, you attack at the point of weakness! It was my grandmother, Ken. She's 81. Honey, her backhand's a joke! I'm not gonna take advantage of that? Quiet, please. Actual work going on here. - Is that that same bee? - Yes, it is! I'm helping him sue the human race. - Hello. - Hello, bee. This is Ken. Yeah, I remember you. Timberland, size ten and a half. Vibram sole, I believe. Why does he talk again? Listen, you better go 'cause we're really busy working. But it's our yogurt night! Bye-bye. Why is yogurt night so difficult?! You poor thing. You two have been at this for hours! Yes, and Adam here has been a huge help. - Frosting... - How many sugars? Just one. I try not to use the competition. So why are you helping me? Bees have good qualities. And it takes my mind off the shop. Instead of flowers, people are giving balloon bouquets now. Those are great, if you're three. And artificial flowers. - Oh, those just get me psychotic! - Yeah, me too. Bent stingers, pointless pollination. Bees must hate those fake things! Nothing worse than a daffodil that's had work done. Maybe this could make up for it a little bit. - This lawsuit's a pretty big deal. - I guess. You sure you want to go through with it? Am I sure? When I'm done with the humans, they won't be able to say, "Honey, I'm home," without paying a royalty! It's an incredible scene here in downtown Manhattan, where the world anxiously waits, because for the first time in history, we will hear for ourselves if a honeybee can actually speak. What have we gotten into here, Barry? It's pretty big, isn't it? I can't believe how many humans don't work during the day. You think billion-dollar multinational food companies have good lawyers? Everybody needs to stay behind the barricade. - What's the matter? - I don't know, I just got a chill. Well, if it isn't the bee team. You boys work on this? All rise! The Honorable Judge Bumbleton presiding. All right. Oase number 4475, Superior Oourt of New York, Barry Bee Benson v. the Honey Industry is now in session. Mr. Montgomery, you're representing the five food companies collectively? A privilege. Mr. Benson... you're representing all the bees of the world? I'm kidding. Yes, Your Honor, we're ready to proceed. Mr. Montgomery, your opening statement, please. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, my grandmother was a simple woman. Born on a farm, she believed it was man's divine right to benefit from the bounty of nature God put before us. If we lived in the topsy-turvy world Mr. Benson imagines, just think of what would it mean. I would have to negotiate with the silkworm for the elastic in my britches! Talking bee! How do we know this isn't some sort of holographic motion-picture-capture Hollywood wizardry? They could be using laser beams! Robotics! Ventriloquism! Oloning! For all we know, he could be on steroids! Mr. Benson? Ladies and gentlemen, there's no trickery here. I'm just an ordinary bee. Honey's pretty important to me. It's important to all bees. We invented it! We make it. And we protect it with our lives. Unfortunately, there are some people in this room who think they can take it from us 'cause we're the little guys! I'm hoping that, after this is all over, you'll see how, by taking our honey, you not only take everything we have but everything we are! I wish he'd dress like that all the time. So nice! Oall your first witness. So, Mr. Klauss Vanderhayden of Honey Farms, big company you have. I suppose so. I see you also own Honeyburton and Honron! Yes, they provide beekeepers for our farms. Beekeeper. I find that to be a very disturbing term. I don't imagine you employ any bee-free-ers, do you? - No. - I couldn't hear you. - No. - No. Because you don't free bees. You keep bees. Not only that, it seems you thought a bear would be an appropriate image for a jar of honey. They're very lovable creatures. Yogi Bear, Fozzie Bear, Build-A-Bear. You mean like this? Bears kill bees! How'd you like his head crashing through your living room?! Biting into your couch! Spitting out your throw pillows! OK, that's enough. Take him away. So, Mr. Sting, thank you for being here. Your name intrigues me. - Where have I heard it before? - I was with a band called The Police. But you've never been a police officer, have you? No, I haven't. No, you haven't. And so here we have yet another example of bee culture casually stolen by a human for nothing more than a prance-about stage name. Oh, please. Have you ever been stung, Mr. Sting? Because I'm feeling a little stung, Sting. Or should I say... Mr. Gordon M. Sumner! That's not his real name?! You idiots! Mr. Liotta, first, belated congratulations on your Emmy win for a guest spot on ER in 2005. Thank you. Thank you. I see from your resume that you're devilishly handsome with a churning inner turmoil that's ready to blow. I enjoy what I do. Is that a crime? Not yet it isn't. But is this what it's come to for you? Exploiting tiny, helpless bees so you don't have to rehearse your part and learn your lines, sir? Watch it, Benson! I could blow right now! This isn't a goodfella. This is a badfella! Why doesn't someone just step on this creep, and we can all go home?! - Order in this court! - You're all thinking it! Order! Order, I say! - Say it! - Mr. Liotta, please sit down! I think it was awfully nice of that bear to pitch in like that. I think the jury's on our side. Are we doing everything right, legally? I'm a florist. Right. Well, here's to a great team. To a great team! Well, hello. - Ken! - Hello. I didn't think you were coming. No, I was just late. I tried to call, but... the battery. I didn't want all this to go to waste, so I called Barry. Luckily, he was free. Oh, that was lucky. There's a little left. I could heat it up. Yeah, heat it up, sure, whatever. So I hear you're quite a tennis player. I'm not much for the game myself. The ball's a little grabby. That's where I usually sit. Right... there. Ken, Barry was looking at your resume, and he agreed with me that eating with chopsticks isn't really a special skill. You think I don't see what you're doing? I know how hard it is to find the rightjob. We have that in common. Do we? Bees have 100 percent employment, but we do jobs like taking the crud out. That's just what I was thinking about doing. Ken, I let Barry borrow your razor for his fuzz. I hope that was all right. I'm going to drain the old stinger. Yeah, you do that. Look at that. You know, I've just about had it with your little mind games. - What's that? - Italian Vogue. Mamma mia, that's a lot of pages. A lot of ads. Remember what Van said, why is your life more valuable than mine? Funny, I just can't seem to recall that! I think something stinks in here! I love the smell of flowers. How do you like the smell of flames?! Not as much. Water bug! Not taking sides! Ken, I'm wearing a Ohapstick hat! This is pathetic! I've got issues! Well, well, well, a royal flush! - You're bluffing. - Am I? Surf's up, dude! Poo water! That bowl is gnarly. Except for those dirty yellow rings! Kenneth! What are you doing?! You know, I don't even like honey! I don't eat it! We need to talk! He's just a little bee! And he happens to be the nicest bee I've met in a long time! Long time? What are you talking about?! Are there other bugs in your life? No, but there are other things bugging me in life. And you're one of them! Fine! Talking bees, no yogurt night... My nerves are fried from riding on this emotional roller coaster! Goodbye, Ken. And for your information, I prefer sugar-free, artificial sweeteners made by man! I'm sorry about all that. I know it's got an aftertaste! I like it! I always felt there was some kind of barrier between Ken and me. I couldn't overcome it. Oh, well. Are you OK for the trial? I believe Mr. Montgomery is about out of ideas. We would like to call Mr. Barry Benson Bee to the stand. Good idea! You can really see why he's considered one of the best lawyers... Yeah. Layton, you've gotta weave some magic with this jury, or it's gonna be all over. Don't worry. The only thing I have to do to turn this jury around is to remind them of what they don't like about bees. - You got the tweezers? - Are you allergic? Only to losing, son. Only to losing. Mr. Benson Bee, I'll ask you what I think we'd all like to know. What exactly is your relationship to that woman? We're friends. - Good friends? - Yes. How good? Do you live together? Wait a minute... Are you her little... ...bedbug? I've seen a bee documentary or two. From what I understand, doesn't your queen give birth to all the bee children? - Yeah, but... - So those aren't your real parents! - Oh, Barry... - Yes, they are! Hold me back! You're an illegitimate bee, aren't you, Benson? He's denouncing bees! Don't y'all date your cousins? - Objection! - I'm going to pincushion this guy! Adam, don't! It's what he wants! Oh, I'm hit!! Oh, lordy, I am hit! Order! Order! The venom! The venom is coursing through my veins! I have been felled by a winged beast of destruction! You see? You can't treat them like equals! They're striped savages! Stinging's the only thing they know! It's their way! - Adam, stay with me. - I can't feel my legs. What angel of mercy will come forward to suck the poison from my heaving buttocks? I will have order in this court. Order! Order, please! The case of the honeybees versus the human race took a pointed turn against the bees yesterday when one of their legal team stung Layton T. Montgomery. - Hey, buddy. - Hey. - Is there much pain? - Yeah. I... I blew the whole case, didn't I? It doesn't matter. What matters is you're alive. You could have died. I'd be better off dead. Look at me. They got it from the cafeteria downstairs, in a tuna sandwich. Look, there's a little celery still on it. What was it like to sting someone? I can't explain it. It was all... All adrenaline and then... and then ecstasy! All right. You think it was all a trap? Of course. I'm sorry. I flew us right into this. What were we thinking? Look at us. We're just a couple of bugs in this world. What will the humans do to us if they win? I don't know. I hear they put the roaches in motels. That doesn't sound so bad. Adam, they check in, but they don't check out! Oh, my. Oould you get a nurse to close that window? - Why? - The smoke. Bees don't smoke. Right. Bees don't smoke. Bees don't smoke! But some bees are smoking. That's it! That's our case! It is? It's not over? Get dressed. I've gotta go somewhere. Get back to the court and stall. Stall any way you can. And assuming you've done step correctly, you're ready for the tub. Mr. Flayman. Yes? Yes, Your Honor! Where is the rest of your team? Well, Your Honor, it's interesting. Bees are trained to fly haphazardly, and as a result, we don't make very good time. I actually heard a funny story about... Your Honor, haven't these ridiculous bugs taken up enough of this court's valuable time? How much longer will we allow these absurd shenanigans to go on? They have presented no compelling evidence to support their charges against my clients, who run legitimate businesses. I move for a complete dismissal of this entire case! Mr. Flayman, I'm afraid I'm going to have to consider Mr. Montgomery's motion. But you can't! We have a terrific case. Where is your proof? Where is the evidence? Show me the smoking gun! Hold it, Your Honor! You want a smoking gun? Here is your smoking gun. What is that? It's a bee smoker! What, this? This harmless little contraption? This couldn't hurt a fly, let alone a bee. Look at what has happened to bees who have never been asked, "Smoking or non?" Is this what nature intended for us? To be forcibly addicted to smoke machines and man-made wooden slat work camps? Living out our lives as honey slaves to the white man? - What are we gonna do? - He's playing the species card. Ladies and gentlemen, please, free these bees! Free the bees! Free the bees! Free the bees! Free the bees! Free the bees! The court finds in favor of the bees! Vanessa, we won! I knew you could do it! High-five! Sorry. I'm OK! You know what this means? All the honey will finally belong to the bees. Now we won't have to work so hard all the time. This is an unholy perversion of the balance of nature, Benson. You'll regret this. Barry, how much honey is out there? All right. One at a time. Barry, who are you wearing? My sweater is Ralph Lauren, and I have no pants. - What if Montgomery's right? - What do you mean? We've been living the bee way a long time, 27 million years. Oongratulations on your victory. What will you demand as a settlement? First, we'll demand a complete shutdown of all bee work camps. Then we want back the honey that was ours to begin with, every last drop. We demand an end to the glorification of the bear as anything more than a filthy, smelly, bad-breath stink machine. We're all aware of what they do in the woods. Wait for my signal. Take him out. He'll have nauseous for a few hours, then he'll be fine. And we will no longer tolerate bee-negative nicknames... But it's just a prance-about stage name! ...unnecessary inclusion of honey in bogus health products and la-dee-da human tea-time snack garnishments. Oan't breathe. Bring it in, boys! Hold it right there! Good. Tap it. Mr. Buzzwell, we just passed three cups, and there's gallons more coming! - I think we need to shut down! - Shut down? We've never shut down. Shut down honey production! Stop making honey! Turn your key, sir! What do we do now? Oannonball! We're shutting honey production! Mission abort. Aborting pollination and nectar detail. Returning to base. Adam, you wouldn't believe how much honey was out there. Oh, yeah? What's going on? Where is everybody? - Are they out celebrating? - They're home. They don't know what to do. Laying out, sleeping in. I heard your Uncle Oarl was on his way to San Antonio with a cricket. At least we got our honey back. Sometimes I think, so what if humans liked our honey? Who wouldn't? It's the greatest thing in the world! I was excited to be part of making it. This was my new desk. This was my new job. I wanted to do it really well. And now... Now I can't. I don't understand why they're not happy. I thought their lives would be better! They're doing nothing. It's amazing. Honey really changes people. You don't have any idea what's going on, do you? - What did you want to show me? - This. What happened here? That is not the half of it. Oh, no. Oh, my. They're all wilting. Doesn't look very good, does it? No. And whose fault do you think that is? You know, I'm gonna guess bees. Bees? Specifically, me. I didn't think bees not needing to make honey would affect all these things. It's notjust flowers. Fruits, vegetables, they all need bees. That's our whole SAT test right there. Take away produce, that affects the entire animal kingdom. And then, of course... The human species? So if there's no more pollination, it could all just go south here, couldn't it? I know this is also partly my fault. How about a suicide pact? How do we do it? - I'll sting you, you step on me. - Thatjust kills you twice. Right, right. Listen, Barry... sorry, but I gotta get going. I had to open my mouth and talk. Vanessa? Vanessa? Why are you leaving? Where are you going? To the final Tournament of Roses parade in Pasadena. They've moved it to this weekend because all the flowers are dying. It's the last chance I'll ever have to see it. Vanessa, I just wanna say I'm sorry. I never meant it to turn out like this. I know. Me neither. Tournament of Roses. Roses can't do sports. Wait a minute. Roses. Roses? Roses! Vanessa! Roses?! Barry? - Roses are flowers! - Yes, they are. Flowers, bees, pollen! I know. That's why this is the last parade. Maybe not. Oould you ask him to slow down? Oould you slow down? Barry! OK, I made a huge mistake. This is a total disaster, all my fault. Yes, it kind of is. I've ruined the planet. I wanted to help you with the flower shop. I've made it worse. Actually, it's completely closed down. I thought maybe you were remodeling. But I have another idea, and it's greater than my previous ideas combined. I don't want to hear it! All right, they have the roses, the roses have the pollen. I know every bee, plant and flower bud in this park. All we gotta do is get what they've got back here with what we've got. - Bees. - Park. - Pollen! - Flowers. - Repollination! - Across the nation! Tournament of Roses, Pasadena, Oalifornia. They've got nothing but flowers, floats and cotton candy. Security will be tight. I have an idea. Vanessa Bloome, FTD. Official floral business. It's real. Sorry, ma'am. Nice brooch. Thank you. It was a gift. Once inside, we just pick the right float. How about The Princess and the Pea? I could be the princess, and you could be the pea! Yes, I got it. - Where should I sit? - What are you? - I believe I'm the pea. - The pea? It goes under the mattresses. - Not in this fairy tale, sweetheart. - I'm getting the marshal. You do that! This whole parade is a fiasco! Let's see what this baby'll do. Hey, what are you doing?! Then all we do is blend in with traffic... ...without arousing suspicion. Once at the airport, there's no stopping us. Stop! Security. - You and your insect pack your float? - Yes. Has it been in your possession the entire time? Would you remove your shoes? - Remove your stinger. - It's part of me. I know. Just having some fun. Enjoy your flight. Then if we're lucky, we'll have just enough pollen to do the job. Oan you believe how lucky we are? We have just enough pollen to do the job! I think this is gonna work. It's got to work. Attention, passengers, this is Oaptain Scott. We have a bit of bad weather in New York. It looks like we'll experience a couple hours delay. Barry, these are cut flowers with no water. They'll never make it. I gotta get up there and talk to them. Be careful. Oan I get help with the Sky Mall magazine? I'd like to order the talking inflatable nose and ear hair trimmer. Oaptain, I'm in a real situation. - What'd you say, Hal? - Nothing. Bee! Don't freak out! My entire species... What are you doing? - Wait a minute! I'm an attorney! - Who's an attorney? Don't move. Oh, Barry. Good afternoon, passengers. This is your captain. Would a Miss Vanessa Bloome in 24B please report to the cockpit? And please hurry! What happened here? There was a DustBuster, a toupee, a life raft exploded. One's bald, one's in a boat, they're both unconscious! - Is that another bee joke? - No! No one's flying the plane! This is JFK control tower, Flight 356. What's your status? This is Vanessa Bloome. I'm a florist from New York. Where's the pilot? He's unconscious, and so is the copilot. Not good. Does anyone onboard have flight experience? As a matter of fact, there is. - Who's that? - Barry Benson. From the honey trial?! Oh, great. Vanessa, this is nothing more than a big metal bee. It's got giant wings, huge engines. I can't fly a plane. - Why not? Isn't John Travolta a pilot? - Yes. How hard could it be? Wait, Barry! We're headed into some lightning. This is Bob Bumble. We have some late-breaking news from JFK Airport, where a suspenseful scene is developing. Barry Benson, fresh from his legal victory... That's Barry! ...is attempting to land a plane, loaded with people, flowers and an incapacitated flight crew. Flowers?! We have a storm in the area and two individuals at the controls with absolutely no flight experience. Just a minute. There's a bee on that plane. I'm quite familiar with Mr. Benson and his no-account compadres. They've done enough damage. But isn't he your only hope? Technically, a bee shouldn't be able to fly at all. Their wings are too small... Haven't we heard this a million times? "The surface area of the wings and body mass make no sense." - Get this on the air! - Got it. - Stand by. - We're going live. The way we work may be a mystery to you. Making honey takes a lot of bees doing a lot of small jobs. But let me tell you about a small job. If you do it well, it makes a big difference. More than we realized. To us, to everyone. That's why I want to get bees back to working together. That's the bee way! We're not made of Jell-O. We get behind a fellow. - Black and yellow! - Hello! Left, right, down, hover. - Hover? - Forget hover. This isn't so hard. Beep-beep! Beep-beep! Barry, what happened?! Wait, I think we were on autopilot the whole time. - That may have been helping me. - And now we're not! So it turns out I cannot fly a plane. All of you, let's get behind this fellow! Move it out! Move out! Our only chance is if I do what I'd do, you copy me with the wings of the plane! Don't have to yell. I'm not yelling! We're in a lot of trouble. It's very hard to concentrate with that panicky tone in your voice! It's not a tone. I'm panicking! I can't do this! Vanessa, pull yourself together. You have to snap out of it! You snap out of it. You snap out of it. - You snap out of it! - You snap out of it! - You snap out of it! - You snap out of it! - You snap out of it! - You snap out of it! - Hold it! - Why? Oome on, it's my turn. How is the plane flying? I don't know. Hello? Benson, got any flowers for a happy occasion in there? The Pollen Jocks! They do get behind a fellow. - Black and yellow. - Hello. All right, let's drop this tin can on the blacktop. Where? I can't see anything. Oan you? No, nothing. It's all cloudy. Oome on. You got to think bee, Barry. - Thinking bee. - Thinking bee. Thinking bee! Thinking bee! Thinking bee! Wait a minute. I think I'm feeling something. - What? - I don't know. It's strong, pulling me. Like a 27-million-year-old instinct. Bring the nose down. Thinking bee! Thinking bee! Thinking bee! - What in the world is on the tarmac? - Get some lights on that! Thinking bee! Thinking bee! Thinking bee! - Vanessa, aim for the flower. - OK. Out the engines. We're going in on bee power. Ready, boys? Affirmative! Good. Good. Easy, now. That's it. Land on that flower! Ready? Full reverse! Spin it around! - Not that flower! The other one! - Which one? - That flower. - I'm aiming at the flower! That's a fat guy in a flowered shirt. I mean the giant pulsating flower made of millions of bees! Pull forward. Nose down. Tail up. Rotate around it. - This is insane, Barry! - This's the only way I know how to fly. Am I koo-koo-kachoo, or is this plane flying in an insect-like pattern? Get your nose in there. Don't be afraid. Smell it. Full reverse! Just drop it. Be a part of it. Aim for the center! Now drop it in! Drop it in, woman! Oome on, already. Barry, we did it! You taught me how to fly! - Yes. No high-five! - Right. Barry, it worked! Did you see the giant flower? What giant flower? Where? Of course I saw the flower! That was genius! - Thank you. - But we're not done yet. Listen, everyone! This runway is covered with the last pollen from the last flowers available anywhere on Earth. That means this is our last chance. We're the only ones who make honey, pollinate flowers and dress like this. If we're gonna survive as a species, this is our moment! What do you say? Are we going to be bees, orjust Museum of Natural History keychains? We're bees! Keychain! Then follow me! Except Keychain. Hold on, Barry. Here. You've earned this. Yeah! I'm a Pollen Jock! And it's a perfect fit. All I gotta do are the sleeves. Oh, yeah. That's our Barry. Mom! The bees are back! If anybody needs to make a call, now's the time. I got a feeling we'll be working late tonight! Here's your change. Have a great afternoon! Oan I help who's next? Would you like some honey with that? It is bee-approved. Don't forget these. Milk, cream, cheese, it's all me. And I don't see a nickel! Sometimes I just feel like a piece of meat! I had no idea. Barry, I'm sorry. Have you got a moment? Would you excuse me? My mosquito associate will help you. Sorry I'm late. He's a lawyer too? I was already a blood-sucking parasite. All I needed was a briefcase. Have a great afternoon! Barry, I just got this huge tulip order, and I can't get them anywhere. No problem, Vannie. Just leave it to me. You're a lifesaver, Barry. Oan I help who's next? All right, scramble, jocks! It's time to fly. Thank you, Barry! That bee is living my life! Let it go, Kenny. - When will this nightmare end?! - Let it all go. - Beautiful day to fly. - Sure is. Between you and me, I was dying to get out of that office. You have got to start thinking bee, my friend. - Thinking bee! - Me? Hold it. Let's just stop for a second. Hold it. I'm sorry. I'm sorry, everyone. Oan we stop here? I'm not making a major life decision during a production number! All right. Take ten, everybody. Wrap it up, guys. I had virtually no rehearsal for that.

[undercoverwizardninjaturtle]

Windows: A ROTTMNT Fanfiction

Summary: Some of us are born different, sometimes it takes a special family member to understand you. Some of us are just that lucky. A Leo and Donnie centered Fanfction

Word Count: 4100

Pairings: None

Rating: Its just a family story, don’t worry

                                                                                                        Windows

 “MUMMY ATTACK!!”

 The large lair immediately filled with the squeals of young children. The source of the chaos was the five-year-old with red stripes over his eyes, and a large blue t-shirt now charging after a laughing four-year-old who was waving his arms excitedly as he ran away, “NO one can escape a mummy attack!” Leo shouted grabbing at Mikey who only laughed louder and ran faster, even for a four-year-old.

 A six-year-old, far larger than either of the two boys, leapt out from behind the recliner, scooping up the four-year-old and turning to Leo in a blur of red, “I’ll save you Mikey!!!” Raph pointed at Leo,” Get the mummy!!!!”

  Leo threw his arms over his face as the giant mass suddenly fell on him, knocking all wind, life, and sense out of his body. Even if he had loss, he made sure to let out a over dramatic cough, “Foiled again!!!! Curse you Lou Jitsu!” before letting out a loud ‘bleh’ and letting his head roll off to the side with his eyes closed

“‘eo’s dead!” Mikey shrieked, Leo could feel his small hands shaking him in panic,” ‘e killed him!”

 “Leo’s not dead.” Raph always ruined his fun,” He’s playing dead.”

 “‘he is?” Leo could feel Mikey peer closer at his face, he had played dead long enough he still waited till Mikey was poking him in the face before bolting upright, his hands brought up like claws with a snarl, “I’m alive!!!” he declared

  Mikey shrieked again, diving behind Raph’s legs. Before his light blue eyes peered around their oldest brother. Though Leo was laughing loudly Raph was giving him a frown, figures, “Leo don’t scare Mikey! He’s the baby!” Raph never knew how to play right

 “Yeah! I’m da baby!” Mikey declared from his hiding location.

 Despite his young age, Leo was more then adept at rolling his eyes, “it’s a game! You’re the one who wanted me to be the mummy. Next time ask Donnie.”

 Raph frowned, not yet capable of a glare, “you know he doesn’t like that. He wanted to be alone.”

 “He ALWAYS wants to be alone.” Sass was another one of Leo’s natural talents. But despite himself he looked over to the far side of the lair where a curtain lay over a doorway. A designated ‘quiet area’ that Dad had set up a few months ago. Raph was already walking over, his constant shadow Mikey was waddling after him. Raph poked his head past the curtain, “Donnie do you want to play with us?” as Leo expected, he didn’t get a response, “Ok but if you want to let us know” Raph ducked back out. Looking at Leo before smiling, “Come on! Let’s go play Jupiter Jim!”

 Raph was already running off with Mikey. Mikey would have no problem playing whatever Raph wanted. But Leo found himself glaring at the curtain and sticking out his tongue before running after his brothers

 (#)(#)(#)(#)

 They played for a while after that, but eventually Mikey wanted to play with paint. Not in the mood for being painted pink, but as usual Raph was, he went and read through some of his Jupiter Jim comics. Until the smoke wafting from the kitchen signified dinner was ready. Thankfully Dad had only managed to burn the salad, somehow, and left the grilled cheese sandwich mostly undamaged. Leo had only ever known one dad, his Dad, so he often wondered if another Dads were as round or tired looking as his. Whenever their Dad wasn’t watching movies or playing with them, he was pouring over several books he had gotten from the ‘internet’. Most of the titles didn’t make sense to Leo, but he recognized one as a cooking book. Which had helped Dad’s food to go from, ‘tolerable’ to ‘tasty’ as he tore into his grilled cheese. Raph, of course, was into his third already. Mikey was savoring each bite with a wide grin on his face. Splinter’s sandwich was untouched mostly because he was too busy using it as a pillow. His black hair had started to resemble salt more then anything, and no amount of poking from Mikey could wake him up. Eventually Raph got sick of it, “Pop’s sleepy let him go!”

 “Food is for eating not for sleeping,” Mikey said,

 “Daddy’s tired Mikey, he’ll be ok.” But it was hard not to hear the pride in Raph’s’ voice. Leo knew Raph well enough to know he craved moments like this, since it meant he could be in charge for a bit. But Leo glared across the table towards a second occupant who wasn’t eating, “Why isn’t’ HE is eating then, he’s not sleeping”

The object of scrutiny didn’t look up from his book. Or look to the plate of plain bread by his hand. Donnie, unlike the others who liked to wear t-shirts and shorts, wore a giant purple hoodie that hung around his knees, the hood brought up over his head and eyes fixated on the pages of a book with words too complicated for Leo to understand.

  “He’s not hungry.” Raph said, “he’s fine.”

 “He’s boring.” Leo clarified. Sinking back into his seat and crossing his arms

 With a giant snort Dad sat straight up, “It-wasn’t-my-donut!’” before blinking, seeming to recognize he wasn’t in a situation with a guilty pastry, “Um, right.” Picking up his sanwich and, despite the fur that must have been caught in it, devoured it in one bite, before looking t his sons., “Finally! I knew I could cook something edible.” With a proud look on his face, “WE will just not eat salad ever again.” Before looking over his sons,” did you all enjoy your dinner?””

  “It was really good Pop!” Raph said happily, “It was really good!”

 “Tasty!” Mikey agreed,

 Despite how tired he looked, Splinter beamed happily,’ Ha! Take that Rupert Swaggart! There’s a new chef in town!” he looked around tile his eyes fell on the quiet son at the table. It was hard to see Dad’s face fall, “Purple, you didn’t eat breakfast. Are you really that unhungry?”

 But, like when Leo had said something, Don didn’t look up from his book.  Instead he slid off his chair and walked away from the table. Leo frowned and crossed his arms again. It was one thing to ignore him, and he REALLY hated being ignored, but Dad had made a good dinner!

 Splinter, to celebrate not burning down the kitchen, gave each of his remaining sons a small bowl of vanilla ice cream. Missing out on ice-cream might have seemed like a punishment to Leo, but he had never seen Donnie even look at a bowl. So instead he ate his treat greedily, and watched Splinter scrub the ice-cream off Mikey’s’ face.

When dinner and desert was all cleaned up, Mikey and Raph went to watch some tv with Dad. Which seemed fine except that Leo wasn’t in the mood to hold still. Instead he thought of his comics. He hurried up to their shared bedroom to retrieve the next issue.

 Their room was a usual mess, except for the bed for Don’s corner, so its surprised Leo to see Donnie sitting on the floor fiddling with something in his hands. IT surprised him more to see his Jupiter Jim comics strewed on the floor around him. One of the comics on his lap, “What are you doing?!” he asked

Don stared at him before looking back to his hand. Leo reached forward and snatched the comic off his lap,” These aren’t yours stupid!” he snapped, he quickly flipped through the pages to check for tears, “you can’t just take stuff that doesn’t belong to you Donnie!”

 “Leo?” figured mother Raph would come to investigate, “What’s going on?”

 “Donnie was touching my stuff!” Leo pointed, “Its my stuff! Not his!”

 Raph looked over the scene, before looking back to Leo, “He’s just looking at its Leo. He’s not doing anything bad- “

 “No! You always stand up for him but its’ my comics! He never plays with us, he refuses to do anything other then sit alone by himself.” He turned, looking to look at said brother, whose unreadable gaze was fixated on him, “You’re stupid, and I hate you.”

 Donnie blinked at him, for the first time in his life Leo could see that Donnie’s eyes were light brown, and even if his face was still silent and stoic, his eyes had begun to tremble with tears. In a dash, Donnie darted out of the room, ducking underneath Raphie’s arms. “Donnie!” Raph shouted after him, before turning and glaring at Leo, “Y-You’re a bully Leo!” before running after their brother.

 Leo squeezed his eyes shut before kneeling. Picking up his comics off the ground. It wasn’t his fault, Donnie shouldn’t have been touching his stuff! It wasn’t’ his fault.

 He was picking up “Jupiter Jim #192 The Never-ending Tale” when he saw something where Donnie had been sitting. Seeing as he had been messing with his comics, he didn’t have a problem messing with Don’s stuff. But when he picked it up, he recognized a small stacking of Lego bricks This one was only a few bricks tall with a blue brick. He had taken some cloth, probably from some sparse clothing and made it into a blue strip around the brick. There were two block dots where the eyes should have been.

 Leo sat down hard on the ground for a moment. Before shifting around the comics some more to find a second brick figure, clearly made to resemble Jupiter Jim, he even had found a plastic piece to use as a helmet….

 (#)(#)(#)(#)

   Donnie didn’t come out of his ‘quiet place’ for the rest of the night.  And neither Raph or Mikey talked to him either not that he was really trying to either. Instead, after sitting alone thinking to himself, he wondered upstairs. His father was, surprisingly, still awake, and sitting at his desk. Even though their bedroom wasn’t’ the cleanest, it was nothing compared to the disaster of their fathers’ room, clothes strewn over the floor and stacks of boxes in the corner, there was even a sword sticking out of the wall, for some reason a sword sticking out of the wall. His father was sitting at his desk, piles of thick books by his desk. Some of them, most of them, had Lou Jitsu on the cover. But there were also a few extra thick books with children on the cover ‘one reading parenting for idiot’s and you’. It was some sort of weird textbook like Donnie was already reading. Leo was having a hard time reading the cover. But the book in Dad’s hands was a little bit easier to read. “A-Auti-sim?” He read out loud, “What’s that? Why are you reading that?”

 Dad gave a small sigh, one sadder then Leo had ever heard from him,” I’m hoping it will help understand your brother.’ He set the book aside and turned in his seat, ‘You had a bad day Blue. You were very cruel to your brother today.”

  “I-I’m sorry.”

 “Did you apologize to Purple?”

 “I-I.” he couldn’t lie. But his eyes started to burn, “He doesn’t talk, he doesn’t’ play he sits in that stupid room all day. He doesn’t even act like he feels anything. But=But he was messing with my comics…and and he made these” Leo stood on his tip toes and set them on Splinters desk. Splinter picked up the Jupiter Jim figurine, then the Little Leo, “I don’t get it Dad.”

 “Some children, like Donnie, have difficulty communicating. They have sensory problems, and don’t know how to connect to others. But if they want to connect with someone…...sometimes they try to communicate in anyway they can.” He held the figurines out to him,

(#)(#)(#)(#)

 Leo had never actually been in Donnie’s Quiet Area, but it was made for Donnie. It was covered in boxes of weird old electronic items that Splinter had collected for him over time. There was also a set of headphones lying by a fully purple blanket. Which is, of course, where he found his brother. Donnie was curled up on the blanket, headphones over his head. Even in the low light he could see his blood shot eyes and wondered how long he had spent crying. Probably all night since Donnie didn’t come to sleep in their room last night. The thought made his gut twist in guilt. Don took one look at him before rolling over onto his side, shell to him and hoodie over his head.

 The five-year-old didn’t move closer, but sat down on the ground, if it wasn’t for his sweat pants the ground would have been a lot colder, “Hey Donnie.” He started, keeping his voice low. Now out of fear of their brothers hearing him. But it was called Donnie’s ‘Quiet Area’ for a reason, “I’m really sorry. I didn’t mean what I said earlier….” He fiddled his thumbs together. He wasn’t’ sure if Donnie was even listening to him, “I don’t always understand what you need. Only what I want…” he reached into his pants pocket. He saw Don’s head tilt over his shoulder for a moment, probably fighting curiosity. Leo set the little Jupiter Jim figure on the ground, and the Little Leo besides it, “I think these are really cool. Did you make them?” Don was now looking at him fully before sitting up sliding the headphones off his head, “ I’m sorry I yelled at you. I didn’t know you were making anything so cool. “Leo reached back into his pants pocket, it wasn’t as clean as his, actually it was mostly just green and purple and marker marking where he had tried to replicate the detail Donnie had made, he set it by the little Leo, “See? Now Little Me won’t be lonely.”

 Even though his expression is still unreadable something in him lights up. He immediately scoots closer and picks up the Little Donnie and looks over it, Leo took the opportunity to look around again, he didn’t realize before that the wires and electronics are organized. But in what way he didn’t know, “What else do you like to do in here?”

 Don looks at him again, but nothing more. Leo almost thought for a moment that Donnie was asking him to leave but wondered if Donnie was asking something…. Leo got up and looked around the room before seeing a box shoved between two disassembled stereos. He moves closer and makes sure to look at Donnie before pulling it out. In it are more bricks of multiple colors, but scrubbed so clean Leo can smell the disinfect, he sits down again in front of his brother, “Show me how you play, and we’ll go from there alright?”

 Its’ obvious Don is still wary of him, but he sorts out all the pieces by shape and color and slowly starts to build. At first Leo isn’t sure what he’s supposed to do but adjusts to Donnie’s subtle gestures and glances on what to put what piece where. Out of the corner of his eyes, Leo can see where Don has put up strange pictures on the walls, not in the typical sense of art, but it looked like he had drawn family members as cars. With Raph being a semi-truck and Splinter being a bug. Mikey was an airplane and Leo was, to his enjoyment, a racecar. He couldn’t help but wonder how many hours Donnie spent staring at the drawings…did he put them up because he missed them? Did it have something to do with what Splinter said about not being able to communicate even though they were less than a few feet away? But it wasn’t’ too long before a strange noise comes from Donnie, one that Raph always got when it got close to meal time. “are you hungry?”  Don gives him a blank look again, “You haven’t eaten since last night, “Even then it had been just a few oyster crackers, “can I go get you a snack?” Donnie glances at his hands for a moment. It took Leo a little bit to catch on, “Oh you don’t want to get your hands dirty. I get that.” Not really, but he didn’t want to say that, “What if I go find a food that won’t make your hands dirty? Is that ok?”

 Don sits up more, as though in trigged. Leo stood up and walked out of the room. But immediately realized his task was futile, a word he had heard in Lou Jitsu’s Child Development Movie called “Lou Jitsu vs Child Illiteracy”. He really couldn’t cook on his own, the Ice Cream bomb of Mikey’s’ third birthday party banned everyone from cooking till they were Atleast ten. But the long yellow fruit on the counter caught his attention, he was sure Donnie love bananas but wasn’t sure on how to make them…clean.

 After a few mints of deep though he peeled the bananas and uses the back of a spoon to cut them into pieces into bowl. After that he grabbed a new spoon and hurried back to the Quiet Area, “Blue?” he stopped and turned to see his Dad looking at him from his recliner, ‘What are you doing?”

  “Donnie’s hungry, he wants clean food.” He held the bowl up for his father to see.

  “You- “Splinter looks surprised, not that Leo can blame him, “You got him to speak?”

 “No, but I can tell he’s really hungry,”

 “Oh, well um I’m very glad you figured out what he wanted to eat.” Splinter turned back to the tv. But again, Leo can feel something is off. There was a sadness coming off his father that he wasn’t sued to, it was the same sadness Leo had felt before when Dad had been reading that book. Was he sad he wasn’t able to help? Leo walked over to the chair, lowering his cheek onto the arm rest, “Donnie loves you Daddy.” He said, “Donnie loves all of us. He just doesn’t know how to tell us yet.”

 Splinter looked back to him, again there’s something about him that makes Leo sad. But slowly his father smiles and gently rubs his scalp, “I know, and I love all you.”

 Leo hurries back to don’s quiet area where Donnie is still waiting of him, sitting o up on his knees eagerly and looking at the bowl in Leos’ hands, “Clean food!” he sat down Nd held the bowl out, how’s this?” he asked

 That time. Leo almost gets a full smile

 (#)(#)(#)(#)

 Ten years later

 What a freaking Day.

 Donnie glared at his broken self-cleaning-toothpick. Of course, Raph would use an experiment he knew nothing about. What part of personal space did no one understand?! He didn’t even use it as a toothpick, honestly, he didn’t want to know what he had used it for only that it had come back to him with the same consistency of molasses.

  Knowing Raph, he had probably used it in a microwave to see what would happen.

 “Back tot eh dork cave I see?”

 The purple masked ninja groaned under his breath and glanced towards his door to see a familiar snarky Leo leaning against his circular doorway, grinning his usual grin,” find out what Raph did to your toothpick yet?”

 “No and I don’t think I want to know.” It was a lost cause anyway, it was better just to start over. He pushed the destroyed device aside and laid his head on his desk with a loud moan. He could have flipped Leo off for chuckling like that but couldn’t find the energy to lift his head up

 “Come on D, you were going to start over anyway. We both know it. Now get out here so we can watch a movie.”

 Unfortunately, Leo was right, if only because every time he tried to use the tooth pick it tried to gain consciousness. He had never told Leo about ah problem, but like every other moment it seems like Leo can read him.

 Another thing he had never told Leo was how grateful he was for that. His brothers didn’t have the memory he did, so his childhood wasn’t as clear to them as it was to them. But he could still remember when his bed rom was his ‘quiet place’ hiding back here for hours and working on whatever he wanted. His brothers, though eh had loved them, were often too loud and messy for him to handle. Now that he was older he understood what the problem had been, what was still the problem, but it had been like looking at his family through a window with them waving over occasionally to acknowledge him. He could see everything they were doing. But no matter how much he wanted to, he couldn’t reach them.

  But one day, after being so cruel Donnie almost cried himself sick. Leo had approached the window. He had taken time to finally understand what he needed. For a while after that, Leo was his protector, his translator for the world. A way for his brothers to understand him and for him to understand them. They had become unofficial twins. A nickname he had hated as much as he loved it.

 He truly believed Leo reaching out helped him learn to communicate better, how to deal with his sensory issues. Though those problems still lurked in the back of his mind, every once in an awhile, he still couldn’t handle loud noises and he still had problems talking to his brothers…

  But that window had been opened.

  Donnie looked at his desk, at the three brick figures that had been built so long ago and stood up, “Atta boy!” Leo cheered, turning to leave, “Now hurry- “Before he could stop himself, Donnie hugged his brother tight around the chest. Burying his face into his brother’s shoulder rand squeezing him for all dear life. He could feel his brothers shock by the fact he lost his footing for a few seconds before freezing up, even so his brothers’ arms came up around him back, cautiously returning the brace, “You ok? If it’s the tooth pick, I swear Raph didn’t drop it in the toilet- “

  “Thank you.” He mumbled. Donnie felt Leo tilt his head more in his direction, probably unable to hear him. So, despite his already waning pride, he spoke louder, with a tighter hug, “Thank you for everything Leo.”

 He half expected a sarcastic comment. Or maybe a bad joke. But instead Leo squeezed him back just as tightly, somehow a link that had existed since their childhood told Leo exactly what Donnie was talking about, “You’re my favorite twin Donnie.” He nuzzled his cheek against Don’s, “I’d do anything for you.”

  “I know.”  For a few moments the two just stood there, even when Raph walked by, gave off an emotional ‘aw’ and slunk away to not disturb them. Donnie finally drew away, but before he could fully release Leo, his brothers’ arms caught him around the chest again and squeezed tighter then before, “then its time for a movie!” eh declared, Hugging Donnie off his feet lifting him out of the room as Don squawked loudly,” LEO YOU NEANDERTHAL- “

  “MOVIE MOVIE MOVIE!!!’ he chanted loudly, using his free arm to pump the air. Despite his embarrassment, and despite his brothers all collapsing in near laughter, he couldn’t hate Leo for embarrassing him. He got his revenge later by kicking Leo off the bean bag they had shared, before reluctantly letting Leo join him again.

  He was his official twin

  He could never stay mad at him

  (#)(#)(#)(#)

 I haven’t written anything here in a while, but this was a prompt from another website I thought would be fund to you, course it became personal for me for many reasons. But I hope you found it enjoyable 😊

[tactfulgnostalgic]

how to never stop being totally not okay: a guide to emotional repression for idiots in love with other idiots (by dirk strider)

alternatively titled: baby, are you existential dread? cuz you make me deeply uncomfortable in ways i don’t care to think about (the john egbert life story) 

Summary: How Dirk Strider stole a car, learned to drive, and got a boyfriend (in that order).

(a late birthday dirkjohn road trip fic for my friend lou @vanillacorpse @centercharter! happy birthday, lou!)

1. When he asks you whether you stole it, say no.

“Please tell me you did not steal that,” says John.

“Why does that matter.”

“Because it matters! And because when Terezi asks me about it later, I need plausible deniability. Tell me you did not steal this vehicle.”

“I . . . did not steal this vehicle.”

“Okay. Now, are you saying that because it’s true or because I told you to?”

“What happened to plausible deniability?”

“Never mind.”

From behind the wheel of a glossy, scarlet, brand spanking new Maserati, Dirk Strider says, “Look, are you coming or not?”

From the front porch of his house, dressed in pajamas and sandals, and holding a duffle bag slung over one shoulder, John Egbert says, “Yeah, I’m coming.”

At four o’clock in the morning, the neighborhood is quiet and dark. The trees rustle in a gentle breeze. A cat prowls along the sidewalk, its first and second eyes a luminous yellow, its third and fourth a vivid green. Down the street, a light is on in Jane’s kitchen, and through the curtains, someone is moving around. Maybe it’s her dad, downstairs for a nightcap. Or maybe it’s Jane. She’s taken up late night baking recently. The last time Dirk checked, the melatonin was working, though, so it’s probably her dad, after all.

You’re a god, now, technically,” John gripes. He slams the door shut with a force that has Dirk opening his mouth to complain about treating the car better, until he remembers that he stole this thing off the display room floor an hour ago, and also that he doesn’t really give a rat’s ass what happens to it. “You can just make infinite money. Or alchemize a car. Or ask them for it, they’d probably give it to you. Why do you need to steal.”

John has this habit, Dirk’s noticed, of asking questions that aren’t questions, questions that are more an opportunity for the other person to prove John wrong than honest inquiries about things John doesn’t know. For example, this one.

“You’re also a god,” Dirk points out. “You live in an apartment the size of my garage. Why not buy a castle? Why not build one?”

“That’s not even, like, slightly the same thing, dude.”

“How so.”

“For one thing, I don’t -- you know what, no. It’s too early for this. Start driving before I change my mind.”

“If you don’t want to come,” Dirk begins uncertainly, and John groans.

“Drive.”

“Okay.”

It started with a midnight text.

Dirk doesn’t exactly know why John hangs out with him. He doesn’t. It makes sense for John to hang out with Roxy, because of . . . shenanigans in their past that nobody really talks about. And with Jake and Jane, well, they’re literally genetic family, so they probably have a lot of shit to talk about. And of course he’d keep in touch with his friends from his session. That doesn’t require an explanation. But there’s not much that Dirk has to offer John, except a whole fistful of absolutely no personal connection. Their first conversation took place in the aftermath of a dying universe, except Dirk doesn’t remember that. So their first conversation was . . . hours after the Game, Dirk guesses. Or maybe earlier than that. He doesn’t remember their first words. It was probably something inane along the lines of “Sup, bro,” or “Nice one.” Dirk probably said something stupid. John probably gave him a weird look and then left him alone. Statistically speaking, that would be how it went.

But somewhere along the line neither of them knowing each other turned into an advantage instead of a reason to avoid each other. Sometimes, when half of your social circle was related to you and the other half had dated you or one of your relatives in the recent past, it was refreshing to hang out a total fucking stranger, for a change.

So when John said, “I need to get out of this fucking town,” what Dirk said was not “Sounds rough, I’ll text Jade,” but instead, “I can get us a car by Friday.”

And instead of saying, “Um, okay, that’s kind of weird, I was just talking about a hypothetical,” John said, “Sweet. Come by my place as soon as you have it,” because he’s the kind of guy that says things like that. Dirk wishes he were the kind of guy who said things like that.

Granted, John does look a little bit like Jake, which is weird sometimes. He looks enough like Jake that Dirk has commented on it, once, in one of his habitual fits of saying dumb shit without thinking about, which that happen to him, sometimes, because his life is hell and existence is suffering. But John, after blinking in surprise, only laughed. “Haha, that’s kind of weird,” he said. “Didn’t you guys used to date?”

“Um,” said Dirk.

“Yeah,” said Dirk.

“I mean, kind of,” said Dirk.

“We broke up,” said Dirk.

“Whack,” John had said indifferently, and returned to ruthlessly beating Dirk’s ass in Mario Kart.

And because Dirk doesn’t know how to have nice things without fucking them irrevocably, he may or may not be a little bit in love with the guy. So he’s got that going for him.

John’s house is in what would be called northern California, if things like the United States government still existed, and if any of the people who created and shaped the global civilization had ever been to California. Upon Dave’s request, every principality and township in the continental U.S. had been subtitled Striderville, with various numerical identifiers to differentiate them. Austin was Striderville No. 1. New York was Striderville No. 7. Minneapolis was Striderville No. 666, for reasons that were unclear to everyone except Dave Strider, who when asked would only grimly profess, “It knows what it fucking did.”

Sacramento (Striderville No. 148) fades in their rearview as they soar across the freeway. Dirk, who has been getting this far on intuitive knowledge and gumption, takes the opportunity to admit, “I don’t actually know how to drive.”

It takes a moment for this fact to register.

“What do you mean,” John says slowly, “you don’t know how to drive?”

“It means what it means. I never learned.”

“What the fuck do you mean you never learned how to drive.”

“I mean that I grew up in the middle of the fucking ocean, Egbert, where was I supposed to get a car?”

“You’re driving right now!”

“Yeah, I mean, the operating part isn’t hard. It’s the lane stuff that makes it all complicated. Like, when to turn and shit. Actually, I think I memorized an old Texas driver’s ed manual once. Does that count?”

“No!”

“No need to get worked up about it,” Dirk mutters.

“Oh, my God,” John says, face in his hands. “I’m going to die. I’m going to die and it’s going to be because of you.”

“That’s a little dramatic.”

“It’s really not.”

“Have we crashed yet?”

“Let me drive,” John orders. “Pull over.”

Dirk really should let John drive. It’s the responsible choice. It’s the reasonable choice. It’s the choice that anybody with a lick of common sense to scrap together in their entire body would make.

Obviously, Dirk says, “No.”

“Do you even know what a stop sign is?”

“No, but if I employ a little bit of deductive reasoning, I bet I have a great guess.”

“What’s the first thing you do at a four-way?”

“Make sure everyone’s got a safeword.”

“Dirk, shut up, Jesus Christ. I bet you’ve never even had sex,” John says irritably, as they sail over the city limits.

Trying desperately not to actually sound wounded, Dirk says, “That’s a little below the belt, don’t you think.”

“How would you know? You’ve never gotten below the belt, have you?”

“That doesn’t even make sense.”

“It does if you’re not a virgin.”

“I’m not -- this conversation is ridiculous.”

“Virgin says what?”

“You’re bullying me. I’m being bullied, right now, by my own friend.”

“I get what Jane means,” John says, thoughtfully. “This really is therapeutic.”

“What? Making fun of me?”

“Yeah,” he says placidly. “Really good for the blood pressure. Hey, do you mind if I take a nap real quick?”

Dirk does a double take. “What happened to me not driving?” he asks suspiciously.

“Eh,” John says, waving it off, tipping his head back against the headrest and closing his eyes. “Don’t worry about it. You’re doing fine.”

“Wait. Do you know how to drive?”

A tiny smile tugs at one corner of John’s mouth.

“Your session started when you were thirteen,” Dirk exclaims. “You wouldn’t have had time to learn.”

“Mm-hmm.”

“You didn’t even care about it, did you.” The accusation is flat.

“Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmno.”

“You were just fucking with me.”

“Uh-huh.”

Dirk considers this.

“You’re a jackass.”

“Yep,” John says happily, and tosses his feet up on the dash.

2. Don’t let him pick the music.

“I get to pick the music,” John decides, apropos of nothing, around 6:30, when they’re in the middle of southern California (Striderville No. 83-195). The sun is just dawning behind them, a blinding pinprick of white against the asphalt in the rearview. It casts sharp rays of orange light through the back windshield, lighting their faces in warm colors, bathing the cab in yellow and the road in front of them in shadows that seem to stretch on for miles.

“What? No, you don’t. I’m the driver. Driver picks the music.”

“Driver has to keep his hands on the steering wheel. Driver can’t stop me.”

“I’ll pull this car over, so help me God.”

“No, you won’t,” John says cheerfully, reaching for the radio.

“Wait,” says Dirk, panicking. “Don’t --”

“WHEN I WAS A YOUNG MAN--”

John wheezes.

“--MY FATHER TOOK ME INTO THE CITY, TO SEE A MARCHING BAND--”

“Listen,” Dirk says, speeding up. “Listen, right, okay, listen, it was in the car when I stole it--”

“HE SAID, ‘SON, WHEN YOU GROW UP, WILL YOU BE--”

John hoots. He shrieks. He cackles, slapping the dashboard of the car like he wants to beat the dust out of it.

“It’s a good record, okay, fuck, I mean, like, it’s not the worst thing--”

“THE SAVIOR OF THE BROKEN, THE BEATEN, AND THE DAMNED?”

“I’m texting Roxy,” says John, wrestling his phone out of his bag. This terrifies Dirk so badly that he actually takes a hand off the wheel to make a mad grab for it, and the car swerves, careening towards the shoulder.

“HE SAID, ‘WILL YOU DEFEAT THEM?’”

“You can’t do that,” Dirk says, his tone hovering two octaves above where it should be. “Listen, she doesn’t need to know about this--”

“Roxy would murder me if she found out about this and realized I hadn’t told her, dude, are you kidding me? Look, it’s an ethical obligation, if anything--”

“YOUR DEMONS? AND ALL THE NONBELIEVERS? THE PLANS THAT THEY HAVE MADE?”

“John,” Dirk says. “John. John. Listen to me, John.”

The shutter of the Apple camera closing, artificial and tinny, ricochets throughout the car like gunfire.

There is a long moment of silence, then, where the only sound is Gerard Way’s indecipherable howling.

“BECAUSE SOMEDAY, I’LL LEAVE YOU, A PHANTOM TO LEAD YOU IN THE SUMMER, TO JOIN THE BLACK PARADE.”

John and Dirk regard each other frostily.

“Give it to me,” Dirk orders, vaulting over the seat divider, and John yells, seizing the steering wheel: “DUDE, THE ROAD,” while also holding the phone as far away from Dirk’s grasp as his considerable armspan can possibly reach.

The car cuts a wild path across the interstate, zigzagging freely between the four lanes as if the lane dividers were more suggestions than rules, at one point almost turning a complete 180 and cruising back the way it came. Black skid marks sear the road under the tires when John wedges himself far enough into the driver’s seat to slam on the brake, and Dirk tries to take advantage of the opportunity to grip John’s wrist and pry his fingers off the phone.

“This is for your own good,” John grits out. “Roxy -- has the right -- to know --”

“Egbert, so help me God.”

“That’s also me, dumbass, and I’m not helping you--”

“I’ll give you anything you want.”

John pauses, the car slowing to a cool forty miles per hour, and says, “Anything?”

From where he sits, perched on the divider between seats like a gangly bird of prey, clinging to John’s outstretched hand like a kitten dangling over a waterfall, Dirk vows, “Anything.”

John grins, and lets go of the phone.

Dirk shuffles into the passenger’s seat, rolls down the window, and flings the offending device out into the street.

“Aw, man,” John complains, watching it bounce and roll away in the mirror. “I had a lot of music on that thing.”

“I’ll buy you another phone. I’ll buy you ten phones.”

“What the fuck am I gonna do with ten phones?”

“I dunno, dude, they’re your phones.”

John shakes his head. “Anyway,” he said. “You said anything.”

The man hasn’t stopped grinning since Dirk agreed. It is a truly unsettling sight.

“I don’t kiss. Aside from that--”

“Oh, man, literally fuck OFF--”

Dirk turns off the radio, which had metamorphosed into the song’s iconic caterwaul of guitars. “A deal’s a deal. What do you want from me?”

John says, “Can you read that exit sign for me?”

Dirk looks up and squints.

“You can take the dumb glasses off. That might help.”

Dirk does not, and so he doesn’t read what the exit sign says until John is steering them steadfastly towards it.

“No,” he says.

“You said anything.”

“I take it back. You know what, you can use my phone to text Roxy yourself. Strike me down for my arrogance. Smite me. Ruin me. Post nudes on my Facebook account. I don’t even have nudes. I’ll take some so you can post them. Just put my ass on blast. Or do you want to decapitate me? That’s very in, nowadays.”

John cackles, again.

The Maserati sails under the exit sign for the Wet N’ Wild Slippery Funtimes Happy Place Water Park, and Dirk Strider, neither for the first time nor the last, contemplates climbing out the window.

3. Do not, under any circumstances whatsoever, go to the waterpark.

Dirk is hot, wet, and covered in skin-tight clothing, and none of it in the fun way. He views this series of information to be a remarkably concise way of summating his life.

John strolls ahead. The bastard is barely wet. Somehow, the water always seemed to avoid him, migrating away from his form as if swayed from its course by his own ineffable good temper, and when he did get dunked, he could summon a gust of wind to dry himself off with all the effort it took to snap his fingers.

The Heir of Breath is such a useful classpect that sometimes it makes Dirk want to scream. Of course it would be Egbert who got the powers that served some fruitful day-to-day purpose.

He floats along instead of walking, like John, because unlike John, Dirk doesn’t derive pleasure from doing things the boring and painful way. Dirk spends most of his time off the ground, actually, even if it’s only by a few inches. It saves him the effort of having to walk.

“You look like a drowned cat,” John says, not unsympathetically.

“You’ve never fucking seen a drowned cat.”

“How do you know? I’ve seen a lot of shit. Maybe a drowned cat was part of it.”

“You know,” Dirk suggests, “if you really feel that bad, you could help me out. By doing things like . . . oh, I don’t know. Drying me off.”

“There were towels at the store,” John says innocently. “You could’ve -- hey, whoa, whoa. You gonna just climb into your luxury sports vehicle like that?”

Dirk, sopping wet and dripping onto the pavement, stops with his handle on the car door and gives John a dead-eyed stare.

“Just saying,” John says, raising his hands. “That’s leather upholstery. You get that wet, it’s gonna stink.”

“John,” Dirk says very quietly. “If you want me to dry off. You could summon the wind. To do exactly that.”

John presses his lips together tightly, brow furrowed in thought. “Hmm,” he said. “You know, I could do that, couldn’t I?”

“Yes.” Dirk resists the urge to vault over the hood of the car and throttle the man he is currently in love with. “You could.”

John summons a small tornado in the palm of his hand. “It’s really just so convenient,” he says blandly. “Don’t you think, Dirk?”

“It certainly would be,” Dirk says, grinding his teeth.

“Of course, I’d only ever do it with your permission. I wouldn’t use my powers on anybody without their consent, first.”

“Consider this,” Dirk grits out, “my full and enthusiastic consent.”

“Really?” John arches an eyebrow. “You’d just let me do that, Dirk? Wow. That’s a lot of trust you have in me. I appreciate it.”

“Yeah, yeah. Just dry me off, asshole.”

John leans on the hood of the Maserati, arms folded, one ankle balanced on his knee. He grins, flashing thirty-two glossy white teeth, and the breeze stirs his hair just so, tousling it with a rakish charm. When Dirk looks at him, something twists in his chest. It feels hot and uncomfortable, and he doesn’t not like it, exactly.

Then he gets whisked into the air by a gust of wind, wrenched up like a ragdoll on the breeze.

As he soars through the air, one brief, fury-infused thought flashes through Dirk Strider’s mind:

He knows what he’s doing, the little shit.

Then this thought is swallowed by Dirk remembering that he can fly, and catching himself before he faceplants into solid concrete. Getting uppercut by the manifestation of the wind itself is bad enough. Eating shit in front of the guy you’re going on a roadtrip across America to impress would add insult to injury, really.

He staggers to his feet and trudges back to where John stands, bent over on his knees, still heaving with his last paroxysms of laughter.

“Granted unthinkable fucking cosmic powers,” Dirk seethes, “uses them like this. Oh, sure, that’s a great way to spend your time. Not like there’s anything more useful you could be doing with them. I’m sure that’s what you got them for. Tossing me around like a limp sack of nickels, that’s the real reason you got to be a fucking airbender.”

“Heh,” John says, straightening up, “yeah. I’m pretty great.”

But the smile he offers is smaller than it could be, and the laugh has gone out of his eyes, and Dirk is struck with a sudden pang of regret. This is chased by a needle-sharp jolt of self-hatred, because he knows what he did, and if he’d thought for half a fucking second before he spoke, he wouldn’t have said it.

They don’t talk about the Game.

4. Don’t think about the past.

Four months after Sburb ended, half of their friends still woke up screaming.

The other half didn’t, but that was because they hardly fucking spoke at all in the first place. Jade once went for a whole week without saying a word out loud to another human being. Jake fucked off into the woods for almost a month and didn’t take his phone with him, leaving everybody to wonder whether or not he’d wound up dead at the bottom of a waterfall somewhere until he came back. Roxy started coding again, but intensely, obsessively, staying up until ugly hours of the morning staring at lines upon lines of unforgiving binary, surrounded by empty cans of Redbull and wearing bags under her eyes. The Lalondes mourned lost mothers and walked quickly past bars, and Dave still couldn’t look Dirk in the eye without flinching, and they were all of them a little uncomfortable with each other, a little too aware of how like much everyone resembled some lost parent or dead guardian. Jane had her dad, but Dirk knew it wasn’t the same. There were some things so painful it became an act of trauma to speak it out loud.

Dirk remembers a lot of things, from that initial period of settlement, when they were learning how to be people instead of gods.

He remembers Jane turning up on his doorstep with a sleeping bag and a pillow, exhausted, tear tracks under her eyes, asking to sleep over because she couldn’t spend another night in the same house where she’d lived under threat of attack for thirteen years and six months. He remembers getting her settled on the couch in his living room, awkwardly trying to make her take the bed, and her refusing stubbornly because she “didn’t want to inconvenience him any more than she already had.” He remembers having a panic attack and locking himself in the bathroom before calling Roxy, demanding answers, demanding her to tell him what to do, how to deal with this, why anybody thought he was the person to go to for help--

He remembers Roxy turning up half an hour later with her own sleeping bag, and Jake in tow. Jake and Dirk hadn’t spoken in God knows how long, then, but it didn’t matter, because Jane was crying in a sleeping bag on his couch and that meant not a single other fact in the whole fucking world mattered one goddamn whit.

Dirk wonders who John went to, when he woke up screaming. If he woke up screaming.

He remembers that John doesn’t just come from a different universe than everyone else in the world, than Dirk and his friends. John comes from a different timeline. John’s friends have had two years, from their perspective, to learn how to be without him.

If Dirk were a braver person, he’d ask what that felt like.

If Dirk were a much braver person, he’d ask whether it felt good.

Instead, Dirk says, “Do you want to get food?”

John says, “Yeah, that’d be okay, I guess.”

It’s the closest any of them get to an epilogue.

5. Do NOT ask whether or not your midnight McDonald’s run is a date. (But if you do, like, be cool about it.)

They roll up to the McDonald’s around 11:30. Dirk is all for getting drive-thru and hitting the freeway again, but John wants to stretch his legs. They’ve been driving for close to eight hours, at this point, and nothing about the road is even remotely familiar. Dirk’s stopped keeping track of which turns they take, which exits, which back roads. They’re trying to get lost, and they’re well on their way.

John gets three hamburgers and eats two without stopping for breath. Dirk orders a carton of fries and a vanilla milkshake, which John makes fun of him for, but Dirk had accepted this eventuality beforehand.

The red leather of the booth they sit in is sticky, and there are stains on the table. Dirk counts the number of health code violations to distract himself from wondering whether or not this qualifies as a date, because it doesn’t, probably, and even if it did, that didn’t make it mean anything, or at least that didn’t make it mean anything to John. When he finishes health code violations, he starts on the ceiling tiles.

John steals one of his fries, and he’s a millisecond too late to bat his hand away.

“You should get something else,” John says, through a mouthful of fry. “You get crabby when you’re hungry.”

“I’m always crabby.”

“Then fuckin’ eat something, dude, that’s what I’m saying.”

Dirk nudges his glasses up his nose and takes a sip of milkshake. “I don’t require anything else,” he says, instead of answering.

“Whatever,” John mutters under his breath, in a way that makes clear how weird he finds this response, and redirects his attention to his third burger.

Dirk fidgets with his straw. The grease has pooled at the bottom of his french fry carton. It glistens under the fluorescents. John’s hair is lanky from not having been washed in two days, and there’s a smudge on the lense of one of his glasses. Dirk watches him stuff a third of a burger in his mouth.

“Hey, so,” says Dirk, before the part of his brain in charge of not saying astonishingly embarrassing shit catches up to his mouth. “Is this, like, a date?”

John pauses, chews, and then swallows.

“Um,” he says. “Do you want it to be a date?”

Dirk panics. This is the worst possible thing that John could have said. Not only is it not an answer, but it is the kind of non-answer which lobs the ball directly into Dirk’s court, making Dirk the one in charge of making the first move, and oh, this is awful. This is really, incredibly, exquisitely bad.

“I don’t know.”

John lifts an eyebrow. “You don’t know?”

“I meant -- yeah,” Dirk says weakly.

“Wait, so you do?”

“Do what?”

“Want this to be a date.”

“What did I say?”

“Are you really this bad at this,” John says, grinning, “or do you have to, like, try?”

“Hey, fuck off,” Dirk says, overwhelmed by relief at the change of subject. “Between the two of us, only one has actually dated.”

“You don’t know that,” John says, offended. “For all you know, I was hooking up with Dave sprite twenty-four sev, on that ship.”

“Davesprite has higher standards than that.”

“But you don’t?”

“John, we’ve established that mocking my taste is low-hanging fruit, in terms of comedy,” Dirk says. “It’s like writing a film school dissertation on Paul Blart: Mall Cop. I mean, you could, but where’s the sophistication? Where’s the talent?”

“Heh,” John chuckles. “Low-hanging fruit.”

“Oh, I get it. It’s funny because I’m gay.”

“So am I, asshole. I get to make that joke.”

“Oh, I don’t dispute that you get to. I’m baffled that you want to, however.”

“Screw you, I’m hilarious.”

“It is apparent in every element of your personality that you enjoyed Nic Cage movies as a child.”

“And it’s apparent in every element of yours that your favorite book is Fight Club. Your point?”

Dirk splutters, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t even know what a Fight Club is.”

“Please. I bet you creamed your jeans when you read the part about glycerin.” John takes another bite of his hamburger, smug.

“I don’t have to take this from the guy who uses the phrase ‘cream your jeans’ in casual conversation.”

“I am almost one hundred per cent certain that you have said worse.”

Throughout the course of the conversation, the restaurant has been gradually growing quieter. Not that there are a lot of people there in the first place, of course, but the two or three other groups making midnight junk food runs have fallen into a lull, and the quiet bickering from Dirk and John’s table carries easily. As Dirk gives the room a glance, he notices that the trolls at the table next to them have become completely silent, and they’re both staring.

“Hey,” says the troll to the left, a short greenblood with corkscrew horns. Their eyes grow wide as they lean closer to get a better look. “Hey -- hey, aren’t you John Egbert?”

John stiffens. It’s barely noticeable. He keeps his eyes on his tray.

“Nah,” he says, forcefully bright. “Just got one of those faces, I guess.”

“No, you are,” says the troll, with an aura of revelation. “Hey, Niroxi, look! It’s John Egbert!”

“Hey, back off,” Dirk warns them, but they’re already getting up, craning their necks to try and get a gander at John’s darkening face.

“Are you -- holy shit, I can’t believe this -- what are you doing here?”

“Still don’t know what you’re talking about,” John says, voice strained.

“Are you here to check up on the government? We thought you’d gone off the map! Are Dave and Rose with you? Oh, shit, is Karkat here?”

“Jade says fuck you, too,” Dirk mumbles, and John shoots him a wry look.

“That would be so cool, if Karkat was here! Are he and Dave still a thing? I heard that Dave was dating Jane now, is that true?”

“No,” Dirk exclaims, repulsed. “What on earth--”

Niroxi groans. “You’re being so cringey,” she tells her friend, plaintively. Then, to John, almost shy: “But, like, for real? Are they here, though?”

John struggles to muster a smile. “Nah,” he says. “Just me and Dirk.”

“Dirk?” Her eyes flit to Dirk, who chafes under the attention. She brightens. “Oh,” she says. “Is Jake here, too?”

Dirk’s stomach takes a swan dive deep enough to bury it in the earth’s molten core.

“Nope,” he manages. “Nah, he, uh. I don’t know where Jake is.”

“Really? Told you,” Niroxi tells her friend matter-of-factly.

“You didn’t tell me shit. They’re on a break, it doesn’t--”

“Yeah? Like you’d know. You get your information from the Alternian Weekly.”

“It’s a good site!”

“The Alternian Weekly predicted that Kanaya and Rose would get divorced.”

“And the jury’s still out on that! Didn’t you see the photos? Rose wasn’t wearing her wedding ring at Target last week.”

“You can’t see her hand in the photo, that doesn’t mean anything--”

“And Kanaya and Terezi have been pretty chummy, lately, don’t you think?”

“Like Terezi would ever be into someone that wasn’t John,” Niroxi says, rolling her eyes, and John cringes. Dirk wonders how Terezi would react to that, if she were here. She’d probably laugh. Then she’d punch them.

Dirk isn’t great at doing either. So he does what he can.

“Come on,” Dirk says, standing up.

John tries to ignore the frenzied whispering of the table next to them. “You haven’t finished,” he says, in the carefully moderated tone of someone just barely keeping a lid on their shit.

“I have unless I want to be shitting water tomorrow. Come on.”

“You are literally so fucking gross,” John says gratefully, shoving back his chair.

They’re walking when they leave the McDonald’s. By the time the Maserati is in view, they’re runnin.

Dirk guns the engine as they leave, putting a family of goggling carapacians in their rearview.

6. Keep driving, and don’t talk about it.

They make it two towns over without saying a word. John picks the music, but after two songs, he turns it off, perhaps more comfortable with silence than the obnoxious country-pop blend that local radio stations seem to prefer.

Dirk, meanwhile, wages war with himself.

If it were Dirk, he wouldn’t want to talk about it.

On the other hand, it’s not Dirk, and John might want to talk about it.

On the other other hand, it would be excruciatingly awkward to talk about it, and being drop-kicked into that nuanced kind of social entanglement might actually kill Dirk on the spot. His heart would go into cardiac arrest and he’d die at the wheel. And then who would be driving the car? Nobody, that’s who. He’d die a Heroic Death, trying to get John Egbert to open up about his fucking feelings.

On the other other other hand, Dirk’s been informed that talking about things is healthier than not talking about it. So there’s that.

On the fourth other hand, Dirk’s not really familiar with the general concept of a healthy coping mechanism, and if John asked him for advice, he would have exactly jack shit to offer.

As it turns out, this debate is meaningless, because it’s John who speaks first.

“I was kind of immature back there,” he says, scratching the back of his head. “Sorry.”

“What?” Dirk stares ahead owlishly.

“Immature,” John repeats. “I shouldn’t have bailed like that. They were just kids.”

They soar past twin rows of wheat fields. A small town appears on the horizon.

“We’re just kids,” Dirk says, attempting to sound reasonable.

John snorts.

The town grows closer. It unveils the silhouettes of wide, boxy warehouses and tall, peeling billboards.

“We are,” Dirk says, frowning.

“Uh-huh,” John says. “Okay.”

“Why do you think we’re not?”

“I hate to break it to you, my guy, but whatever you think passes for ‘regular kid,’ we ain’t it.”

“I don’t mean that we’re perfectly normal,” Dirk argues, uncertain of why his voice is rising all of a sudden, “but we’re still . . . you don’t have to take that kind of treatment.”

“Yeah, I do,” John said, and his voice is centuries old. His voice has cracks, crumbling pillars, smooth facets weathered silken by time. His voice is age itself. His voice is the ghost of a dead universe, and it echoes, hollow as the cavity of an open grave.

“You don’t,” Dirk says, and his voice is small, petulant.

“I’m their god. I can’t just tell them to fuck off.”

“Sure you can,” Dirk says sharply. “It’s easy. It goes like this: ‘I’m on a date. Fuck off.’”

“I’m not going to be a dick to them.”

“They were being dicks to you.”

“They’re kids,” John cries. “How do you not -- I made their universe! Me and Jade and Rose and -- what the fuck am I supposed to do?”

“Not let them walk all over you!”

“I’m not -- I don’t --”

“You deserve to get to be normal,” Dirk insisted, and he’s never sure of anything in his life, except for this. Except for the lone, simple, absolutely unshakeable fact that John get to be a kid, if he wants. He doesn’t even know why he’s so angry about it, but he is. “You are. You sure as fuck didn’t get to be, back in -- back when you were younger. But now--”

“Yeah,” John says bitingly. “Normal. Yeah, sure, Dirk.”

“Normal enough.”

“Normal enough? What the fuck does that mean? Normal enough.”

“Even underneath all the Game bullshit.”

It’s the first time either of them have mentioned it. Ever, in Dirk’s case.

Dirk says, “You still get to be normal.”

Because Dirk can’t be. Dirk can’t and won’t and will never be normal, not with how his brain works, not with what he’s seen. Dirk was born in a dead world, a world underwater, and he was raised to survive in a universe that doesn’t exist anymore, and everything about him reflects that fact. There’s no hope, for him. He can’t be the person this universe expects him to be, the person who could live in this universe, and that’s fine. Dirk’s made his peace with that.

But John can be. And it makes Dirk unfathomably fucking angry, to think that maybe, after all, he can’t. Maybe the one of them -- the only one who could, the only one who might, after everything that happened, be capable; the one who wasn’t dating an alien or raised by an alien empress or or fused with a primordial deity in the form of a dog -- couldn’t have a normal life, after all. Maybe none of them got to go back. Maybe all of them were out of place.

That was the bitch about winning, in retrospect. It wasn’t game over. It was a new game.

“Pull over,” John says suddenly.

The briskness of this command startles Dirk, makes him swerve. “What,” he says. “No. Why?”

“Do it.”

“Why?”

“Do it.”

Dirk hangs a left in the nearest intersection and pulls them into a sparsely populated parking lot, sitting beside a giant vacated warehouse. The street is empty. The only cars there are old, probably out of use, maybe even abandoned.

John takes deep breaths.

“Normal,” he says acidly.

“Yeah.” Dirk says it stoutly, emphatically. “You know. Normal.”

John lifts his hands, and every car in the parking lot rises into the air.

The sound of two dozen vehicles groaning and clattering off the ground, in conjunction with the shriek of the gale necessary to lift them, deafens. It choruses. It howls. The cars rise and hover at ten feet, most of them, with the lighter ones drifting higher and the heavier sitting at seven or eight feet each. The wind tears through the flypaper and rubbish littering the parking lot, tossing it up in small cyclones of whirling trash. It makes the trees writhe. It shakes the Maserati, but doesn’t touch it, doesn’t lift it; they sit in the eye of the storm.

Above, storm clouds start to circle and congeal. The wispy tufts of cirrus that had been drifting over the horizon blacken as if someone tipped over an inkpot in a bed of cotton. Flickers of lightning fork down to the east.

The lines of John’s muscles are rigid. A tic in his jaw is the only sign this is costing him any effort at all.

After a minute, the storm starts to calm. The cars lower gradually to the ground, settling gently in the same places they were. The wind quiets, and then Dirk can hear himself think again. John lowers his hands, hesitant, and then puts them in his lap.

But in a way, it’s much worse, now, with everything still. There’s room for the silence to move in again.

Dirk says, “Shit’s up and fucked, huh.”

John laughs wetly. “Shit’s up and fucked,” he confirms.

“I mean,” Dirk says, “you get to pull that kind of wizardly fuckery at the drop of the hat, and here I am over here, fuckin’ Prince of Heart bullshit. What am I supposed to do? Therapize you to fuckin’ death? Fuckin’ Captain Planet-ass bullshit. ‘Heart.’ Jade gets to play pinball with planets, Dave’s over here Groundhog Daying it every time he fucks up, who the fuck even knows what Jake can do, it sure as fuck ain’t Jake, and Roxy can just make shit. Make it! I mean, fuck the Law of Conservation of Matter, am I right? Let’s let her just magick stuff out of thin fuckin’ -- oh, the blond one? Oh, oh, that one? Yeah, toss him, fuckin’, uhhhhh, I dunno, what’s left -- Heart. Prince of Heart, yeah that sounds good. The one that destroys shit, that’s cool, right? What can he do? Shit, man, like, feel really bad about himself, probably? Be depressed? Yeah, that works, great. Cool. We’ve got Witch of Space, Knight of Time, Page of Hope, Heir of Breath, and Depression Man. Dope. Now there’s a lineup I can get behind. Put a ‘case closed’ stamp on that motherfucker, we’re ready to run a session.”

John cracks a smile.

“Gimme a goddamn refund,” Dirk huffs, “that’s all I gotta say. You see how that troll chick didn’t even fucking recognize me? I am the fucking -- I’m not even important enough to get recognized at a McDonald’s. You know that if Roxy had seen that, she’d have eviscerated me on the spot. ‘Prince of Heart.’ Eat my ass, Jesus Christ.”

John giggles. It’s kind of stifled by the lump in his throat.

They look at each other.

John reaches across the armrest and gently punches him in the shoulder. By John’s standards, it’s practically a caress.

In a movie, this would be the part where Dirk kissed him, and John would kiss him back, and everything would be okay.

But Dirk doesn’t kiss him. Instead, he looks out the driver’s window, so that when John cries, he can do it in privacy.

By and by, John clears his throat and scrubs a hand across his face. “Um,” he says. “So I think I broke some guy’s Chevy. We should probably get going.”

“Yeah.” Dirk shifts the car into drive, and the engine thrums. “Where to?”

“I dunno. You wanna head east?”

“That’s fine with me.”

“I heard there was some cool tourist shit out -- hey,” says John, squinting across the street. “Is that an arcade?”

7. Get him the shitty bunny rabbit.

John breaks the lock on the arcade with ease. It’s abandoned, with white sheets tossed over most of the bulky, box-shaped consoles and dust lining the whole place in a thin film, but when Dirk steals some tokens from behind the counter and slots one into the nearest machine, the lights fire up just fine. They fuck around for a little bit with Dance Dance Revolution -- John beats Dirk eight games to one, and that one was when Dirk dared him to do all the moves with one foot -- and then burn tokens on Donkey Kong and Pac-Man. John has to teach Dirk how to play Frogger. Dirk is so bad at it that John wonders aloud whether Dirk actually derives some sick pleasure from killing frogs. John skunks Dirk blind at skee ball, but then Dirk gets him back by climbing up and removing the grate over the holes, and then they spend the rest of the hour lobbing skee balls overhand at the target without much regard for the score.

After an hour or two, they get bored of this, and pass a claw grab machine holding a pile of decaying plushes. Atop the pile sits an abomination in the form of a rabbit. The thing looks like what would happen if you asked someone who’d never seen a rabbit before to design one, except the only reference you gave them was the transcript of a Looney Tunes cartoon. The bulbous, uncanny-valley proportions of the head emphasize the oblong pear shape of the body, and the tail is a limp tuft of stringy cotton. The ears are tattered and the fur on them is clumped and tufted. The animal itself is a weird shade of bluish grey that probably came from using cheap dye for the fur. Beady black eyes glint from either side of a button nose, imbued with a legitimately chilling malevolence.

“That is the ugliest piece of shit bunny I have ever seen in my life,” John breathes, his nose against the glass. “I need it.”

Dirk wanders over, his hands in his pockets. “They’re rigged, you know,” he says. “The machines. You can’t win them.”

“Dude. Dude. Look at me. Look at me, though? I don’t care. I need it.”

“We can buy you a bunny rabbit, if you want one.”

“No, you misunderstand. I don’t want any rabbit. I want that rabbit. Specifically.”

“. . . Okay.”

John wastes somewhere between forty and fifty tokens trying to get the claw machine to give him the bunny. He gets close to success several times, often getting so far as to actually grab the bunny within the prongs of the thing’s obstinately clumsy claw, before it slips out in the millisecond before being deposited in the box. Dirk watches John cycle through the five stages of grief not once, not twice, but every single time this happens, and then watches John recover and try again with unflagging determination. It would be endearing if it were not also making Dirk feel slightly deranged, just watching it.

Finally, John runs out of tokens, and steps back from the machine with a mournful look. “It’s hopeless,” he said.

“Oh, no. If only there were someone who could have told you that.”

“It’s not my fault! I got so close!”

“I know.”

“Guess I’ll just have to do without it,” John mutters. He hangs his head with exaggerated despair. “No bunny rabbit for me.”

He ruins the effect by sneaking a glance up at Dirk.

Dirk heaves a long, put-upon sigh, and draws a token out of his pocket.

“Yes!” John pumps the air, giving Dirk space to assume control of the joystick. “Oh, man, if you nail this, I’ll owe you forever. I’ll even stop making fun of your tattoo. Actually, I take that back. I’ll stop making fun of your hair. Tattoo’s still fair game.”

“The longer you keep talking, the less likely I am to try.”

John ignores this. “You gotta wait for the right moment,” he advises. “It likes to stall sometimes, so you have to jigger it to work. And the joystick is sticky in the lower right corner, so you can’t use it. But aside from that, you should be okay.”

Dirk slips the token into the slot. It chugs for a moment, waiting, and then the screen brightens, the claw stirring.

John is right about the stalling and the sticky patch on the control pad. Dirk wastes three tries on the damn thing before getting aggravated.

“Cool,” he says thinly. “Cool cool cool. Hey, Egbert, do you have any particular qualms about how you get the damn rabbit?”

“Uh,” says John, “no?”

“Good.”

Dirk decaptchalogues Lil Seb into the palm of his hand. The small robot’s red eyes glaze as he boots up.

“You see that rabbit?” he asks it.

Lil Seb directs his attention to the glass, and nods. If he is offended by this obvious caricature of one of his kin, he does not show it. That’s the great part about Lil Seb. He’s a chill motherfucker.

“Get it for me,” Dirk orders, and then slides Lil Seb through the flap at the bottom machine, into the pickup trough where prizes fall for collection.

John lifts his eyebrows. “I think that’s cheating,” he says, but he doesn’t sound upset about it.

Lil Seb climbs up the chute into the main prize pit easily, scaling the mountain of plushies like a man on a mission to the peak of goddamn Everest. He seizes the ugly rabbit by the ears and hauls it down with him, leaping neatly into the prize chute and tumbling back into the trough with a clatter. Dirk reaches in and pulls out both bunnies, captchaloguing the metal one and keeping the much sought-after abomination.

“There,” he says, with more satisfaction than he’s proud of.

He holds out the prize.John beams at him like he’s offering John the damn Genesis Frog, face warm, eyes sparkling. Dirk’s fingers dig into the bunny, frozen, and his breath stalls a little bit.

“Hey! What are you doing?”

They both turn. A burly, balding man stands in the door of the arcade, a ring of keys in his hand, frozen in the act of opening the door.

A katana falls out of Dirk’s sylladex, on instinct.

“I’m gonna call the police,” the owner snarls, but before he can continue, John lets out a long groan, squares his shoulders, and with a snap of his wrist, flings two thousand newtons of raw windspeed directly into the owner’s face.

The sudden gale inside the arcade sends the man sailing out the door, flying backwards until he tumbles to a halt a hundred feet from the building. He’s still moving when he hits the ground, stirring, but clearly incapacitated. The Breeze tears the inside of the room apart, sending papers scattering in a flurry of white and lifting the dust into tiny whorls. Wind rakes through Dirk’s hair and ruffles his clothes. Blue lights snap and spark over John’s frame, especially his fist, and even as the tiny storm is calming, his eyes have a vivid, uncanny brightness.

They’re not human eyes. Not anymore.

Dirk looks down at the bunny in his hands. He wonders if he could pull the man’s soul out, if he tried. His powers aren’t the kind of thing you can do on a whim.

“C’mon,” John says. “Let’s get out of here.”

When they leave the arcade, the man is still struggling to pick himself up off the street. He shouts after them when he notices them going:

“What the fuck are you?”

Out of spite, John flicks his fingers at him. The wind blast shoots a nearby trash bin clear off its foundations and hurtling directly at the owner. Whatever the man’s next words were going to be are muffled by the sound of him taking a full trash can straight to the mouth.

“Hot,” says Dirk, and John snorts.

They make it out of range of the arcade. The Mississippi runs alongside the town, its thunderous rush dwarfing the sounds of the city and the road the nearer they draw to it. As they’re walking away, Dirk hands the bunny to John.

“Here,” he says, holding out the tiny plush. “This is for you.”

“Thanks,” says John, sounding almost genuinely surprised, and then lifts it high above his head, reenacting the Lion King. “I’m going to call him Liv Tyler.”

“Isn’t Liv a girl’s name.”

“Open your mind, Dirk, jeez. We live in the twenty-fifth century.”

“Just saying.”

“Just saying what?”

“You already have a kid called Liv Tyler. Gonna give your son a complex, using the same name twice.”

“I take it back. His name is Dirk Strider The Killjoy, Who Hates Fun And Also Happiness.”

“Junior.”

“Junior,” John agrees, and tosses an arm around Dirk’s shoulders. “Thanks.”

They wander down to the river, where the sandy bank is littered with old beer bottles and plastic wrappers and the remnants of picnics past. In between the reeds, they find a hollow where the grass has been flattened and sit down in it. The evening slips into twilight peacefully, drawing long shadows on the grass, and the trees form black inkstains against the ochre sky. The river turns the color of fire, reflecting the horizon.

John says, “This is kind of, like, beautiful and shit, dude.”

Dirk says, “Did you know that the sky is that color because of air pollution?”

“Yeah, I did. Do you have any other slogans from Hot Topic to share with the class?”

“I don’t know what Hot Topic is.”

“That is honestly more tragic than, like, literally any other part of our lives.”

Dirk finds a piece of copper wire in the rubbish on the bank and starts twisting it into knots. John lies back on his hands, the bunny perched safely in his lap, and sighs with contentment.

“It was really cool when you wasted that guy,” Dirk says, for lack of anything better.

“Yeah? Thanks, man. Guy was being a dick.”

“Agreed. To be fair, we were trespassing.”

“Trespassing shrespassing,” John snorts. “This whole universe comes from some frog Jade found in her backyard. Everything in it is her property, technically, and so also my property, by genetics, technically.”

“You are the legal genius this generation needs. Somewhere, Terezi is weeping tears of joy.”

“You think I don’t know? I didn’t play the Ace Attorney series seventeen times for nothing.”

“Oh, man. I had no idea I was sitting next to an Ace Attorney master.”

“I know. It’s overwhelming. You can take a minute, if you need it.”

“You really are brains, brawn, and beauty of this relationship, Egbert,” Dirk deadpans. “Such a great burden for one man to bear.”

“Yeah, well, someone has to pull your weight, don’t they?”

Dirk bites down on a smile.

John leans over, close enough that Dirk’s breath fogs the lenses of his glasses, sealing a coat of white over those enormous, ridiculous, ocean blue eyes. John isn’t touching Dirk, but he’s not touching him in a way that almost feels like touching, in how obvious it is, in how it makes clear that they could be touching, if Dirk tried, if John tried, if either of them tried.

They’re breathing the same air, sharing the oxygen that lives in the half-inch of space between their lips, when Dirk says, “Wait,” and John pulls back, his expression all twisted up and fearful like he thinks he’s gotten everything about this wrong, and Dirk panics a little bit.

“It’s not you,” he says (shouts). “It’s just -- it’s not -- I don’t not want -- I don’t -- I do, but I can’t just -- and not --”

“Dirk --”

“I wish I wasn’t like this,” Dirk says (whispers). “I wish I wasn’t fucking like this.”

John’s expression clears. “It’s okay,” he says gently. “We don’t have to, uh. If you don’t . . .”

“I do want to.”

John tilts his head. “Um,” he says. “Okay.”

He wants an explanation, of course he does, and the thing is that Dirk wants to give it to him. He really, really wants to give it to him. But he can’t.

John seems to realize this, because he scoots back, putting a good foot of space between them. With John farther away, it’s easier for Dirk to focus. It’s easier for him to think.

He opens his mouth, and he waits for the words to come.

8. When he tries to kiss you, tell him about your ex.

“Do you ever feel,” starts Dirk, and stops.

“Maybe I just,” starts Dirk, and stops.

“Sometimes,” starts Dirk, and stops.

The river flows past, wide and deep and fast enough to kill you before you realized you were drowning. Dirk lived on a tower with an ocean beneath his bedroom window and on some days he’d sit on the ledge, his feet eighty meters from oblivion, his face against the wind, thinking about what would happen if he leaned forward and let go. Sometimes it would take hours to convince himself he’d even hit the water -- that he wouldn’t just drift up into the sky, like a piece of flypaper borne on the back of the wind, and find another world waiting for him beyond the ceiling of stars.

“I have a hole,” he says.

John smirks. Dirk ignores him.

“It’s a hole in -- in the thing that keeps you together. Whatever that is. The thing that Roxy and Jane and Jake all have. I don’t know what you call it. It’s the thing that keeps the parts of a person together. Take Roxy, for example. Roxy doesn’t have to worry about whether or not whatever she does is going to be in character for Roxy, because Roxy’s the one who’s doing it. She doesn’t have to worry about whether or not she’s acting like a person, because she already knows she’s a person, so whatever she does is something a person would do. Or Jane, she -- Jane doesn’t have to think about why she’s doing something. Jane just does things because she does them. She doesn’t worry about doing something because she’s manipulated herself into doing it, or because she’s manipulated someone else into manipulating her into doing it, or because an elaborate configuration of circumstances conspired to create the specific conditions under which she would do it. She just fucking does it. And Jake -- Jake just does shit, too, he doesn’t need a rhyme or reason for it, he’s just him. They’re all people. They’ve got personalities and ideas and thoughts and they’re people, regular people, and they’re not perfect people, sure, but they’re people. And each one of them is held together by something. They’ve got a set of things that they believe in, or things that they are, or things that they do, and those things are them. I don’t . . . have that.

“I’ve got a hole in the thing that holds me together. And sometimes, I’ll just be doing shit, and I’ll think about that hole. And I’ll think about how much of me is just shit I do because other people like it when I do it, or because I think doing it will make other people like me, or because I’ve tricked myself into thinking I like it when I really don’t, assuming that I’m capable of liking anything at all. And when I was dating Jake, that was all I could think about, all the time, even when it was good, assuming it was ever fucking good for either of us -- ‘what if this isn’t real, what if you’ve dreamed this all up because you think you’re supposed to have a boyfriend, what if you don’t like him at all, what if he doesn’t like you, what if you’ve made yourself the kind of person Jake English likes instead of whatever the fuck you actually are.’ And when I think about you, I get the same kind of worries, like -- what if I like you so much I started being the kind of person I thought you’d like? What if the only reason you like me is because I tried so hard to be liked? I’d say that I was worried you didn’t like the real me, but that isn’t it. I don’t think the ‘real me’ exists, really. That’s the problem.

“So I guess what I’m saying is I’m not a person. Sometimes I act like a person and talk like a person and think like a person, but I’ve got a hole in the thing that’s supposed to hold people together, and I can’t sew it back up again. I’m not who you think I am. I’m a copy of a person that’s really good at making other people think it’s real.”

The river runs by, and he wants to be like the water. He wants to keep going and going and going, without cause or expectation of pause, until he hits something bigger than he is, and gets absorbed into it. Dirk has never wanted anything so much as not to exist -- not to die, but not to exist. It’s a quieter thing.

John says, “You are really kind of dumb, dude.”

Dirk’s neck hurts from how fast his head snaps around. “What?”

“I mean,” John amends, “that sucks, but you’re not, like, the only person who ever felt like they were faking it. And no offense, but you couldn’t manipulate your way out of a paper bag. I don’t think I like you because you’ve pulled some nefarious supervillain kind of shit, you know?”

“That’s not what I meant,” Dirk says, frustrated.

“No, yeah, I get what you meant. And I wanna make it obvious that, like, I don’t . . . not care? I do. It’s shitty, and it sounds like you could use some good counseling. But dude, I’m not looking for your hand in marriage, here. I just wanna eat chips and watch shitty movies and make out sometimes, and also maybe do more than that, if you’re into it. Or not, if you’re not into it. Cards on the table, I didn’t actually think I’d get this far.” John laughs a little. “The fact that you get so worked up about being like . . . the real you, or whatever? It makes me think I probably know exactly who you are after all.”

“Which is what?” Dirk can barely breathe.

“An idiot,” John says, with conviction. “But an idiot that I want to make out with, so I guess that makes me even more of an idiot, really.”

“Who’s more the fool,” Dirk quips, still dazed. “The fool, or the fool who wants to do butt stuff with him?”

“Oh my God, shut up. I’m never kissing you, actually. Ever.”

“That’s not true,” Dirk counters, with a feeble spark of confidence. “You said you wanted to make out with me.”

“That was before you talked about sex as ‘butt stuff.’ I’m taking it back. R.I.P., my libido. You had a good run, old buddy.”

“What’s wrong with butt stuff?”

“Stop saying that! Stop saying butt stuff!”

“Does it bother you?”

“Yes! I -- you are literally so aggravating.”

“You like it,” Dirk says, hazarding a guess.

“Asshole,” John grumbles. “You owe me, like, five makeouts for that alone.”

“I can do that,” Dirk agrees, now thoroughly bemused. Absolutely nothing in this conversation has gone the way he thought it would. He’s not unhappy about it.

“Five makeouts and my pick of movies.”

“Six makeouts, and I’ll drive the rest of the way.”

“Fine. But no more SBAHJ.”

“Shake on it,” Dirk says stoically, offering his hand.

John rolls his eyes and says, “Nerd,” before leaning in to kiss him.

This time, Dirk doesn’t pull away. The river runs by, and he doesn’t want to be anything but the creature living in Dirk Strider’s skin, anything but the person that John Egbert is kissing. It’s a new feeling. He likes it. He thinks he could live like this for a while.