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platypan · 5 years ago

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Strangest (chapter 8)

“Yeah, you trespassed a few too many times, asshole. Keeping you.”

“What,” Billy buried his face against Steve’s side. “You’re not keeping me, you’re--you’re releasing me with one of those radio collars. Throw me in a truck, drop me in the mountains, hope to fucking god I don’t find my way back.”

Leaning his head back, Steve watched Will edge out of the room, pointing upstairs, and waved with his free hand. His other hand teased at the hairspray in Billy’s curls. “What,” he had to clear his throat a couple of times to laugh. “You--you saying you’re--domesticated. Tame. You want to--”

“Fuck you,” Billy yanked away, standing up. “Saying I’ll probably knock over your trash cans every night after work.”

“You can always ring the doorbell--” Steve swung his legs to the floor to reach for him, and Will walked back in.”

Whole chapter under cut, Ao3 link in the comments!

Will placed his hand flat to the door of Steve’s room, and shoved dramatically. “...wow, Dustin...Dustin was not kidding, it is...plaid.”

Steve glanced around, and sighed, arms full of comforter. “Yeah, it’s really plaid. They hired an interior decorator, I guess. Didn’t ask me.” He shoved more pillows at Will, called down “Hey yo, Hargrove,” and dumped the other comforter over the railing after the first. Billy scrambled out of the way.

“Watch yourself, King Steve,” he looked up, and exchanged a grin with Will. “The peasants might revolt when you’re snoring tonight. Pitchforks and torches.”

“Will the Wise, my fine court wizard, would never!” Steve grabbed the pillows in one arm, and Will around the waist--he yelped--and trotted down the stairs.

Billy was grimacing, head cocked, at Will’s giggles and kicking feet. “‘Will the Wise’? What’s that, his--his nerd game name?”

“His D&D character,” Steve corrected, sitting Will’s feet on the floor.

“Seriously?” Billy tossed something in the fridge with a clunk. “You coulda been ‘Zarbok the Unendearing’ or ‘Magicmaster’ or ‘Savatage’. You stuck with William? Who the fuck wants to be a William, if you could be somebody else.” He stuck some rattly cardboard boxes labeled ‘lasagna noodles’ in the cupboard, and Steve for once salivated over something other than his lovely ex, or the school bully. “Done.”

“Are you making lasagna?!” he gasped, but Will cut him off.

“I like being a William,” Will grabbed the movie club box Steve’d left on the counter, and rattled it. “When we built Castle Byers, Mom wanted to put a ‘Trespassers Will’ sign outside. I’m not five.” He rolled his eyes, glanced between their blank faces, and sighed. “It’s from Winnie the Pooh. Piglet says his grandfather was Trespassers William.”

“Trespassers William, huh,” Steve grabbed the movie club box, tearing at the corner, and let his smile grow at Billy.

“No,” Billy frowned back. “You’re not calling me anything to do with a bear--”

“It’s so perfect, though,” Steve yanked at the box. “Trespasser.”

“It’s Piglet,” Will stared between them. “Actually.”

“Trespassers Billiam,” Steve snickered, yanking a side of the box away, and wrinkled his nose. “...huh. Anybody wanna watch The Smurfs and the Magic Flute? Or hey, they reissued Snow White. Jesus. My mom’s hot secretary thinks I’m five.”

“Your mom?” Will perked up.

“Yeah,” Steve shrugged, trying to ignore the avid attention of various Williams. “Do we need to explain where babies come from? Again?”

“Are you up for that?” Billy raised his eyebrows. “You could barely handle it the first time.”

“...does Hargrove need to explain where babies come from again?”

Billy smirked, and Will giggled. “No, I--just--where is she?”

“Oh, uh. She’s roommates with her really...hot...secretary--” he narrowed his eyes, then blinked. “Wait, my--my mom’s gay. That’s definitely weird.” Billy slid an arm around him, laughing into his shoulder. “Uhhh, she’s in Boston, usually? She, um, she travels a lot.”

“Why doesn’t she--” Will began, and Steve felt his jaw clench. The kid must have noticed, because he stopped.

“You got a dad?” Billy leaned his chin on Steve’s shoulder.

“He’s got his own secretary,” Steve let himself lean back into him. “I guess.”

Billy squeezed him. “Where?”

“Uh, guys--”

“You live here alone,” Will’s eyes were huge. “You’re all by yourself. That’s why Billy can stay.”

Steve sighed, squeezing the bridge of his nose. “Okay, look, I’m still seventeen--”

“We’ll keep it quiet,” Billy shifted against him, glancing around. “Shit, Harrington, how long you been living on TV dinners?”

“Hey, I get Kentucky Fried chicken, sometimes,” Steve squirmed, and Billy stepped back.

“...the hell’d you do before you could drive,” Billy stepped away, digging a beer out of the fridge.

Steve snorted, cracking his neck. “I took the bus? I had a--” he waved his hand hip-high. “Little kid bike, y’know, what the hell d’you think.”

“How--how old were--” Will’s eyes just kept getting wider, and Steve cut him off, swallowing around a raw feeling in his throat.

“Not everybody’s got your mom, Will,” he grabbed a chair in one hand, the bag of Christmas lights in the other, tossing them over his shoulder, and strode into the front room. “Hoy. Buttfaces. How do we start. Let’s make this fort.”

Will followed him out, Billy bringing up the rear with the sound of a crushed beer can tossed into the sink. As Will dug clothespins out of one of his totes, Billy slid an arm around Steve, leaning in. “So. How hot is your mom’s secretary,” he whispered, and Steve’s tight shoulders dropped as he barked a laugh.

“She’s almost as old as my mom,” he grinned, pulling the chair over and climbing on to reach the ceiling.

“Just my type,” Billy grabbed his hand and kissed his knuckles as he walked by, and Steve stepped too far to the side. The chair tottered, then slowly began to tip--like the chair got a run-by smooching, Steve thought, rolling his eyes--and he had to shift his feet to balance it on two legs as he stepped down to the side rung, then to the floor as the chair thudded softly on its side behind him.

He glanced around, head ducked, feeling like a silent movie comedian. Both Williams were pink-cheeked and watching. “Oh, fuck off,” he put one foot on the rung of the chair to get it arcing upright as he stepped on the edge with the other, and Billy turned away, clearing his throat.

“Did you practice that?” Will asked, wide-eyed, as the chair settled back on four legs, and Steve cocked his head.

“...falling...off a chair? Why...why would I practice that.”

“It looks cool,” Will watched as Steve rolled his eyes, grabbing the back of the chair and rocking it back to two legs while he balanced with one foot on the seat, one on the side rung. Will clapped--and slid a glance at Billy. “Billy really likes it.”

“Shut up, Will,” Billy stomped off to grab a blanket.

“Of course my trespasser likes watching me stumble around--” Steve rolled his eyes, and Will shook his head, opening his mouth, and sighed.

“...you wouldn’t fuck off from under my window, shithead,” Billy threw a pillow at his head, and Steve took the hit and caught it, grinning over. “The hell was I supposed to--”

“Rapunzel, Rapunzel, let down your mullet,” Steve snickered, and Billy grabbed pillows in both hands and launched an attack. Will grabbed a couch pillow, forgetting the effect the size of it would have on his reflexes, and ran around waving it at both of them and missing entirely.

They circled the front room in an infinite loop, supplying each other with thrown pillows, stances wide like they were playing one-on-one basketball. Billy finally smacked Steve sprawling over the arm of the couch and knelt on the floor next to him, panting. “You wanted me here. You--you fucking--you came and got me, don’t--”

Steve flailed an arm out, and grappled his shoulders close, talking into his curls. “Yeah. Yeah, you trespassed a few too many times, asshole. Keeping you.”

“Fuck you,” Billy yanked away, standing up. “Saying I’ll probably knock over your trash cans every night after work.”

“You can always ring the doorbell--” Steve swung his legs to the floor to reach for him, and Will walked back in.

“I got the sheets,” he said, breathless. “They aren’t as heavy, it’s easier to tie them--” He glanced between Steve and Billy, blushing.

Billy accepted one, stepping up on the chair, frowned at it under his feet, and then squinted at Steve.

“What,” Steve mouthed, and Billy stuck out his tongue and looked away, shaking his head. He braced himself, feet as wide as they’d go on the chair, before stretching up to tie the corner of the sheet around the track lighting.

Steve looked away from his toned stomach where his shirt rode up, cleared his throat, and started gathering other tall things--the metal tubing hatrack from the garage, and while he was there, bungee cords. They shortly had a canopy wide and tall enough for--he stopped, glancing around for Billy, who was crouched with Will trying to untangle the Christmas lights.

Steve stepped over, bent in a low bow, and kissed his stubbled cheek, as Will giggled. “May I have this dance?”

Billy turned a pink-cheeked glower on him, and Steve crouched, holding out his hand.

“What are we waltzing to, your highness,” Billy thumped his shoulder into Steve’s, and Steve threw an arm around him to keep his balance.

“We should get the lights up first,” Will tugged harder at his strand, face bright red.

“I could put on a princess cartoon--” Steve began, straight-faced, and Billy shoved him over, scrambling to his feet and stomping off to the garage, yelling back through the door.

“You’re a sick fucker, Harrington! You’re diseased in the head!”

Steve shot a grin at Will, who was leaning on the floor on one hand, cackling into the other.

When Billy returned, carrying a small suitcase and an armload of cassettes to dump in front of the stereo, Steve and Will were arranging the lights. They zigzagged them between the hatrack and the chair supporting the other back corner, which lit most of the fort, and then Steve climbed back up and started twining them along its ceiling. Will abandoned him to look through the cassettes.

“Do you have any Led Zeppelin?”

Billy grinned at him, leaning in to unclasp the little suitcase, and Steve finished the fifth and last strand to look over and see Will and Billy’s heads together, discussing music. He switched off the overhead lights--forcing them to huddle closer to the stereo light--and crossed his arms, waiting for them to look up and see his fairy lights.

Billy smacked a cassette in, and crossed his arms at Will, who held up his fists, giggling. “Next one’s my turn.” Billy rolled his eyes, and Steve shook his head, grinning, and moved the chair he’d used to stand on out of their blanket fort. He dropped down to lean between them--and get an unasked-for lecture on, of all things, metal bands who liked Lord of the Rings. When Will paused to cover a yawn, Steve opened his mouth to rescue Billy, who promptly ejected the Led Zeppelin Will’d been explaining. Billy popped in a tape labeled “Cirith Ungol,” which sounded, to Steve’s ears, like screaming.

Will crawled across Steve’s lap to get to the case in fascination. “That’s a pass on the way to Mordor--well, and the orc stronghold in the pass--”

“What,” Steve groaned.

“In the Lord of the Rings! You’ve seen the movies, Steve--” Steve leaned against Billy’s shoulder, succumbing to his fate, as the two nerds pawed through the cassettes, talking about orcs and goblins. Billy said something about the Dark Tongue, and Steve snickered into his shoulder.

“But you’ve never read it,” Will yawned again, slumping between them, his shoulder digging into Steve’s chest, his head against Billy’s neck.

“Tried the Two Towers once, couldn’t figure out what the fuck was going on,” Billy grinned over his head at Steve, and switched out the tape for a more comprehensible one labeled “Attacker: Battle at Helm’s Deep”.

“You can’t start there,” Will took that case too, blinking slowly at the lyrics “Vandalizing the countryside/Goblins march in fearless pride”. “I want to hear all of them,” he tipped himself forward to inspect the cassette case, covering another voluminous yawn. “And then we can--we can start the book.”

“Yeah, no,” Steve leaned sideways to watch him rubbing his face. “We can do that in the morning.”

Will squinted at him, unsubtly sliding another cassette around his body to Billy, who blinked wide eyes at Steve before clicking it in the player.

Steve groaned as another guitar riff reverberated around the room. “I’m gonna set it up so we can sleep,” he jerked his thumb towards the fort, and Billy scrambled up with him, displacing Will onto the floor. He didn’t seem to notice.

Steve started laying out the comforters, and arranging pillows, eventually realizing Billy had sat back on his heels, frowning around.

“Hey, Harrington,” he licked his teeth, grinning. “Looks like a sex cave.”

Steve covered a loud snort. “Shut up.”

“I think we could fit the king-size off that bed upstairs in here.”

Steve surveyed the grounds with new eyes, eyebrows raised as he nodded. “I think you’re right.” He stepped over and hauled Hargrove to his feet, pulling him close for a peck on the mouth, and holding him with their heads together. Billy let his eyes close for a second, then jerked back, shooting a glance at Will, who was staring at the stereo, bouncing a little in place.

“He’s not even looking,” Billy hissed, and Steve bit his lips, stepping back. Billy ran his fingers through his hair, staring at Steve, then turned on his heel and stomped away towards the stairs. The electric guitar cut out as Steve followed.

When Steve walked in Billy’s room, he was lying on his back on the bare mattress, his curls a little wild where he’d run his hands through them. “...sorry?” Steve tried.

“Doesn’t matter,” Billy shoved himself upright, yanking his t-shirt down. “Kiss me all you like, you’re the one who fucking--who doesn’t want--”

“Wait, it’s not that I--”

“Look, fuck you,” Billy stalked up and shoved him back. “Get the other end of this fucking mattress.”

Steve ducked his head, and did. As they took mincing steps on the multi-point turn out the doorway and into the bannister, familiar notes on a familiar harmonica floated up the stairs, and Steve cracked up, dropping the mattress to lean against the bannister. “William Whatever Hargrove,” he gasped, pushing the mattress just enough to feel it thud into Billy, “You listen to the Beatles?”

“...it was my mom’s,” Billy growled back, and Steve winced, picking his end of the mattress up again.

“Shit, sorry...let’s just tip it over the bannister, we won’t make this turn. We can balance it and then catch it, yeah?”

Billy shrugged, but helped him balance it, and Steve squeezed his shoulder as he slid around him to stand on the stairs.

“Serve you right if I drop it.” Billy’s voice was hoarse. “Sled down over your corpse.”

“I think it’s a specific crime if you kill somebody you’re married to,” Steve bounced on his toes to catch the mattress as Billy flipped it towards him.

“Shut up,” Billy sighed.

“Is it maricide?” Steve mused. “Maritime? No, matricide?”

“You aren’t my mother,” Billy shoved the mattress, and Steve staggered down the bottom steps. “And holding hands at the IHOP doesn’t make us married.”

“Think it does, we had witnesses--” Steve jogged backwards to the front door so Billy could get out of the stairwell, and they slid the mattress on its side into the front room. Billy left Steve holding the mattress, then stopped, beckoning Steve over with raised eyebrows.

The mattress thumped as Steve pushed it against the wall, sidling over slide an arm around Billy, and look at Will asleep, curled up in Steve’s plaid comforter. His face was half under the entertainment system, hugging an armload of cassettes so one was partly in his mouth.

Billy swore under his breath, and went to yank the blankets out of the fort and clear the floor. Steve pulled some out, and piled them up, but when the next song started, Billy just stood in the center of the fort. He had his fist pressed against his mouth, and his eyes closed tightly, and Steve dropped the pillow he was holding to go stand in front of him.

“Hey,” he lifted his hands, remembered Billy’s earlier flailing, and lowered them. “Do you--you okay?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I’m good--” He took a deep, shaky breath. “The fuck are you--”

“Want me to turn it off?”

“Fuck.” Billy rubbed his face. “It’s--whatever. Doesn’t matter. What’re you staring at, straight boy, aren’t you afraid I’ll try and slow dance?”

“Hey, I suggested it,” Steve grinned, twiddling his fingers as he reached out with both hands and grabbed Billy’s, then leaned close to whisper in his ear. “Are we doing this or aren’t we?”

Billy groaned, leaning his face in Steve’s neck, but swayed along with If I fell in love with you/would you promise to be true/and help me understand? “I’m gonna get hard, and you’re not,” he mumbled into the skin under Steve’s ear, and Steve snorted.

“Don’t count on it.”

“If I give my heart to you,” Billy sang along his breath warm against Steve’s ear, “I must be sure/from the very start that you/would love me more than her--”

Steve huffed a laugh into his curls, tucking his fingers, twined with Billy’s, in the back pockets of Billy’s jeans. “I’ve asked you out, asshole. You threatened to kill me.”

“So I hope you see that I/would love to love you,” Billy pressed against him shoulder to hip, singing against his collarbone. Steve could feel his grin. “And that she will cry/when she learns we are two--”

“Jesus, I didn’t realize this song was so pissed at my ex,” Steve dug his nails in the denim covering Billy’s butt, and Billy jerked closer, laughing, as the song switched to And I love her. He stumbled, and Steve slowed, pulling a hand free so Billy’s weren’t pinned awkwardly behind his back when he had Sudden Emotions.

He listened to Billy’s slow breaths, running a hand up his spine. “...that’s not my sweatshirt,” he lifted his head to squint at it. “Whose sweatshirt is that?”

Billy yanked his other hand free and slung both around Steve’s neck, laughing helplessly into his shoulder. “I have my own clothes, Harrington.”

Steve felt himself flushing. “How was I supposed to know you owned shirts?” he whispered back. “You don’t fucking wear them.”

“I do fucking wear them,” Billy lifted his head, breathing less than an inch from Steve’s mouth. He smelled like beer, and chapstick, and toothpaste, and his eyes made Steve feel like a swimming pool was laughing at him. “I’ve been wearing yours, just ‘cause you keep...shoving me into them.” He licked his lips.

“...like...you’re still--days later,” Steve stumbled over his words, sliding his hand up to curve it around Billy’s jaw, and feel his face get warmer with every second they swayed to A love like ours/Could never die/As long as I/Have you near me. His mouth and throat had gone dry somehow, and he swallowed, and didn’t slide his other hand through Billy’s curls. “But--good--good to know you, y’know, you know how to--dress yourself. When--once you--get back to California.”

Billy stalled out, suddenly just a cement traffic barrier Steve was trying to dance with. “What.”

“I mean. I won’t--it’s not like--you’ll have to zip up your own sweatshirts,” Steve cleared his throat, swallowing again. “Good. Good thing it’s warm there.”

“California,” Billy repeated. He nodded, grinning, and yanked his arms back, shoving away from Steve’s shoulder. “Right. You’re giving me money to get the hell out of your fucking life. How could I forget that.”

“...you wanted a job, to leave town,” Steve staggered back. “You said you--”

“Yeah. Thanks. That’s great, Harrington.” Billy laughed, pressing the heels of his hands against his eyes. “I thought that was some of the shit you didn’t mean. How long’s that gonna take.”

It was probably good, Steve reflected, how fast Billy could switch channels. Apparently I need to be reminded: he’s only here because it’s safe. He’d known Billy only wanted to get back to California, but it kinda stung sometimes, being disposable. “A-a week, maybe two? I called the bank, but I’m--I’m a minor, so--”

“What’s going on?” The comforter rose with Will’s wide eyes underneath it, his face red where he’d hugged the cassettes, and Steve tried not to whine.

“My sweet boyfriend here,” Billy reached out and squeezed Steve’s shoulder, right at the bone. Steve’s t-shirt was no protection from the grip of his blunt nails. “--he’s letting me have some money to move home to California. I--I can see all my friends! I bet my mom really misses me, too, right, honey?”

“Your mom lives in California?” Will’s eyes widened. “Wow, that sucks. That--that is so goddamned far.” He enunciated the swear carefully, and Steve resisted a snort. “Unless your mom tries to keep you all--wrapped up in bubble wrap, like mine does, sometimes I--I mean--”

“She does not do that, no,” Billy’s eyes were fixed on Steve’s.

Will’s eyes were flicking between them. “You--you must be excited, to see her, but…what about you and...” He fixed wide, shining eyes on Steve, who winced, both from guilt and Billy’s bruisingly-tight hold on his shoulder.

“Oh, of course my beloved will visit,” Billy yanked his hand away to fold his arms around himself. He bared his teeth in a grin at Steve, and Steve swallowed.

“I would if you wanted me to,” he muttered, rubbing his shoulder, and Billy narrowed his eyes at him.

“Of course you’ll visit,” Will stumbled out of his nest and hopped over on one leg, trying to disentangle himself from the comforter. “Right?”

“Ye-yeah, of course,” Steve swallowed, his throat feeling like a dry riverbed. “Maybe he’ll come back for the fair this summer. Or--or I could--take you and El and, uh,” he risked a glance at Billy, who’d stalked over to haul the mattress away from the wall and push it towards the fort. “We could--road trip. Disneyland.” He dodged out of the fort as Billy rammed the mattress at him.

“Oh!” Will blinked. “That’s a good idea, the mattress, at home we don’t have a bed that big. You know what, we could use the couch cushions as walls. Do--do you live near Disneyland?” He helped Billy lower the mattress.

“Don’t fucking live anywhere,” Billy clambered back out. “Apparently. I need a--a fucking--smoke.” He grabbed Will’s head with both hands and messed up his hair, and Will giggled, batting at him, and then spent a few seconds trying to get it back out of his face as Billy slammed out the door to the deck.

“Shit,” Steve watched him stomp down the steps. “Shit, shit shit. I--I gotta go--I think I said something--I think he thinks I want him out--”

“Okay,” Will bit his lips.

“I really--I do like him,” Steve groaned, scrabbling at his hair, and wishing it wasn’t true.

“I know,” Will shrugged, grabbing the pile of sheets.

“Shit,” Steve reached to slap the pool lights on on the way out the door, then braced himself as the cold frosted down his windpipe on the first breath. He coughed, ducking his face into his collar. “Shit, shit, goddamn it.”

“Fuck off, Harrington,” Billy’s voice sounded thick.

Steve followed it around to the snowy chairs around the pool, and tipped the snow out of the closest. “I don’t--I’m not trying to--I like you here.” He took a deep breath, dropping into the chair, and frowning over to see Billy’s suspicious eyes barely visible between his hair and his attempt to turtle into the sweatshirt.

“Yeah, I know you’re lonely, Harrington, shit.” Billy raised his chin just enough to take a drag on his cigarette. “‘Course you don’t mind me. You’re too afraid you’re crazy to date. Your old friends suck balls. Your new best friend’s a fucking--toddler. You’re so tired of this empty house you’re watching princess movies. Probably nothing sounds better than some fag hanging around just--leaning into you like you’re a fucking flame.”

“Shit, no,” Steve got out of his chair, and Billy held up a hand.

“Don’t fucking touch me. You don’t--you don’t want all of this pile of--of--screw you.” he took another shaky drag on his his cigarette, and blew a ring. “Don’t fucking touch me if you won’t kiss me, or let me just--christ.”

“Sorry,” Steve swallowed. “It’s not that I--”

“It’s okay around Will,” Billy turned away as much as he could, squirming with his legs curled in the chair. “I know you aren’t actually gonna let me go any further with that. But if you aren’t--if I’m your fucking pound puppy, stop fucking romancing me, it’s--”

“Sorry,” Steve shivered, rubbing his arms. “You’re--you’re so--” He tried to encapsulate the frustration of never knowing how to form his vague feelings into words, to someone who could apparently do it exhausted and shivering.

“What, Steve,” Billy smiled up. “Am I being too complicated? Or is that too difficult a word for you?”

Steve stopped, and considered, feeling a bit like he’d been asked to stand in a grave and handed a shovel. Or maybe smacked with it. “Sorry. I--I’ll go inside now.” Before he turned, he unzipped his sweatshirt, tucked it around Billy--who froze, mid-drag on his cigarette--and shoved his hands in his pockets to tromp back in the house.

He’d almost made it to the door when Billy let out a hacking cough and roared “Harrington! Take your fucking sweatshirt back--I just fucking said--”

When he leaned into the fort, Will was piling up the comforters. He frowned up. “We need a name. And a sign...where’s Billy?”

“I don’t think he’s gonna hear anything I say right now,” Steve shrugged, kicking the pile of pillows closer to the fort, and tossing them singly to Will. “I mean I dunno what to say, but I think if I stumble around with a bunch of bullshit right now, he’ll--” he frowned, suddenly annoyed. “I bet he’d shove me in the pool.”

“Why’s he mad?” Will brushed his hands together theatrically, waving around their colorfully lit blanket cave. “Lemme get my paper and markers--”

“Looks really comfy,” Steve pushed Will over backwards into the pillows, and flopped next to him, ducking away from a flailing arm. He grabbed an armful of fluffiness, and buried his face, until he felt tiny sharp fingers prodding his side.

“Steve,” Will whispered. “Why’s Billy mad?”

After a long fight against the impulse to smother himself with the pillow, Steve lifted his head. “...I don’t…” He groaned, kicking his feet. “I mean. I kinda know, like, he’s mad that I...he thinks...okay,” he folded his arms on a pillow, propping himself up to see Will’s intent face. “Dad Hargrove is such a fucking--he’s a shithead, okay, he’s just--he’s completely--rargh.” He buried his face in his arms again.

“Yeah,” Will waited.

“So Billy keeps--he doesn’t--he doesn’t think he’s...like-able, y’know, like--nobody could ever like Billy Hargrove, to Billy, so--”

“He doesn’t believe you?” Will sat up, crossing his legs, the better to lean in.

Steve sighed, rolling onto his back. “I don’t--it’s like it changes, he thinks I really want Nancy, and I’m lying, and then he thinks I don’t want him at all, but right after that he thinks I want him to--” he stopped with his mouth hanging open, his cheeks heating like burners as he realized he’d almost mentioned blow jobs to Will Byers. After a long pause, about the point Steve was thinking he really did need to breathe, at least, Will prodded him again.

“He thinks you like him sometimes?” Will squinted.

“Whenever I’m mad,” Steve said carefully, “--he thinks I want him to do...stuff, and I don’t know if he even wants to do the--the stuff.”

Will squinted harder, cocking his head. “What kinda--oh.” He cleared his throat, biting his lips. “Stuff. Uh.”

“I don’t wanna do--stuff--if he doesn’t even usually--ugh,” he pulled the pillow over his face again.

“Why...would he...I mean, don’t you believe he wants to--to do--stuff?” he squeaked the last word, hands steepled to hide some of his face.

“Uuuurgh,” Steve lifted his head. “He just wants me less...mad. Like. Like if your mom was upset already, and you took the trash out, you’d be doing it, like--”

“So she wouldn’t cry,” Will nodded, huge-eyed. “Doing--stuff--is like that?”

“I don’t know!” Steve flailed. “Maybe! For Billy Hargrove!”

Will tottered to his feet, staggering across the thick uneven layers of comforter and pillows, and grabbed his backpack. “What are you gonna do?”

“I don’t know,” Steve watched him pull out construction paper and markers. “I don’t know what he wants. I think I do, but then I keep fucking up.”

“You can’t just ask him? Or--oh, is it like--” Will gripped his markers, frowning down. “He just--tries to make you happy?”

“Yeah,” Steve sighed. “Or he tries to make me mad? He’s always just--he does shit to piss me off, he was yelling at me for being dumb out there. I’m not stupid, he’s just crazy.”

Will nodded slowly. “...what should we name the fort?”

Steve army-crawled over to look at the tapes. “Uh, wasn’t this a place?” He waved Cirith Ungol at Will, who wrinkled his nose.

“A bad place. What about--”

“Trespassers Billiam,” Steve pointed, grinning. “All trespassers with that name I toss in here.”

Will made a face, then grinned. “You’re gonna make him mad again.”

“Uuuurgh,” Steve rolled to bury his face again.

“Can’t you just...say you like him...even if he doesn’t do, um, things?”

“He’s leaving anyway,” Steve sighed. “He thinks his mom hates him, but I bet his dad like--got full custody by lying about her, or she’s hiding from him, or--I dunno. It’ll work out. He’s...he’s got somewhere to fucking be.” He punched the pillow, twice, then grabbed it to cover his face.

“...that’s...good, though, right?” Will wouldn’t stop talking, and Steve swallowed a couple times, before raising his head to press his thumb against the bridge of his nose.

“Yeah. It’s great. Of course. He doesn’t need all this, he’s got somewhere to go. If I had the money to g-lend him, he’d be halfway there now. Cloud of--cloud of fucking dust.”

“...you...you could call him. A lot. And, uh, and visit.” The mattress bounced as he shifted closer, and Steve forced out a laugh, sitting up.

“Sorry. Sorry. You came for a sleepover, and I’m not any fun.”

“I’m having fun,” Will grimaced. “Not--not while you’re fighting, but. This is fun. You told me it was a bad time.”

Steve snorted, combing the hair out of his face with his fingers where the pillow-hugging had messed it up. He crawled to the side to fix the blankets.

“You--you know,” Will watched him with wide, determined eyes, and Steve leaned away, “Um, you don’t have to be fun. Not all the time. Your friends will still like you if you aren’t fun.”

Steve almost laughed in his face, but reached over to mess his hair up again instead.

“I mean it,” Will smacked at his hands. “Real friends won’t--”

Steve swallowed back another laugh, and tossed a pillow at him. “I’m glad you’ve got good friends, Will.”

“You have lots of friends! You’ve got Billy, and Dustin, and--and Nancy--”

I shouldn’t take satisfaction in him running aground. Steve let his smile widen. “I’ve got friends when they need something, okay? I get the call when something dangerous is happening, or a kid needs someplace to go--” he waved around at Trespassers Billiam.

“Wait,” Will held up his hands. “No, that’s not--”

“--and I thought he needed me, because--I mean, fuck it, anyway, he doesn’t--shit, I’m sorry, you don’t need to hear this. Fuck.”

“Steve!” Will smacked him in the face with a pillow, tears running down his cheeks.

“Shit,” Steve took a deep breath. “Shit, Will, I’m sorry, I don’t care if you come over. I didn’t mean that.”

Will smacked him again, and again, sitting on his chest to aim properly, until Steve was curled up laughing, arms around his head. “Take all that back, you do too have friends,” he smacked at Steve’s protective arms again.

“Sure, kid,” he snickered, and got smacked again.

“I-am-your-friend,” Will punctuated every word with another whack of the pillow. “Dustin-is-your-friend.” He panted, wiping his face on his sleeve. “I--I think Billy really--really likes you. He got those photos away from me and slid them under the cassettes in his carrier case. I wasn’t supposed to tell you.”

“...blackmail?” Steve suggested, and got walloped a few more times, before Will flopped forward over the pillow, groaning.

“I’m tired and you’re dumb,” he reached down and pinched Steve’s cheeks, hard, and Steve rolled to dump him off.

“I thought a real friend didn’t mind if I wasn’t fun.”

“Screw you,” Will mumbled, throwing the pillow at him, before clambering back upright, pointing at Steve’s face. “You said it! I’m a real friend!”

“Feel better?” Steve grinned over, and got another pillow to the face.

“I do now, yeah,” he sighed contentedly up at the Christmas lights. “Also, I’m telling.”

“What?”

“I’m telling Dustin, and Nancy, and--and your boyfriend, and Mrs. Williams--”

“Holy god, please don’t,” Steve breathed. “Please don’t tell my ex I was whining about her not liking me enough.”

“Mmmm,” Will narrowed his eyes, and smacked him with another pillow. “Okay, fine. But I’m gonna hint real hard.”

“Christ,” Steve whacked him back with the pillow. He wrinkled his nose. “Leave it be, they’ll think I’m clingy.”

“Nancy already knows that,” Will rolled his eyes, and Steve felt his throat click.

He rubbed his face, standing. “Right. Right. She knows I’m--clingy. She said that?”

“Basically,” Will shrugged, and Steve nodded, taking a deep breath and blowing his cheeks out.

“Great. That’s--that’s really great. Perfect. Y’know the only reason Billy likes me is I think I’m the first person who didn’t treat him like shit--”

“What?!” Will squeaked, but Steve cut him off.

“Christ fucking hell, did he freeze out there?” He scrambled over the piles of bedding and loped to the wall to peer through the window. “...should I go get him?”

“...I could? Do you want me to?”

“You,” Steve pointed, “--should be brushing your teeth and putting on--sleeping--things. I’m gonna--” he pointed outside, took a deep breath, and blew it through his cheeks. “...tell my dickhead boyfriend he’s great and I don’t want him to freeze to death.”

Will snickered. “Maybe he doesn’t believe you because you sound so romantic.”

“Okay, you’re like nine, so fuck off,” Steve flicked his head, then ignored his detailed rebuttal, math excuses, and flung pillows.

Will was still yelling “I’m not nine! And I’m still telling!” as Steve set his shoulders, grabbed the afghan Will had left on the couch, and huddled into it to brave the outdoors again.

When he crept ineffectively around the corner of the house, the crunching of refrozen snow reverberating clear to the neighbors, Billy was still curled up in the plastic lawnchair. All of him except his hair and eyes was covered by Steve’s sweatshirt. The whole chair was shaking.

“Hey, dickhead,” Steve tried, hanging back a few feet. “Maybe come inside before you freeze solid?”

Billy laughed. It sounded wet. “Th-think I’m-m already--”

“Yeah, okay,” Steve dropped the afghan over him, sliding one arm under his knees, and one around his shoulders. Billy’s clothes were cold, and stiff to the touch, like a tarp.

“D-don’t you f-fucking d-dare--”

“Come on,” Steve braced himself, and lifted with his knees, and Billy grabbed for him with both arms, stuttering profanity. “Just taking you--inside--oof--jesus, maybe--go a little--easier on the reps.” All curled up, he was heavy as hell, but he still seemed smaller, with his head tucked under Steve’s chin, and his boots in the air.

“Stop--stop this p-prince shit, p-put me down-n,” Billy shivered hard against him, laughing.

“I could throw you over my shoulder like a fireman,” Steve grinned, hoping Will was in the front room to open the door. “But I’m kinda afraid you’d crack in half--”

“You d-drop me,” Billy laughed against his neck, “--and I will c-crack you in half--y-you will fucking d-die, I will f-fucking murd-der you--”

Steve went slow, both unworried and undoubting that he would, in fact, die. And fair enough, if I drop him on his spine down the stairs in the snow. “I’d do it, y’know. Date you. I think you--do you--think I’m shitting you, when I say I’d take you out? ‘Cause I would, I’d fucking do it.”

“...fucking would n-not,” Billy muttered. His fingers clenched in Steve’s shirt so tight it pinched.

Steve held him tighter, pretending to himself it was so he could see the stairs. “I mean, if you weren’t leaving.”

“Fffuck you,” Billy shuddered against his shoulder, in what could have been laughter, or cold.

“I would! We could--we could do the drive-in movie thing!” Steve took a few deep breaths after climbing the stairs, and kicked the door lightly.

“S-sit at the theater, r-room between us for Jesus,” Billy huffed.

“Theaters are dark, dipshit,” Steve squinted through the door, trying to see Will in the dim front room. “You can get up to shit in the back of a theater--” He waggled his eyebrows, and Billy jerked in his arms.

“...think I did fr-f-fuck. F-freeze solid,” he muttered. “C-can’t even kick you. ‘N my lips ‘re numb.”

“I’d bring you forget-me-nots. Frosty.”

“D-don’t want any ff-fucking flowers,” Billy laughed hoarsely. His shivering had slowed, bundled against Steve, but Steve was slowly going numb.

He kicked the door again, trying not to hum ‘Frosty the dickhead’. “Might just eat all the fancy chocolates and stare at you, then, like ‘Look at me, eating all the chocolate, you actual fucking prick.’”

“What the f-fuck,” Billy burst out laughing, and rolled his head against Steve’s shoulder. Despite his flush, his face was cold even through Steve’s t-shirt, but Steve remembered, and didn’t pull hims closer, or bury his face in the soft curls. “You’re g-gonna stare at me and s-slowly eat things? Y-you’re sure you don’t wanna b-blow job?”

Steve started cackling against the side of the door, looked down to see Billy waggling his tongue around, and lost it again. “Shit. Jesus. Okay. Stop that, Will’s coming. How’re you doin’, asshole?”

Billy raised his eyebrows. “D-dinner’s great, ma’am, c-could we get some more breadsticks--”

“Oh, shut up.”

Will ran to the door, and beamed at them as Steve walked by--for all Billy’s griping, he didn’t try to get Steve to drop him. When Steve did set him on his feet, he staggered, started to tilt toward him again, and jerked back, stumbling off through the kitchen like an afghan-swathed grandmother zombie.

“...we better get ready too,” Steve grinned at Will.

“...did you, uh, did you...fix him?”

“...I don’t think I can...fix it that fast, but,” Steve shook his arms out, wincing. “God, he’s like carrying a--like a stone statue, I need a crane or something--we’ll be right back down.”

Will yawned, grinning.

Billy was glaring up the stairs, leaning against the wall, and Steve slid an arm around him slow enough for him to pull away. He didn’t. He was quiet while Steve hauled him up the stairs, and quiet when Steve tipped him onto the lid of the toilet and turned away to run the hot water. The afghan flew by as Steve turned back, but Billy’s hands were shaking too hard to disentangle himself from Steve’s sweatshirt, let alone unzip his own. He was still unnervingly passive as Steve pushed his hands aside and leaned in to unwrap him, and tug the undershirt over his head.

“What the hell was that?” Steve asked, dropping to sit in front of him and yank on his boots. “You were just gonna sit out there?”

“Just th-thinking. Thought I might g-go home,” Billy rubbed his hands together, and up his arms, keeping his gaze on the shower curtain. “I mean it’s n-not like I haven’t run off before--”

“What, no,” Steve grabbed his hand, and Billy yanked it back, thunking his elbow against the toilet.

He grinned down. “Whatcha g-gonna do, Ha-Harrington, lock me in the garage?”

“No! No, why would--don’t--” Steve yanked at his other boot. “Come on, dickface, your lips are blue. At least get in the shower.”

Billy pushed himself upright, and Steve kept his eyes on Billy’s holey athletic socks at the sound of his jean zipper. “F-figure I’d be out of your h-hair sooner.”

“I want you in my hair, Hargrove--” Steve growled, smacking Billy’s leg, and ignoring Billy squirming around trying to get out of his extremely fitted jeans. He clapped his hand over his eyes. “What d’you want from your room? To wear?”

“...whatever, Ha-harrington,” Billy slurred, shivering, and Steve heard the shower stall open, and close.

He slid out to get sweatpants, and change, then wandered back in--eyes on the floor--to sit on the toilet, and brush his teeth. He crossed his legs, trying to get the words everybody else used to play well together in his head. “Hargrove.”

“Yep,” came Billy’s voice, over the sound of a thorough soaping.

“I don’t--” Steve leaned his elbows on his knees, and frowned at the suds on his toothbrush. “I know I--I say stupid shit. But--” he stuck his toothbrush back in his mouth, thinking as he thoroughly brushed his molars, then jumped as Billy smacked the inside of the shower door next to his head.

“Fucking christ, Harrington,” he growled.

“The hell d’you wanna hear?” Steve leaned to spit in the sink, and rinse his brush, then glared over. He bit his lips on a smile at the sight of naked Billy Hargrove, covered in suds, narrowing his eyes. Steve jerked his head away, flushing.

“You opened your fucking mouth when it’s got nothing in it.” Billy smacked the glass again.

“Agh,” Steve let his head fall back against the wall. “Just--just stay here, goddamn. I’m not--you don’t--I’m not gonna be--” he waved a hand, then rubbed his face with it. “‘M not gonna be glad when you leave.”

For a long moment, there was only the sound of running water, and then the sound of bare feet again, and the snap of a plastic cap. “...can’t leave you high and dry with Will, anyway,” Billy’s voice was muffled by the water.

“Yes! That too!” Steve reached over and slapped his side of the glass. “What the hell, Hargrove, you just gonna--just let him think I’d throw you out if we broke up?”

“Maybe I got drunk and kicked your ass again, and you dropped me in a ditch outside of town,” Billy laughed, and Steve started to stare at him, then rolled his eyes and smacked the glass again.

“He wouldn’t believe that--”

“Might if I did it,” Billy tapped the glass, and Steve frowned over, watching the water run down Billy’s shoulder and over his chest, and feeling the blood that wasn’t already in his face redirect to his crotch.

“Shut up--you look like a fucking mermaid in there, you’re all--”

“All?” Billy’s grin widened.

“Wet,” Steve gritted his teeth, and Billy leaned close, and licked up a big swath of the glass. Steve stood and pressed his face against the other side, and Billy stumbled back, cackling, as Steve made fish faces, inflating his cheeks with his lips pressed against the glass.

Billy leaned back in, grabbing the top of the door, and the light refracted off the water in his eyelashes. His curls were dripping down his face and collarbones, then down the edge of his hand as he tucked them behind his ear. His grin looked like it was more at himself than anything else, and his eyes wouldn’t meet Steve’s.

“...at least stay ‘til you graduate, Hargrove.” He put his hands next to Billy’s on the top of the door, running his thumb over wet knuckles. His bruises have mostly healed, I can’t let him go. Back there. God.

Billy licked his lips, and Steve stared. “...you sure you’re up for...all this, Harrington?” he swayed his pelvis at the glass, waggling his tongue, and Steve turned his head and laughed into his upstretched arm, feeling his dick take even more of an interest.

He tried not to squirm in his jeans, turning his eyes back to Billy’s. “Think I know what I’m getting into.”

Billy stepped right up to the glass, leaning his forehead against it, and bit his lip in a grin. “Yeah?”

Steve leaned his forehead against Billy’s, separated by the glass, and Billy closed his eyes for a long slow breath--before pushing away, and yanking his hands free of Steve’s.

“Water’s gonna get cold,” he said hoarsely, sticking his face right up under the showerhead, and blowing his nose.

Steve bit his lips, opened his mouth, closed it, and blew through his cheeks. “Uh. I could just...tell him we broke up. If--if you want, if it’s easier.”

The conditioner bottle bounced off the glass directly in front of Steve’s face, skittered around the floor, and nearly hit Billy’s foot. “Fuck you, Harrington, are you high, make up your fucking mind--”

“No, for real, I mean, we could just tell him. If you don’t want m--to--just. Just say we can’t be togeth--we can’t keep it together ‘cause you’re leaving m--moving away. We’re--we’ll stay friends, you’ll stay here, but I couldn’t--I just can’t--” Steve shut his eyes, running a hand through his hair.

“Oh, ‘cause me leaving is really gonna break your heart,” Billy snorted.

Steve grinned and nodded, eyes stinging, and forced himself to swallow.

“...nah,” Billy turned to rinse, and Steve watched the water run down his spine.

I’m not even hard anymore, he realized--even how hot Billy looked showering wasn’t distracting enough from how empty the shower would look every time he walked in and remembered, and how echoey the house would be--again--without his snide comments about singing princesses, shoes lying everywhere, careful check-ins about hot chocolate, and the scent of his cologne on Steve’s pillow.

“Let’s let him think we’ll exchange syrupy love letters,” Billy shot a grin over, and Steve’s lungs seized.

He cleared his throat again. It didn’t help. “Fuck, yeah, yes, we can--loads of--total dumbshit poetry. Stupid drawings on ‘em. You’ll get a letter with a crunched up candy heart in it and be trying to figure out what it said without saying ‘yeah, your stupid candy arrived broke--’”

Billy finally turned off the water, laughing, and bent to squeeze the water out of his curls. “You don’t need to actually send any goddamn letters, Harrington--”

Right, of course. Steve backpedaled. “Yeah, I don’t have to, shit. It’ll fuck with, like, you getting a girlfriend, or--”

“Why the hell would--fine, send me fucking letters,” Billy took a deep breath. “I’ll fucking--woo you back, you royal ass--”

Steve laughed, holding up a towel as he stepped out, and Billy stepped in to lean against him. Steve kept the towel between his hands and Billy’s wet shoulders, but squeezed him tightly, rubbing the terrycloth up and down.

Billy huffed a laugh against his shoulder, and drew back, back and neck still red from the shower, frowning at everything but Steve. “Why the fuck--that afghan is the ugliest--pink and brown and orange with green tassels?”

Steve snickered, aware Billy’d find other normal not-asshole people the second he got away from his dad, but inexplicably pleased at the permission to send letters. This is even worse, he told himself, firmly. Instead of a clean break, now you’ll be waiting for weeks for a letter. He’ll never even call with an address. It wasn’t like he was any good at letters anyway. Billy’d probably be subjected to bad diagrams of how they lost basketball games. He grinned at the afghan, cheeks warm. “Mrs. Williams made it. She said she wanted it to be cheerful.”

“It’s...bright,” Billy raised his eyebrows, pulling on the sweatpants, and running his fingers through his curls as he patted at them with the towel. He shivered.

“...put something else on,” Steve leaned back against the door, keeping his hands to himself. “You almost froze to death earlier. I’ve got an ugly as fuck afghan and I will use it.”

Billy snorted, shrugging.

“...you think, when you’re back in California…”

After a few seconds of silence, Billy parted the hair in his face to raise his eyebrows through it.

Steve leaned back against the door, sliding to sit against it. It creaked. He closed his eyes for a minute, then flailed his hands. “Just--you think you can go a few fucking days without--driving drunk off your ass, or freezing to death in a--a fucking lawn chair?”

“Maybe?” Billy shrugged, and Steve yanked another towel down and threw it at his butt.

“Come on, fuckhead--”

Billy crouched down to grin at him, tucking wet curls behind his ear, and Steve’s hand twitched toward a drip running along the edge of his jaw. “You almost sound worried about me there, your right royal majesty--”

“I’m worried as hell! What if I’d fallen asleep or something, dingus? You coulda died out there!”

“Dingus,” Billy bit his lip in a grin. He was turning a little red across where he usually hid his freckles, and Steve wanted to grab him and shake him.

“Why do you think I kidnapped you, I was losing my shit thinking--”

“Does it count? As kidnapping?” Billy dropped next to him on the floor, crossing his legs, and cocked his head. “I mean, I climbed out that window on my own. This time.” He stuck his toothbrush in his mouth, and Steve buried his face in his hands.

“Oh my god, twice.”

Billy patted his head, getting up to spit in the sink.

When they wandered down--sharing the afghan--and tiptoed through the kitchen towards the fort, it was glowing from within with the rainbow of Christmas lights. Will was on one edge of the mattress, out cold with his mouth hanging open.

“Trespassers Billiam,” Billy mouthed, wrinkling his nose, and punched Steve in the shoulder.

Steve pointed to Billy, and then the middle of the mattress, and Billy shook his head, eyebrows raised. Steve nodded, miming a shiver, and pointing at Billy again, then several times at the middle spot on the mattress, and Billy rolled his eyes, leaned his head on his hands and pretended to snore, then pointed at Steve, then himself, then the bed, and put his hand on his crotch. He lifted it so it stuck out, widening his eyes at Steve, then pointed to the middle spot, then Will, and made a huge X of his arms, shaking his head.

Steve was trying to keep his cackling silent, shaking his head, but he crawled in, holding the blankets up for Billy to situate himself at the edge opposite from Will. He still felt chilly against Steve’s hands, so he pulled him close, and Billy made a weird noise that might have been a groan if it hadn’t been so high pitched, and clung to the edge of the mattress.

“Fine,” Steve whispered, letting go, and Billy yanked the covers over his head.

Steve smacked a kiss against the lump under the plaid comforter, and Billy kicked back at him.

What felt like moments later, he awoke to Billy’s curls brushing his face as he pulled his arm from under Steve’s head, leaving a chill where Steve had apparently been using Billy’s warm weight instead of a blanket. Steve squinted into the Christmas lights, listening to Billy trying to navigate in the dark and thud against the coffee table. His eyes started to drift shut again, but when he heard the fridge door open instead of the bathroom, he rubbed his face, muffled a groan into the pillow, and crawled out, hands low to intercept any malevolent furniture. He heard a familiar pop and hiss, and sure enough, in the dim light from the stove hood, Billy was leaning over the sink shotgunning a beer. There was another on the counter.

Steve waited--nothing like choking over a shotgunned beer--until Billy sat it in the sink, and folded his arms against the edge of the sink for a few slow breaths. “You okay?”

Billy went perfectly still, watching Steve in the dark window over the sink. His breath ratcheted up as Steve stepped closer, so he stopped, smacked a hand back to find the fridge, and leaned against it.

Billy closed his eyes, lowering his head to rest on his arms again. He was whispering something.

It was nearly as dark in the kitchen as outside, and Steve started to relax, squinting into the darkness, before he registered Billy’s shoulders shaking. “Hey,” he tried. “Hey. Dickhead. Sweetheart. Asswipe. Hey, hey,” he slid a hand over next to Billy’s elbow, and knocked his knuckles softly against the counter.

Billy shook his head without lifting it, and grabbed a white-knuckled handful of his own curls.

Steve bit his lip, but didn’t touch him, stepping close enough to lean in and hear the news that Billy was sorry he was a fucking drunk rotten sack of shit. “Hey, no,” he whispered over the stream of furious apologies. “Hargrove. Honeymustard.” He risked his thumb brushing Billy’s elbow, and he went quiet--so quiet Steve was fairly sure he wasn’t breathing. “Jesus,” Steve whispered. “Come on, breathe, babe. Fucking--cupcake, jellybean, come on, dipshit--”

Billy shook harder, now silent, and Steve finally slid an arm between him and the sink--Billy’s knees bent, and he curled away against the lower cupboards, and Steve almost let him go before registering all the knobs and the oven handle he’d be slamming back into, and pushed him sideways against the smooth wood as carefully as he could. Billy held his arms around his head, face contorted as he suppressed sobs. His wet face gleamed in the dim light, and Steve pulled him in to a careful hug.

“Deep breaths, come on, shithead, jesus--breathe, babe--I scared the shit out of you, christ, breathe--”

Billy made a soft noise in his throat, finally taking an uneven breath against Steve’s neck, and Steve stroked his back. God, not the time to crush him in a hug. Later. I’ll squeeze him until he doesn’t want to leave. The air in the kitchen was cold, and Steve could feel himself getting gooseflesh as he rocked them back and forth. His legs started to ache in the awkward half-crouch. He kinda wished he’d worn a shirt to bed, feeling Billy’s tears run down his collarbones and collecting in the waistband of his sweatpants. Billy’s back felt as cold as earlier as he stroked it, and cupped the back of Billy’s head to hold the constant mumbled “Sorry. Sorry, shit. I’m sorry,”s against his shoulder.

When Billy finally lifted his head, he jerked away, staggering upright to the paper towels and juicily blowing his nose.

Steve allowed himself to be drawn over by the hand clenched on the waistband of his sweatpants.

“Sorry,” Billy panted. “Fuck. Shit. I didn’t--I didn’t get any of that, Harrington, I couldn’t--” he laughed, wiping his eyes, “--I’m too fucking stupid to understand words in my own language, sometimes.”

Steve reeled him back in. It was hard to tell whose heart was pounding harder. “Shit. Jesus. Welcome back. Christ.”

“Missed whatever you yelled at me,” Billy laughed into his shoulder again, still shaking. “T-too much of a fucking drunk to understand words. Couldn’t get my ears to switch on. Tell me what to do again,” he took a slow breath. “I don’t hurt anywhere. You throw me out finally? Fucking--fucking getting drunk in here with your kid out there sleeping? I can just--”

“Jesus, shut up.” Steve buried his face in Billy’s curls, squeezing him, and Billy nodded, taking a shaky breath. “Not fucking throwing you out. I’m not even mad, babe--”

“You’re mad as hell,” Billy snickered, sniffling. “You’re shaking--”

“Not mad at you,” Steve slid his hand up to rub the back of Billy’s neck. “I’m not mad at all at you.”

“...what now?” Billy swallowed. “You’ll get pissed again if I try and blow you. Probably been apologizing. I fucking apologize better now, is that right?” He laughed. “I thought. Y’know, finally, this is the part where you grab my hair and slam my face into the counter.”

“You didn’t do anything, jesus. I don’t give a shit if you wanna finish off my shitty beer.”

“I’m shameful,” Billy snorted into his shoulder. “I can’t stay sober for one day to help a little kid build a pillow fort. You should hate me even more now.” He was giggling, whispering in Steve’s ear, and he wanted nothing so much as to shove away, but he yanked him closer.

“Christ, shut up. Stop--stop telling me I hate you, I don’t.”

“Fucking scum.” Billy breathed against his ear, his warm lips brushing Steve’s neck. “Throw me off those stairs. Back out in the fucking snow. Make a better ice sculpture than I do a human being--”

“Stop,” Steve hugged him closer, pressing their heads together so Billy didn’t lick him. “Sorry I scared the shit out of you. Don’t flip your shit. I shoulda waited.”

“...fuck, I got you all snotty again,” Billy swallowed, pulling away enough to grab another paper towel, and start dabbing at Steve’s chest. “God, I’m disgusting.”

“Y’know,” Steve leaned back against the counter, as Billy pushed him back to wet the paper towel in the sink. “You--you drink a lot, and yeah, you cry a shit ton--”

“Fuck you,” Billy muttered, running his fingers under the faucet to test the temperature.

“No, just, I mean--anybody would, right. Your whole life is bullshit.” He jerked as Billy pressed the hot, wrung-out paper towel against his chest. “I think you’re doing okay.”

“Just blew my lid because you walked in the kitchen.” Billy wiped the hot towel along his collarbones, and Steve shivered, and tried to keep his train of thought.

“Yeah, but like. That’s ‘cause something happened, right. You don’t just--”

“Just fucking ask,” Billy growled, stalking back to the sink and wetting a new paper towel.

Steve pushed himself up to sit on the counter. “No, I don’t--I mean, I can guess, you don’t have to tell me anything. I mean. You don’t...want to, right--”

“Fuck no.”

Steve took the paper towel when he wandered back over, lifting Billy’s chin to wipe under his eyes. “Okay, then.” Billy’s eyes widened and teared up again as Steve carefully patted along his moustache, and Steve yanked him close again, laughing into his hair. “Christ. Maybe if everyone wasn’t so shitty to you, me being normal wouldn’t set you off--”

“You are not normal,” Billy huffed a laugh against his chest. “You are abnormal. You are a fucking mutant. God. I’m fucking exhausted.”

“We should get back to sleep,” Steve didn’t let go. “...d’you need the other beer, first?”

Billy flinched.

“Listen, I...used to, um, I dated Carol’s sister. Couple years older--”

“Shit, I don’t care,” Billy slumped against him, his skin cool and still damp, and Steve kept rubbing his neck.

“No, I know, I just--” Steve grimaced. “Uh, before she went to college, her mom was taking her on this trip for a couple weeks, and she knew she wouldn’t be able to--hide. Y’know. Things. So we said she had the flu.”

“...mmm,” Billy slid his arms around Steve’s waist, yawning.

“So, uh. She came over and hugged a toilet for a few days, and--I mean, it sucked, no lie, but I don’t think you’re any worse than she was.”

Billy grunted, then lifted his head, squinting. “...you’re offering to help me dry out? Jesus, Steve.”

“If you want. I’m good at calling people in sick,” he grinned. “Want me to get you some aspirin?”

“I guess,” Billy mumbled, dropping his head back to Steve’s shoulder. “...wait, that’s why you’re friends with Tommy and Carol. Carol’s sister.”

“I guess?” Steve shrugged.

After he chugged the second beer, Billy allowed himself to be hauled upstairs, and pushed him in the right direction a few times as he stumbled. He swallowed the aspirin dry, then sighed and accepted the glass of water Steve shoved at him, dropping to sit on the floor. He leaned against the bathtub, letting his eyes drift shut as he drank it. Steve grabbed the glass, slapping his toothbrush in his hand, and Billy brandished it, glaring. “...didn’t think you’d noticed,” he breathed, then winced. “I mean--I musta been pretty fucking obvious--I know you saw me hiding the tequila behind the microwave. When we were making bread.”

“I wasn’t sure,” Steve shrugged, outside the open bathroom door, his eyes on the window. “But it’d be, y’know, good, if you could stay sober driving west.”

“Depends on how I’m paying for it,” Billy snickered, and Steve frowned over, but then he shrugged. “Sounds shitty, but. Sure. I guess.”

Steve kept his arm around Billy’s shoulder on the way down the stairs, and Billy leaned in to whisper “So what now, Harrington, do you rock me to sleep?”

“Don’t test me,” Steve whispered back. Jesus, here it is, the part of the slumber party where he’s so tired everything’s hilarious.

“In your lap?” Billy grinned, and Steve barely resisted kissing his face.

“Necessary part of the slumber party,” Steve whispered back, and Billy snorted.

“Never got invited.” He thudded against Steve as they got near the mattress, knocking them both into it, and Steve ended with an armful of Billy Hargrove, trying to giggle silently, the two of them sprawled on top of the blankets. Steve rocked him, whispering Rock-a-bye-baby in his ear, and he laughed harder, strumming an air guitar.

Billy’s silent wheezes of laughter shook the mattress until Will mumbled in his sleep, and he finally just rolled them both sideways off the mound of blankets, curling into Steve and pulling the blanket over their heads. It was hard for Steve to stop laughing, when every time he started to doze off, he could still feel the back pressed against him shaking with giggles.

Will awakened them with Fellowship of the Ring at seven o’clock. Steve squinted at the clock, and then smacked him with a pillow, but Billy waved. “S’fine. Jus’ sleep.”

“Nope!” Will clambered over and dropped his skinny butt on Billy’s back, which was half on Steve, and both older boys yelped. “These books are really long, guys, we gotta get reading. I made a schedule--”

“I thought this fucking kid was cute,” Billy grabbed a pillow, trying to hide, and Steve held up a hand.

“‘Nother hour, Will. Just--just another hour.”

“Fine,” Will groaned, flopping backwards across their legs, and Steve pulled Billy closer, trying not to think about sleeping alone.

When Billy did consent to be awoken, he stumbled and grumbled his way to the kitchen, and Steve huddled tighter under the blankets.

After a while expecting attack, he caught the smell of bacon. He sat up in bed, looking around at piles of blankets and pillows, then followed soft voices to the kitchen, where Will was sitting on the counter kicking his feet, and Billy was chopping something. Steve waited until the blade of the knife wasn’t near anything, and pulled out a chair. “Smells so good in here.”

“He says I’m Boromir,” Billy grinned over. “I have no idea who that is, but--”

“He saves the Ringbearer and prevents Sauron from taking over the world, his mom’s gone, and his dad is a shithead,” Will reported, and Billy cocked his head, nodding.

“Uh, your majesty,” Billy turned to face Steve, wiping the knife, and sitting it back on the counter. “Omelettes are almost ready.”

“We were gonna bring you breakfast in bed,” Will grinned. “And read--”

“Eat first, jesus,” Billy rolled his eyes.

“Really,” Steve stood, preparing to sneak over, and Billy pointed the spatula at him.

“Siddown.”

Steve did. When the omelette, bacon, and fried potatoes landed in front of him, he stared. “Holy fuck, Hargrove, this looks like restaurant food.”

“Yours does,” Billy handed over Will’s--somewhat smaller--selection, and pulled up a chair with his own, which had apparently tipped over and spilled most of its filling.

Steve took a huge bite, and groaned happily. “Oh my god, you asshole, this is amazing. I love the--cheese, it’s melty--there’s crunchy things!” he took another bite, and Billy snickered, choking. “And spicy things!” He took another bite, holding a thumb up. “Mmhmmf!”

Will nodded, wide-eyed. “You cook better than my mom--” he leaned back to yell “Sorry, Mom!” at the ceiling, and grimaced at his plate, while Steve cackled, leaning to bump shoulders with Billy.

“You don’t have to cook all the time, dude,” he shoveled in another bite. “So damn good, though--”

“You’ve never even seen the movies? Steve has the movies,” Will’s track switched back to Lord of the Rings as though they’d never left.

“My dad liked C. S. Lewis,” Billy shrugged, watching Steve vacuum his omelette. “I read Narnia.”

“Narnia,” Will took a big bite and chewed, crossing his arms, and Steve tried not to snort.

“They were friends, y’know,” Billy grinned over. “C. S. Lewis and Tolkien. C. S. Lewis wanted more religion in his books, he was a theologian--”

Will blinked, wide-eyed, and Billy was in the middle of explaining what that was, with phrases like biblical inerrancy and referring to discrepancies between the books of Genesis when Steve could not hold his laughter in anymore. He buried his face in his arms, cackling, and Billy shut up mid-sentence. The knife on Steve’s plate scraped, and he lifted his head, wiping his eyes, to see Billy collecting the dishes.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to throw you off,” Steve snickered. “Oh my god, I have such a--”

“I know it sounds dumb, I’m probably getting it wrong, but you can shut the fuck up now.” Billy cranked on the water, leaning against the sink. “It--it was--I probably didn’t even understand it.”

“Shit, no, you were making sense, that’s why I was laughing,” Steve balled up his napkin and tossed it at Billy’s butt. “You see it, right, Will, here I am fucking--fucking mooning over this curly brunette with booksmarts.”

Will blinked between them, and started giggling. “You did make sense,” he beamed over. “I don’t know anything about that stuff--”

“See? And he’s a toddler, if it made sense to a toddler--”

Will cackled, kicking Steve under the table. “How come I keep getting younger?”

Steve grabbed Will’s napkin and threw that too, and Billy squinted at him. “All this time you’ve been pretending you were normal, and you’re smart as hell, you asshole fuck. I have a type, oh my god.” He buried his face in his arms again, laughing.

“I was just saying what I read,” Billy shook his head, smiling tightly. “I remembered some of it. Don’t get your hopes up that I’m--different, I’m still Billy fucking Hargrove, and that’s--”

“Yeah, you keep saying that,” Steve got up and slid his arms around him, reaching to turn off the water. “I keep finding curly brunettes that are way too smart for me. Long eyelashes and big eyes, jesus.” Billy’s face was hot to the touch when Steve leaned in to kiss his freckles, then his mouth.

“Augh,” Will flailed in the corner of Steve’s eye. “Aaah! I don’t want to know your turn-ons, Steve!”

Steve pulled Billy closer, sliding his hand through the soft curls in question, and tucking his face against Billy’s ear--and Will’s chair groaned against the floor as he pushed it out from the table and fled to the front room.

“Let’s read when you’re ready,” he yelled over his shoulder, and Steve pulled back, clearing his throat, and turned on the water to wash the dishes.

“Fucking chaperone coulda stuck around long enough for a real kiss,” Billy stepped close and leaned his hot face against Steve’s shoulder, taking a deep breath. “Well fucking played, he thinks you think I’m a catch.”

Steve bit his lips, then leaned to bump shoulders. “You know you are a catch, though--”

“Jesus fuck,” Billy shoved away, stalking back into the front room.

Steve turned off the water and followed him out to find him face-down in a pillow, neck and ears red.

“Finally,” Will groaned.

After breakfast, and one chapter of The Fellowship of the Ring, with many questions such as “What are hobbits,” and “What do you mean I missed the dragon,” Billy drove off to the auto-repair place, and Steve did the dishes. Will picked up the phone on the third ring, when Steve yelled that he was up to his elbows in suds, and brought it in to hold to his ear.

“Hey, kid,” came Hopper’s voice, audible to both of them through the loud handset.

“Sheriff Hopper?” Steve took a deep breath. “Did--did something happen?”

Hopper sighed. “Not yet. But Neil Hargrove called. He says there’s stuff missing from his house. He’s considering pressing charges for robbery.”

“...what?” Steve tried.

“He’s accusing your boy Billy of robbing his house.”

“He--he just took--he took socks. Some sweatshirts. His schoolbooks,” Steve breathed, and Hopper sighed again.

“Yeah, I figured. But since Billy’s a minor, it’s sticky. When’s he turn eighteen?”

“I--I don’t know--”

“Huh. Well, we can keep Mr. Hargrove wading upstream with it--”

“But it’s his stuff,” Steve prodded the melted cheese he was scrubbing, his brain watching film of Billy being loaded into a police car, and mug shots, and orange outfits. “They’re--they’re just his clothes--” Will was quiet, holding the phone up, and Steve grabbed the hand towel, drying off so he could take the phone, and pull Will’s head to rest against him.

“Yeah, son, I know.”

Steve flailed an arm, wanting to pace in a circle. “He--he can borrow my clothes, we can give his clothes back--”

“You gonna buy him a new car, too? Calm down, kid. Neil Hargrove won’t realize we’re giving him the runaround for a while. Max said Billy’s leaving town anyway. When?”

“He was--we thought he’d stay here. Just until he graduated,” Steve could hear his voice getting a little high, and tried to swallow down the thickness in his throat.

“Might want to speed that timeline up a bit. We can keep the man chasing his tail--it’ll keep him busy for a while, but it’s gonna piss him off, eventually, and he’s--we don’t know what he’ll try then. Might want to keep an eye on your boy, until you can get him out of town.”

“Shit,” Steve ruffled Will’s hair, dodging Will’s batting hands. “I need to go, Hopper, he’s getting his car fixed. Wait--do you, uh.”

Hopper waited on the line.

“Uh,” Steve swallowed. “You know when I asked you about Billy’s mom. Um, do you--can I have her number?”

“...lemme look it up,” Hopper sighed. “I’ll call back with it--”

“Don’t leave it as a message,” Steve cringed into the phone. “He thinks she hates him, I just wanna talk to her--”

“Yeah, okay, kid.” There were some rustling noises. “I found it, you got a pen?” Steve wrote it in the magnet pad on the fridge, and folded it up in his pocket. “You play it safe, Steve, and give me a call if you need anything.”

“If--if Mr. Hargrove comes?”

“Then you definitely give me a call, and don’t open the door.”

“Okay. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. I gotta go.”

“I can finish the dishes,” Will said in a small voice, once Steve had hung up.

“Shit, thanks,” Steve squeezed his shoulder, and ran to pull on his shoes. “We’ll be back soon. Sorry.”

When Steve pulled up to the service place, they had the Camaro’s hood up, but Billy was nowhere to be seen. Steve popped in the office and took care of the bill, sending up a little prayer that nobody receiving the bill’d look at the make and model of the car requiring a new battery, then accepted a paper cup of coffee, and stood out on the sidewalk. He almost spilled it when he was suddenly drug, Billy’s fist in his jacket, around the corner of the building.

Billy hauled him clear down by the dumpsters, in the cement-walled dead end between the car shop, a cinderblock fence, and what smelled like a neighboring pizza place. “Harrington,” he unfolded a piece of paper from his pocket, and flattened it against his leg. “I--I swung by the clinic first, they had my--”

“Hargrove, I need to talk to--”

“Shut up, shut up,” Billy put a hand over Steve’s mouth, then yanked it back. “I’m--I’m talking, don’t--don’t pretend you can’t hear me.”

“It’s important, dickface--”

“This is important,” Billy held his hands up, twitching towards Steve, then smacked the paper into his hand. “Not to you, but. It’s--it’ll just take a sec, just--come on.”

“Yeah,” Steve nodded, leaning against the wall next to the dumpster to watch Billy pacing around, flicking his lighter five times more than he should have needed to to light his cigarette, and swearing quietly into his cupped hands. “Am I listening or reading--”

“I know this wasn’t--anything,” he waved his hand between them, smirking at the wall behind Steve. “But I thought--if you thought--”

Steve snorted. “My purty talkin’s rubbing off on you.”

“Fucking read it,” Billy leaned against the wall next to him, taking a long draw on his cigarette.

The paper was Billy’s test results for STDs, and Steve blinked, reading “Negative. Negative. Negative.” in a long line.

“If--just, if that’s why,” Billy laughed, blowing smoke in a long trail. “I’m clean. At least. And you came, your majesty, don’t pretend I was no good. You fucking liked it. You liked my mouth.” He flicked his tongue at Steve, but wouldn’t meet his eyes.

“Jesus, B--Hargrove,” Steve folded it back up, his mouth stumbling as his brain started running like a hamster wheel.

Billy snatched it back. “Fuck you, fine, sorry I don’t have a fucking cunt, my liege. Tell me when to clear out when you bring home all those other bitches in the sea--” he shoved by, and Steve caught him around the waist, letting Billy’s momentum spin them around.

“Ssh. Gimme a second, goddamn. Hopper called, your--” Billy’d gone rigid against him, watching his face, and Steve forced a smile. “It’s okay, he’s got your back. For--for now, it’s fine.”

“The fuck did he say,” Billy shoved him back against a dumpster, folding the test results up, and tossing them over Steve’s shoulder.

“Your dad’s...he’s making trouble. You should--”

“The fuck did he say, Harrington,” Billy leaned in close, blowing cigarette smoke that smelled like toothpaste.

“He wants you arrested for theft,” Steve grimaced. “Hopper said they’ll keep him chasing his tail, but you should leave town.”

Billy clenched a hand in Steve’s jacket, and slammed the other one into the dumpster.

Steve grabbed his arm as he pulled back to punch it again, checking his fingers. “Shit, hold on, Hargrove--”

“Just a dumpster, Harrington,” Billy shoved him off. “Just fucking trash back here. Doesn’t matter, let me fucking--”

“Wait, wait, wait,” Steve grabbed him around the upper arms. “Hold the fuck up, don’t break your hand. Come back with me. We’ll go yell in the woods, okay?”

Billy pulled himself into the shaking tension Steve remembered from first meeting him, slapping a smile on his face and allowing himself to be drawn back to Steve’s car. “So I’m going to jail,” he grinned over, as Steve pulled away from the curb. “For taking my shit. That’s new, actually. Used to be for assault. Or I was gonna set myself on fire.”

“What.” Steve tried not to speed--the last thing he needed was Billy deciding he and the sheriff department needed to have a shootout at the OK Corral.

“Yeah, I shoved him back. He said he’d have them try me as an adult. For assault. Adults can get the death penalty. His word against mine. Shit.” Billy let his head loll against the window, his breath coming fast through his clenched teeth. “Adults get the electric chair. I’m big, I’m strong, nobody’ll ever believe I didn’t swing at him. It’s actually lethal injection here, I looked it up.”

“Hopper believes you,” Steve flapped a hand over until he found Billy’s, and squeezed it. “He said he’ll give him the runaround until you get out of town.”

“Sure. I’ve never fucking talked to Hopper--”

“He believes me, then,” Steve swung around a turn. “And I have a bat, babe. Shit. Bi--dickhead. He’s not taking you anywhere.”

Billy was laughing over his verbal stumbling, but his breaths were still sounding punched out of him. “He said I was gonna burn to death. One of these times coming home drunk, if I didn’t go in the ravine, I was gonna--I’d spill some liquor, and drop a cigarette. Burn to death in my car.”

“Christ,” Steve swallowed, listening to Billy try to force himself to breathe. He was making these awful muted screaming noises between his teeth, trying to muffle them with the arm of his jacket.

“Fucking inferno,” Billy whispered, and Steve squeezed his hand again, patting it.

“Tell me about your dumb nerd music. Goblins, and--”

“Didn’t bring any,” Billy’s laugh sounded strangled, as he grinned over, but at least he wasn’t staring at his imagined death out the window.

“What’s that sugar song you’re always singing. What’s that about.”

“It’s--it’s Def Leppard,” Billy swallowed, closing his eyes.

“Almost there,” Steve told him, and kept asking about the band, and their other songs. Billy was describing one of their music videos as they pulled up in the driveway, and Steve squeezed his shoulder. “Okay, I’m gonna go get--we can throw bottles at trees, or something, okay?”

Billy snorted, letting his head fall back against the headrest. “You don’t want me in there around Will.”

“I’m just going in the garage, we don’t need snow in the house. I’ll grab you another jacket.” At Billy’s smirk and nod, he dashed in, grabbed his ski jacket, found a crate, started loading it up with bottles, and saw his bright red toy bat leaning in with the skis. He opened the door to the house and leaned in. “Hey, Will? Everything’s fine, but we’re gonna go and just--scream at the woods--I guess--”

Will’s head popped around the doorway to the front room. “Okay..?”

“Sorry,” Steve waved. “We’ll be back soon.”

Billy was having a smoke, and Steve rolled his eyes, flumping the crate of bottles in the snow by his feet, and digging gloves out of the pockets of the jacket. He grabbed the hand without a cigarette in it to tug a glove on to.

“I’d think being from California, you’d be more worried about the cold, not less,” he growled, as Billy stuck the cigarette in his mouth and surrendered his other hand. He was already pink-cheeked from the wind. “Christ. I hope you wear sunscreen.”

“Why, you wanna put it on me?” Billy allowed himself to be maneuvered into the coat, waggling his tongue.

“Whatever keeps you safe,” Steve groaned, handing over the crate of bottles, and stalking off around the side of the house.

“Where’d that bat come from?”

Steve twirled it. “Got it for me before I was old enough to join Little League. Used to hit trees with it. Doesn’t, y’know, vibrate your whole arm like a wood one.”

“That what that trophy was for? Little League? By your bed.”

“Yee-up.”

“You don’t still play?”

“Stuff happened,” Steve led him over to the trees, and spun the bat around his hand to offer the handle. Billy rolled his eyes, but took it.

“What, I’m supposed to hit a tree?”

“Or throw bottles into that rock over the ditch. Pretend it’s your dad. Pretend it’s--”

“I got something,” Billy tromped through the snow over to a tree, and hit it.

“Harder,” Steve coached. “And call it a fuckhead.” Billy grinned back at him, and shook his head, but faced up against it again.

As Billy got into it, he got louder, and Steve looked over to see Ms. Williams’ face pressed against her window. Billy didn’t notice him waving, too busy roaring profanities at a tree, so Steve jogged over to her house, stomping on the porch and blowing into his hands as she opened the door.

“Sorry.” He waved at the shuddering trunk. “He’s, uh, there’s a lot going on, so I gave him my old plastic bat.”

She nodded slowly. “Well, he doesn’t look like he needs any assistance.”

“Maybe I’ll go back later and cheer,” Steve nodded frowning over the porch railing. “I just didn’t want you to think we were fighting.”

“You look tired, again,” she held out the bowl of strawberry-shaped candies, and he grabbed a handful. Billy’d actually eaten one. Maybe his tongue’s too sharp to mind candy shrapnel. He crouched to hug the head of the nearest dog, and then frowned up. “Ma’am, would you--”

She raised her eyebrows, and he bit his lips. “M-may I use your phone?”

She set him up at her little phone desk, with pencils, and a paper pad, and he dialed Billy’s mother. He let it ring for several minutes, then hung up and let his head drop against the desk.

When Steve wandered back out, he had two mugs of hot cider, and Billy was starting to get slow and clumsy with the bat. “Hey,” he held out the mug, and Billy squinted at it, then at him, panting.

“Where’d...I didn’t buy cider.”

Steve stepped closer, raising his eyebrows, and Billy took it, inhaling.

“...this isn’t mix cider. Where’d you even--” he frowned behind Steve, flushed, and put his hand up and waved.

Steve swung around to see Ms. Williams waving in the window, and waved back. “Figured I’d give you a minute. Y’know, just in case my face was on any of those bottles.”

“What,” Billy laughed. “Why--no.”

“I dunno, you were pretty mad last night.”

“I wasn’t--ugh.” He tossed the bat down to wrap both gloves around the mug of cider. “...thanks for this.”

“Sure,” Steve reached over and brushed snow out of the hair around Billy’s ear. “Should get you a hat.”

“Nah,” Billy grinned. “You can keep doing that all you like. I’m gonna make lasagna,” he took the last swig, and grabbed the bat, “--and then I think I can sit still. Maybe.”

“Use it all you want,” Steve couldn’t fight back a huge grin. “It helped?”

“Didn’t even break the bottles,” Billy shrugged, and Steve grabbed one and hucked it at the rock he’d pointed out in the ditch, sighing as it exploded in a shower of sparkles.

“Might as well. That one was my math teacher who uses essay questions.” He grabbed another. “And Hawkins Labs.”

Billy watched, mouth quirked, then grabbed one, frowned at it, biting his lips together, and threw it with a grunt of effort. He took a shaky breath when it shattered, and Steve wondered who it had been aimed at, but just offered another. Billy got through about half the crate before they were both laughing too hard, bent over.

“So,” Steve staggered, snickering, and Billy grabbed his jacket, steadying them both. “You were not in Little League.”

“Fuck you! How the hell do I keep missing--”

“It’s a huge fuckin’ rock,” Steve wheezed, smacking his shoulder. “It’s huge, how--we’re like twenty feet away, dude--do you need me to paint a target on there, or--”

“I could probably lift it--I could throw you at it--” Billy slid an arm around Steve and hefted him, grinning, and Steve kicked, shoving at his shoulder, and discovering the appeal of muscles that could lift him one-handed.

“No! No! I’m sorry!” he cackled. “I won’t make fun of your shitty-as-hell aim! I promise--here, put me down,” he stumbled in the snow as Billy sat him back on his feet, and turned away to cover his face. Oh my god, would it be too obvious if I put SNOW on my face, I’m on FIRE, wait, I need to just--he let himself fall forward, flumping body-length in the snow. Calm the fuck down, Steve, he’s leaving. He’s leaving. He’s leaving. If you jumped him right now he’d probably think he owed you. Just--just pushed him right down in the snow and yanked his pants open. Kissed his lips until they were hot from our breath. Christ.

“What the fuck,” Billy crouched next to him, prodding his shoulder.

Steve lifted his face out of the snow enough to talk. “I’m making a snow angel.”

“I think you’re doing it wrong,” Billy dropped next to him. “You’re such a dork. Can you breathe?”

“I’m fine,” Steve groaned. “Kill me.” He turned his head, opening his mouth, and Billy was sitting in the snow, watching him with pink cheeks and snow in his hair. Steve put his face back in the snow, willing the hot tightness in his pants to subside, particularly where it was kinda squashed by a lump of snow. “Christ,” he whispered, into his hands.

“If you’re so amazing, you throw them,” Billy growled, punching his butt.

“I will,” Steve tottered to his feet, arms numb, and regretting his decision to stick his dick in the snow, even if in hindsight he couldn’t think of a better idea that didn’t involve Billy’s mouth--jesus, I need a long shower with the door locked. He tried to push his hair out of his face with gloves on, and then just shook it. “I’ll show you up. Gimme a bottle.”

Billy got up, brushing himself off, eyebrows raised.

“And name it.”

“What?” He frowned over.

“Fucking name it, or picture a face, or something.”

“Okay?” Billy held one out, and Steve threw his best pitch into the mound of bottles that’d rolled unbroken from either side of the rock. The crash sent some birds flying up from the surrounding trees, and Billy burst out laughing, wide-eyed. “Holy shit.”

Steve accepted the last couple, tagging an outlier, then waggling the last one. “This one’s just a ‘Fuck it, why do you have to leave.’”

Billy blinked at him, watched it shatter, and ducked his head. He took a deep breath, tucking his hair behind his ear.

Steve slung an arm around him. “Come on, dickweed. Let’s go make lasagna. Tell me what to do.”

“Fuck no,” Billy leaned into him, glancing over with a small grin. “I’ll tell Will what to do with the food. You can read to us about goblins.”

#harringrove #stranger things #stranger things fic #platypan #platypan fic #Apparently metal bands loved Lord of the Rings #So does Will #Steve just wants Billy to stay #Billy just wants an excuse to #Neil Hargrove deserves an ACME falling anvil #Fake relationship to convince Will it's safe to be LGBT+#Fake relationship so Billy and Steve can slow dance in the pillowfort

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smokeybrandreviews · 5 years ago

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Smokey brand Movie Reviews: Don’t Stop Me Now

This Wuha sh*t has me f*cked up but it’s been pretty legit with all the new release flicks on streaming. I’ve seen a ton of movies i missed in theaters here on my couch and it has been glorious. One i decided to skip because of all the little chil’lens was Sonic the Hedgehog. I’m a massive fan of the Sonic from way back when so i was concerned how this movie would be received, especially after that god-awful reveal initially. Dude had human teeth and it was horrifying. Paramount put it back in the cooker for a few months and popped out something a little more accurate, much to my surprise.This thing came out and blew up the theater market, also to my surprise. I couldn’t believe how accepted by the masses this thing was. Since it’s out on streaming now, i finally decided to check it out. After my first viewing, I have a few qualms but so much more to gush about.

The Good

First and foremost, thank god Paramount decided to shelve that original Sanic design. Goddamn was that hing creepy. This new one hits the sweet spot between Classic and Modern Sonic perfectly. F*cking good job.

Sonic the Hedgehog feels like an MCU Spider-Man film and i love. That opening sequence felt right in line with Tom Holland and his ridiculously lovable quips. When he hot me with that “great power” line, i almost sh*t myself.

The usage of the rings was surprisingly dope. When i saw their ability in the previews, i thought it might be stupid but, to my surprise, it was pretty interesting. No spoilers but it’s a nice plot device.

All of those game references are adorable. I mean, that Mushroom World reference, tho. Outstanding.

The contrasting themes of friendship and loneliness, while a little trite, are more than enough to give proper depth to a relatively shallow plot. There’s a ton of soul in this flick which i think is because of these particular themes and how they’re explored.

I have to say, this score is pretty legit. I thought we’d have something special with that opening Queen ballad but it just kind of kept coming with the bangers. did not expect that from a Sonic the Hedgehog adaption.

But that sound design, tho. I mean, the rings, Sonic’s spin dash, and even that little Green Hill remix; I loved al of it!

Ben Schwartz as Sonic is amazing. Dude fills those shoes perfectly. I grew up on the old cartoons with Urkel so dude had to bring the fury to impress and, boy, did he. Schwartz bring this effervescent, lovable energy to Sonic that immediately endears the blue blur to your heart.

James Marsden is quite charming as Thomas Wachowski. Dude is usually rather dry for my taste but i actually enjoy him in this. Dude has an absolutely brilliant chemistry with Schwartz and considering dude is a cartoon, that’s saying a lot. All hail Donut Lord!

Tika Sumpter was surprisingly hilarious as Maddie Wachowski, Tom’s wife. She has a very small amount of screen time but she kind of killed it when she was onscreen. I think she had potential going forward but it might be tricky giving her proper due in the future.

Jim Carrey is absolutely brilliant in his aggressive, manic, self. I miss this Carrey, that Mask/Ace Ventura Carrey. His Robtonik hits all of those nostalgia notes and i love it. I hope he returns for the sequel, if there’s a sequel. His Robotnik is mad insidious and i’d love to see what he can do in Mobius.

Shout out to Crazy Karl!

The Bad

Ugh. That Floss, tho. Really?

The plot to this flick is kind of generic. You’ve seen this buddy cop cartoon shtick before. Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Iron Giant, Peter Rabbit, Bumblebee, the f*cking Smurfs; This type of flick might as will be a trope. Still, Sonic’s execution more than makes up for it’s pedestrian framing device.

The pacing of this movie is a little funky. The relationship between Tom and Sonic feels like they rushed through the necessary milestones but this movie is only a little over an hour and a half so i imagine expedience is necessary.

This is more a nitpick than anything because i actually really like this effect but the way they address Sonic’s super-speed isn’t anything new or innovative. It’s kind of just Quicksilver meets Blue Hedgehog but the way it’s executed is pretty dope.

Sonic is definitely a family film. It’s nothing heavy or super deep, but it is fun as hell. I’ve seen a lot of reviews kind of ding it because of that but i, personally, didn’t have a problem with it. Still, if you go into this looking for some super philosophical dive into the human condition or expect it to be as funny as a Chappelle standup, you’re going to be disappointed. I don’t think this is too terrible but it can be considering a limitation i guess? I dunno. I’m reaching for sh*t to dislike at this point.

The Verdict

Sonic the Hedgehog is one of the best video game adaptions i have ever to seen. I thought Detective Pikachu was the clear winner but this one gives it a real run for it’s money. It’s incredibly adorable, has fantastic performances, and genuine heart. Ben Schwartz give a life to sonic that rivals Jaleel White and i say that with all of the nostalgia i have for those old Sonic cartoons. Jim Carrey steals every scene he’s in and even James Marsden is great. Dude is usually kind of iffy in my opinion but he’s great in this. Probably all that practice with the other computer generated, anthropomorphic, animal movies he’s in. Look, i loved this movie. I absolutely did. It has it’s problems but, i mean, its f*cking Sonic and it’s good. It’s a good Sonic the hedgehog movie and that’s saying a mouthful considering the majority of the games that predate this thing. This movie is more Sonic than anything Sonic team has released in the last two decades and that;s absolutely ridiculous. I can’t wait for another one, as long as they maintain this level of quality.

This movie made me smile. Genuinely smile. I love Sonic. I’ve loved Sonic since i was a kid. Sonic the Hedgehog 2 is one of my all time video games. It’s the reason i got a Genesis way back when. In a world where Bayhem corrupted my beloved Transformers and Disney dropped the ball with Star Wars, seeing Sonic done proper justice on film is absolutely blessing. If you love the Blue Blur like i do or just enjoy wholesome family entertainment, this flick is definitely for you.

#Smokey brand Movie Reviews #Sonic the Hedgehog

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chuckletons · 7 years ago

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this probably sounds so weird to ppl who haven’t seen the cartoon but uh:

homnibus, father time, mother nature, johan & peewit, etc. you know, those other characters that exist

speaking of homnibus, his adopted son justin that was only in one episode (to smurf a thief) and then never mentioned again

the other species of mythical creatures. there’s fairies, pixies, elves/woodelves, mermaids, imps, all these other characters that never saw the light of day again????

to add onto the third bullet: other locations such as pussywillow hollow and the swamps and whatnot

all the villains!! there’s so many and even though gargamel is the main villain, villains like balthazar and chlorhydris also exist and pose a larger threat than the others do most of the time

background smurfs from like season 2-3 like tracker, sloppy, weakling, tuffy, nosey, timber, etc. (and later season smurfs like weepy, flighty, dabbler, the list goes on) in which some have only made reappearances via the smurf village app and some merch (specifically tracker) but basically no other media since the 80′s

baby smurf had magic powers we knew nothing about???????????????

me looking at 80′s smurfs and seeing all the wasted potential that was never used in any of the movies and probably never will be

#i'll add onto this whenever i get More Thoughts but feel free to add more #but this is why i'm so disappeared by all three movies. they lack so much that i loved abt the cartoon and so much is just glossed over #*disappointed #you can make a smurfs movie for kids and do it effectively while not just reaching for ''trendy'' humor and whatever else #like???????? god #at least the third one was good in a few areas but still lacked a lot of what made the cartoon and the comics so interesting #the smurfs #smurfs #hb cartoon #my posts

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itsfunnierin-enochian · 6 years ago

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Happy Halloween!

Pairing: Rob Benedict x Reader

My Beta ❤: @gettingbywithalittlehelp96

Summary: When you thought about Halloween this year, you actually didn't expect what the holiday brought to your life

Warnings: Mostly Fluff!

A/N: This just came to me because of Halloween and because Rob dressed as Mario is the cutest thing in the world! Thank you to my amazing beta for helping me with this and I hope you like it!

After work, you were excited to return home. It was Halloween and you had loved the holiday for as long as you could remember and even though you lived alone and didn't have kids to enjoy it with you enjoyed decorating, and how other kids would walk to your door in awe with the decorations and all the sweets you gave out.

This year as you arrived back home, you looked at your garden and thought to yourself that maybe you went a bit too far. You’d spent a lot of money on it all, but what did you work for if not to please yourself every once in a while? Then as you were climbing the porch to your doorstep the pumpkins that you had placed on the stairs started to light up, and you let out a chuckle. You liked the idea of putting those motion sensing lights in them so when someone got close they would light up, and you knew the kids especially would enjoy it.

After you showered and relaxed for a while, you put on the costume you bought. It wasn't original or fancy, but you loved it and had always wanted one. It was a Luigi costume, from Mario Bros and you had to admit you were a little bit too excited about it. You knew many kids probably wouldn’t recognise it, but you didn't care. You also knew that more people digged Mario, and that made you want to pick him even more.

With the candies in their bowls, and the lights on outside you were ready to receive the trick or treating kids. You even decided to put on some music to lighten up the mood, because even though it was all very exciting you were still alone.

“Trick or treat?” You heard some kids yell, before your doorbell rang.

That got you really excited. Quickly, you ran to your door and opened it revealing three little kids dressed as Smurfs.

“Nice costumes!” You complimented them as you put some chocolates and lollipops in their pumpkin shaped bags.

“Our mum's made them,” one of them said, looking back at their mother who was waving at you.

You waved back with a smile.

“I like yours too,” the girl, who seemed the oldest, said with a sweet smile.

“Thank you so much!” you exclaimed finishing up, filling their pumpkins. “Okay, there you go guys. Enjoy!”

“Thank you,” the kids yelled in unison, running back to their mother.

The whole night was like that, with a lot of kids coming and going in their original costumes. Many of them complimented you on your costume as well and you couldn’t tell if that was because they recognized it, or just liked the looks if it.

“Trick or Treat?” You heard a boy say, before a conversation took place and then he and what you knew was a little girl's voice yelled again “Trick or Treat?”

As you opened the door, the little girl hide behind, who you supposed was her dad. The young boy, however, smiled widely and showed you his bag which you filled with lots of candy. Once you finished you went to look up at the girl but instead your sight quickly went to the man standing next to them.

“Oh fuck,” he said mouth agape looking at you.

“Uncle Rob!!!” Both kids yelled distracting him. meanwhile inside your head you said ‘great, he's the uncle Rob and the costume is the twin to yours...’.

“You'll have to give us some money,” the little boy told him, with a very cheeky grin on his face.

“I am sorry, kids. Wh-” Looking up at you, he trailed off and began to smile.

“Hi Mario,” you said laughing, the kids joining in.

You found it funny how cute this grown man looked in his Mario costume.

“Hi” he said, his eyes not leaving yours, and you… you couldn't help but stare either. Those blue eyes and smile were truly incredible.

Before you or him could say anything else, the little girl spoke up.

“Hey, you didn't put any candies on my bag,” she said tugging your clothes.

“What?” You shook your head and looked down at them. “I'm sorry kids. Here,”

Dumping what was left of the contents from your bowls into their bags, Rob watched you and let out a laugh.

“Wow! Thanks!” they yelled, starting to rummage through their bags excitedly.

“So, Luigi… I thought I was the only person that decided to dress as one of the Mario Brothers,” Rob said smiling sweetly.

“Me too. I feel like people don't appreciate Mario and Luigi nearly enough.”

You both laughed and he nodded and stretched his hand.

“I'm R-” he started but was interrupted immediately.

“Uncle Rob, let's go” the kids yelled as they were going down the stairs, noticing and starting to play with the pumpkins.

“I'm Rob” he finished with a smile

“That’s what I heard. I'm Y/N, nice to meet you”

“Nice to meet you too, I- You-” he started stuttering awkwardly, just going to start talking again when the kids called out for him.

“Uncle Rob, we're leaving!” they called out as they walked slowly to the gates

“We’re going to go tell mom that you said a bad word," the boy teased him.

“You better go,” you said laughing, “that kid will get you in trouble”

“They really are terrible. It was nice to meet you though Y/N.”

Kissing your cheek he pulled out nervously and smiled before he followed the kids and you watched them walk away.

Closing the front door you let out a sigh, and were sure that you had to look like one of those cartoon characters with the big hearts in your eyes. The man was beautiful. Even more so with the way he was with his nephew and niece and how cute he had looked in that Mario costume made your heart warm.

Then there was those blue eyes, and that very attractive white patch on his beard. Damn he was gorgeous. You remembered every detail of him, the softness of his beard when he kissed your cheek, his hand so strong and soft, his smile. You hated how a stranger could have such an effect on you. He looked so familiar, too, but you couldn’t remember ever meeting him before.

Noticing that you had given out all the sweets, you decided to shut off the porch lights and decorations, because otherwise you were going to get a lot of tricks. Luckily it was getting late anyway so there weren't a lot of kids out on the streets.

Slipping out of your Luigi overalls you returned to your couch, still so amazed by that man that came to your door that you tried to distract yourself by putting on a movie and getting some food. It was working too, until you heard the ring of your bell again.

“Damn” you said to yourself, thinking that there were probably angry kids at your door because you had run out of candy, but when you looked through your window, your heart skipped a beat as you saw Rob was back on your porch.

“I'm coming!”

Quickly getting a pair of shorts on, you stumbled your way to the door and opened it and smiled at the man on your doorstep.

“Were you busy? I'm sorry I should have… I-"

You smiled.

“No, I was just watching a movie and eating. What are you doing here?”

Looking him over, you noticed he had changed his clothes as well. He now had on a black and white flannel shirt and a pair of jeans. He looked and smelled delicious.

“I just- I've never seen you around and, uh, my niece insisted that we were meant to be because we were in matching costumes. You know, kids stuff," he laughed nervously. “And also she sent you this.”

Reaching out, he handed you a bag with some of the candy you had given out in it.

“Why?”

“Because she said you gave them everything and there was nothing left for you,” Rob answered smiling.

“Oh God, that's so sweet but you are definitely going to have to take this back to them.”

“Uhm…alright, I guess i’ll just…” He pointed to the gate and turned to walk away.

“Where are you going?” You asked confused, causing him to turn around. “You’ll have to take that to them, but later. For right now maybe you can join me. We can change my chick flick for a spooky movie.”

Stepping aside, you waited for him to come in, which he eventually did with another big smile. Following along behind him, you walked over to the couch and could tell that he was still feeling nervous, and knew you needed to do something to try and calm him down.

“Take a seat, Mario, I don't bite.”

You noticed a change right away, and after you went to the kitchen to bring a glass and a plate, you returned to find him sitting on the couch.

“So, Clueless, that's your pick for Halloween?” he asked looking at your tv that had the movie paused.

“Hey, don't judge me. I was bored. Do you eat pizza? Or do you want something else? I have eggs, pie, coffee ice cream…”

His eyes widened and he looked at you in surprise.

“You like coffee ice cream?” He asked with a grin.

“Oh yes. I know some people may not like it, but it’s my favorite! Why?”

“I love it! It's actually my favorite as well.”

You liked that you already had a couple things in common and it might of been silly but he already seemed like a really nice guy.

“Well, I guess we’re going to have to have some then,” you said sitting down next to him, and serving him a slice of pizza. “So, do you live nearby? I've never seen you before.”

He followed your every move and it was becoming very hard to hid how it was making your heart race.

“No actually, I don't. I just came to see my sister and since she had plans I had to babysit the kids. What about you? Do you always invite strangers that show up at your door dressed as Mario in for dinner?”

You giggled at how casual that sounded.

“No," you said as your laugh died down. “Actually, it never happened to me. I invited you in because you obviously can’t be too dangerous if you were trusted to take someone else's kids out trick-or-treating.”

“You have a point there, but really I had to pay to them.”

You both started to laugh again, before taking a couple bites of pizza.

“Actually,” He continued. “I live on the other side of the city, and since I'm travelling tomorrow I decided to come visit.”

“Awe what a good uncle,” you teased. “So you don’t have any kids of your own then?”

“Thanks and no, no kids. You?” He hit his face with the palm of his hand. “No obviously you don’t, I would’ve seen them by now if you did.”

“It’s fine but no, I don't. I'm free as a bird. That's why I invite strangers dressed as Mario into my home. Even though I didn’t know he had more clothes.”

He started to laugh and you felt happy that you had made him laugh, because he was even more beautiful when he did.

“You look good though, in your other clothes,” you added with a smirk.

“Thank you, same with Luigi” he said still chuckling while he looked at you.

You kept talking a bit more and soon found you were really comfortable with him, which was a bit strange considering you’d just met, but he was sweet and kind, and you liked how you could talk about all sorts of nonsense with him, but an hour later, after sharing the tub of your coffee ice cream, he started to stand up.

“I have a long drive back home but I do really wish I could stay a bit longer,” he announced looking down at you. “You are a very cool and beautiful Luigi.”

As the compliment came out he blushed and you felt your own cheeks beginning to redden.

“Thank you, Rob, and thank you for coming back. I actually can say the same about you too.”

“Absolutely, I had to. I- if you're ever near my place. Give me a call. We can go to the beach or something,” he said as he wrote his number on a piece of paper that was on your table. As he did you couldn’t help but to stare at him and think about how you didn’t want him to leave.

Taking another piece of paper, you wrote your number on it. “You too, call me or stop by when you come back here.”

“Oh,” he responded with a wide, giddy, smile as you put the paper in his shirt’s pocket “I will.”

“Take care yourself, Rob.”

After placing a kiss on his cheek you walked him to your door, and then watched him walk away. It was a very strange night. You never thought about letting a stranger into your house before, but something seemed different about Rob. Something about him, made him not feel like a stranger.

A Week Later

It felt like your phone had been ringing nonstop and when you were finally able to pick it up, you saw the message.

Rob

Hey Luigi! Open the door!

You were confused and in that moment you heard two knocks on the door, which had you running right over. Opening the door, you found Rob leaned up against the doorway.

“I just landed, and I couldn't stop thinking about you this whole week. Wanna go on a date?” he said all in one breath before letting it all out with an exhausted breath.

There you were mouth agape and he was still able to make you smile, and blush, but that whole week you had been just like him. Not a second went by that you didn’t think about him. You shared a couple of messages but not much more and still that night replayed over in your head.

“I say yes.” His face lit up, but he still looked so tired. “First, though, come in and rest and we will have some coffee ice cream.”

Relaxing a bit, he walked inside your house, placing a soft kiss on your cheek as he walked by. Making your heart race again, just like the first time you saw him.

TAGS: @marichromatic • @missihart23 • @natasha-cole • @notfunnystillhere • @kocswain • @apeshit7x • @princess-of-erebor1992 • @rblstrash • @spnmightkillme • @tas898 • @wontlookaway • @sirraxa • @damn-it-destiel • @i-hear-crazy-calling-my-name • @burningrupture • @internationalmusicteacher • @sherlockedtash88 • @cyrilconnelly • @srtaprieto • @dropthepizza346 • @queenofhellwithcrowley • @pinkykayley • @lauragail2007 • @two-sidedsoul • @shanghai88 • @klinenovakwinchester

#Rob x Reader #rob benedict x reader #rob benedict x you #one shot #my fics #happy Halloween #rob benedict rpf

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aion-rsa · 3 years ago

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The Real Ghostbusters: The Rise And Fall of The Coolest Cartoon Of the 1980s

https://ift.tt/3Aktlu4

The 1980s was a golden era for animation on TV. It was the decade of Thundercats, Inspector Gadget, Transformers, Ducktales, The Smurfs, He-Man and The Masters of the Universe, Care Bears, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Yet arguably the era’s greatest cartoon came in the form of The Real Ghostbusters.

The show arrived at a time when animated spin-offs based on popular blockbuster movie properties were everywhere in the world of television with companies eager to translate box office gold into something palatable to younger audiences. It didn’t always quite go to plan, of course, as short-lived and ill-advised animated incarnations of everything from Rambo to The Karate Kid can attest.

But The Real Ghostbusters was different, running for 140 episodes across seven seasons.

It was a little different from the film. For one thing, the title had to be tweaked due to a dispute with Filmation who were making an animated version of the 1970s series The Ghost Busters at the same time.

The Ghostbusters themselves looked a little different too: Egon Spengler inexplicably sported a blonde pompadour, Ray Stantz was a little tubbier (and ginger), Winston Zeddemore seemed younger, while Peter Venkman suddenly became very chiseled. They sounded slightly different too with Ernie Hudson the only member of the original cast to try out for a voice role on the show. The fact he ended up losing out to Arsenio Hall for the role is, well, awkward to say the least.

The only other noticeable departures came in making Slimer, the glutinous green ghost from the first movie, a sidekick character and the presence of a synth-laden soundtrack by Tonya Townsend and Tyren Perry performing under the stage name Tahiti.

Cosmetic changes aside, however, this DIC Entertainment and Columbia Pictures television production retained much of what made the original movie so special with episodes blending intelligent and occasional slapstick comedy with effective supernatural scares and strikingly surreal imagery.

A lot of that had to do with executive producers Joe Medjuck and Michael C. Gross. Both had served as executive producers on the original film (Gross is even credited with creating the iconic Ghostbusters logo), and both appeared eager to carry the ethos of the movie through to the cartoon.

“The most brilliant thing they did was to not change a thing from the movie,” The Real Ghostbusters writer Dennys McCoy tells Den of Geek. “When you mess with that formula, you inevitably fail. Ghostbusters has a very tight structure of four friends or five if you count Janine. You have to base everything out of their relationship, no matter what you do. To me, that’s what happened when they did Extreme Ghostbusters [the short-lived late 90s reboot of the series.] The Real Ghostbusters stuck to the tenets of the movie, and continued to tell that story”

McCoy’s writing partner and wife, Pamela Hickey, also recalls how much importance was placed on authenticity right down to the series bible – a set of notes commonplace in writing of this kind which was established to ensure continuity.

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“When you wrote for someone like Venkman, for example, he had to say things in a certain way. That was the focus when we were working on it,” she says. “The rule with Slimer was to imagine him as a seven year old boy. That was how you wrote for him. They made him their pet and he’s domesticated now like a feral cat….You had to really track those characters. That faithfulness was crucial to its success.”

McCoy and Hickey recall the biggest compliment ever paid them by Medjuck and Gross was when they said they could pick up one of their scripts, remove all of the character names and still know exactly which Ghostbuster was saying what line.

“That was the challenge,” Hickey says. “But that was also how much we all loved these characters. They got stuck in your head.”

Hickey and McCoy have enjoyed a prolific writing partnership that includes over 50 different credits. It was their agent who first floated the idea of them writing for animation. As jobbing creatives at the time, the idea appealed because as Hickey puts it they “needed some money for an air conditioner and changing table for a baby.”

Their first script was for the 1980s series Heathcliff, a cartoon based on the comic strip of the same name which featured the legendary voice of Mel Blanc. McCoy recalls submitting a script that was “sight gag after sight gag.” It went over well and the pair quickly warmed to the idea of writing for animation.

“The thing we found we loved about it was that we could direct the episodes in the script,” McCoy explains. “It gave us so much control. We could call the backgrounds, the sound effects, the camera angles, we could do all of that.”

Fast forward a couple of years and, after seeing Ghostbusters at the movie theater, McCoy learned that an old acquaintance, J. Michael Straczynski, had just been hired as story editor for a cartoon series based on the film.

Straczynski would go on to create Babylon 5, wrote comics for Marvel and DC and penned scripts for Thor, Changeling, and World War Z and many more. He had been hired to join original writers Len Janson and Chuck Menville after ABC’s initial order of 13 episodes was suddenly bolstered by a further 65 which would be used for broadcast syndication.

The huge jump in demand for episodes ultimately required multiple writers on The Real Ghostbusters. While Straczynski, Janson, and Menville wrote many, they were joined by a host of talented writers from the world of sci-fi and animation past and present.

There was Michael Reaves, who would go on to earn acclaim for his work on Disney’s Gargoyles and Batman: The Animated Series and future Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine scribe Marc Scott Zicree. John Shirley, a fantasy and horror writer who penned the 1994 movie The Crow, contributed episodes as did David Gerrold, a writer on the original Star Trek series.

Mark Edward Edens, who would go on to develop the iconic X-Men animated series, worked on the show, as did Richard Mueller, Kathryn Drennan, Steve Perry, and Linda Wolverton to name but a few. Wolverton would later make history as the first woman to write an animated feature with 1991’s Beauty and the Beast.

McCoy was working at Saban Productions as supervising producer on a series called Kidd Video when he learned Straczynski, who he had previously helped get a job writing for a magazine over at Time-Life publications, was doing The Real Ghostbusters.

Calling Straczynski up, he asked if he and Hickey could pitch for the show. Looking back, McCoy says he later realized Straczynski was “doing me a favor” by saying yes and didn’t necessarily think anything would come of it. That was until he read the resulting script, which was one of the first to make Winston the main focus.

“We looked at the thing and realised the way we’re going to get a story out of this is to make it about Winston,” McCoy explains.

“Nobody was going to pitch a Winston story. They were all going to pitch stuff around Venkman,” Hickey adds.”But we remembered that amazing scene in the film where Ernie Hudson and Dan Aykroyd are driving across the Brooklyn Bridge.”

The scene, in which Winston talks about the Bible and theorizes that the recent spate of spiritual activity could be linked to the potential onset of Judgement Day, proved to be a major inspiration.

“Winston cracks the case right there,” Hickey says. “We saw that and right away there was more to him than meets the eye. He’s a very literate guy.”

The result was “Boo-Dunit,” an inventive episode that saw Winston take center stage after the Ghostbusters are called out to the estate of recently deceased Agatha Grizzly where occupants are being terrorized by the ghosts of several characters from her final unfinished novel.

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“We made Winston a big fan of murder mysteries. So there was then this whole thing where he had to solve this mystery involving ghosts in order to stop people getting killed in the real world,” McCoy explains.

Straczynski loved the script and Hickey and McCoy went on to produce nine more during the show’s run, putting them among the most prolific writers on the series.

“Every time they wanted a weird story, they’d come to us,” McCoy says. “It was a very interesting environment because the syndicated shows were run by [Straczynski] where we had a lot of freedom. But the episodes for ABC, which were run by Len [Jensen] and Chuck [Manville] were under network protocols which were very strict.”

It was the syndicated episodes that gave the team more freedom.

“On the syndicated episodes of The Real Ghostbusters it was no holds barred,” McCoy says. “You could get away with a lot more as long as you stayed faithful to the characters. The sky was the limit.”

This environment gave birth to arguably the most famous of the couple’s episodes and one that ranks among the very best from The Real Ghostbusters’ run: “The Devil to Pay.” It sees the gang sign up to take part in a gameshow, with the prize of a trip to Tahiti up for grabs. However, they soon discover it’s being run by the Devil himself and if they lose he gets to claim their eternal souls as his prize.

“It started with us asking ‘What would they do if they were on a game show with the Devil?’ And just went from there,” Hickey says. “We figured the Ghostbusters might want to go on a vacation so would sign up for this game show.. To be honest a lot of the writing was us just sitting there for a couple of days trying to crack each other up. ‘What kind of game would you play with the Devil?’ Dennys would ask and I would be like Wheel of Fortune.’”

The end of the episode sees the Ghostbusters strapped to a giant spinning wheel where they must confess a past misdeed to escape the Devil’s clutches.McCoy ranks it as his personal favorite. Not everyone was quite so enamored with them summoning Satan for a kids TV show though.

“What’s scary about it is that we got it broadcast,” McCoy laughs. “Oh my God, we got so much shit. We had every evangelical right wing religious nut in the world complaining about it. Even my own brother, who was born again, gave me shit about it.”

Not that they were the only writers to push the envelope when it came to blending laughter and scares on a kids show. Straczynski delivered some of the most striking episodes in this regard, including “Knock Knock” in which subway workers unwittingly unleash evil creatures from hell into the underground system and “The Thing in Mrs. Faversham’s Attic” a spookfest about an old lady with spirits lurking in the roof of her home.

Others like the Reaves-penned “The Boogieman Cometh” where Egon is forced to confront his own very real fear of the bogeyman and the Brennan-written effort “Night Game” where the gang must deal with a haunting at the New York Jaguars’ baseball stadium are regularly cited among the best and most unsettling.

Hickey and McCoy took inspiration from a variety of sources both contemporary and otherwise when it came to coming up with ideas.

“I have a background in folklore, so we were also looking into stuff like that we could use,” McCoy says, recalling the episode “Banshee Bake A Cherry Pie” in which an Irish chart-topping singer is revealed to be a Banshee intent on wreaking havoc on the world.

Elsewhere, episodes like “The Long, Long, Long etc. Goodbye” served as an ode of sorts to Philip Marlowe stories – not something you would see in many children’s cartoons -while “Dont Forget The Motor City” saw the guys head to Detroit to deal with some pesky gremlins, where they met a character who looked a lot like Aretha Franklin, even if she was rather carefully referred to as “the Queen of Soul.”

Not that that quite went to plan. “We were supposed to avoid saying Aretha Franklin,” Hickey recalls. “But at the end of the episode, I don’t know how it happened, they had the Ghostbusters singing Respect. I don’t know how they got away with it because it was the whole R-E-S-P-E-C-T.”

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McCoy says the fact that the series was animated in South Korea to save money also led to similarly bizarre moments, where hair color would change or continuity would be slightly off.

“I remember this one scene where the Ghostbusters were supposed to be eating a pizza,” McCoy says. “But pizza wasn’t really a big thing in South Korea at the time, so they ended up drawing it looking like a seven layer cake. It was deep. Anyway, they didn’t what to pay to redo it so the show just ended up having the weirdest deep dish pizza you’ve ever seen in your life.”

But while the cartoon may have lacked the polish of the film, it did end up having some influence on the franchise and plans for the sequel.

“If you notice in Ghostbusters II, they have all these little incidental scenes where Slimer appears,” McCoy says. “Well, the thing is they did the entire movie without Slimer. It was only when Gross and Medjuck told them that was the most popular character in the cartoon that they put him in.”

The influence worked both ways though, as Hickey explains.

“We knew that Bill Murray watched the show with his kid, because he called him up and Ivan Reitman and said ‘What’s Garfield doing Venkman’s voice for?’”

Lorenzo Music, who also voiced the character of Garfield on the animated series, played Peter in the early series. Oddly enough, Murray voiced Garfield in two big screen outings made after he passed away.

In the case of The Real Ghostbusters, however, for whatever reason Music vacated the role of Venkman from the third season onwards with comedian Dave Coullier taking his place.

The crossover almost manifested itself in one other way too.

“So we had a story we wanted to do and we knew it was good,” McCoy says. “We pitched it to Straczynski for the syndicated shows. He loved it but when we sent the script through it was rejected. So we went to Gross and Medjuck for the network. Again, they loved it. We sent the script in and it was rejected.”

It was only when they went to see Ghostbusters II that the truth emerged. “The crux of our story had been that the Statue of Liberty comes to life. So when we saw the film it suddenly made sense.”

Hickey believes The Real Ghostbusters had the potential to run much longer as a series – but it didn’t. Instead, the network, ABC, made the cardinal sin of tinkering a little too much with the original formula.

Eager to improve ratings for its Saturday Morning lineup of shows, they drafted in a consultancy firm called Q5 who from the third season onwards began making changes that altered the makeup of the show entirely.

There was less satire and less of the subtle, sophisticated verbal humor that had made the cartoon such a fine sparring partner for the film.

Janine’s character was rewritten, moving away from the sharp-edged wise-cracker who had more in common with Annie Potts’ version of Janine from the film, and becoming simplified and, to their way of thinking, warmer and more appealing to young female viewers. It could have been even worse with the consultants suggesting at one point that Ray Stantz be written out entirely.

The likes of Strazynski and Reaves objected to the changes with the former stating that the changes were “diminishing” the show while the latter lamented that the show was “not as much fun” as it used to be.

“Janine was a strong, vibrant character. They wanted her to be more feminine, more maternal, more nurturing, like every other female on television,” Straczynski told the LA Times. “I think they [the consultants] reinforce stereotypes–sexist and racist. I think they are not helping television, they are diminishing it…I sat there in dumbstruck shock at what they were saying…

“We [Straczynski and Reaves] just looked at each other and started laughing. We couldn’t deal with it anymore; it had gone so far into the realm of the absurd.”

McCoy and Hickey shared much of the same criticism of the changes, highlighting one other noticeable shift in focus that hindered proceedings.

“They brought in The Junior Ghostbusters and changed things,” McCoy says.

A team of three children drafted in to help out the team on several episodes, while McCoy and Hickey were able to integrate the characters, the new additions coupled with a move, later in the series’ run, to make the increasingly popular Slimer the main focus, hindered the show.

“Sometimes people try to refresh things that don’t need to be refreshed,” Hickey says. “So you get things like all of a sudden the network would add something like the junior Ghostbusters. We made those work. It was cute.”

“There was always this idea that children have to have somebody their own age in their cartoons,” McCoy notes. “But how do you explain watching Bugs Bunny? He was obviously a 25-year-old guy.”

“It’s a fallacy because if you look at the most successful cartoon in the world today and it’s something like One Piece where there are no children and yet everyone watches it,” Hickey says. ”Kids appreciate a good story as much as anybody, and they’re they don’t care if it comes out of an adult space or a kid’s one.”

Had the show continued, then they would have loved to explore other areas of the Ghostbusters universe.

“We always wanted to do a spin off with Louis and Jeanine,” McCoy says. “They’re Ghostbusters, but they’re not Ghostbusters. It would be interesting to have them as a team.”

Having recently celebrated 50 years working together – Hickey and McCoy first met in a creative writing class in high school – the pair are showing no signs of slowing down writing multiple scripts during lockdown, including one feature.

“Pam and I are so in sync,” McCoy says. “We know each other so well,” Hickey agrees. “It’s been long enough that we know whether what the other person is right almost immediately when they start typing.”

Specialist writers in their field, the duo describe how a few years back they developed an entire 52-episode series called Pander and Rooster in the space of a five-day trip to Beijing. They say it’s an exciting time for animation, which has evolved a lot since the days of The Real Ghostbusters.

“The most interesting animation being done right now is in Europe and Asia,” McCoy says.

“Anime is thriving,” Hickey agrees. “Because there is that element of a continuing storyline to a lot of these shows. It’s no longer about doing episodic TV, it’s about creating something that is like a very long movie.”

The pair have high hopes for the new Ghostbusters: Afterlife movie too.“It’s a Ghostbusters movie that pays homage and uses what they have done before,” Hickey says. “No gimmicks.”

Should the film prove a hit, then they would be against firing up some more animated proton packs for a new set of cartoon adventure. “If they came to us and said ‘Can you do an animated series?’ Sure, we would probably say yes,” McCoy says. “We could do that.”

cnx.cmd.push(function() { cnx({ playerId: "106e33c0-3911-473c-b599-b1426db57530", }).render("0270c398a82f44f49c23c16122516796"); });

The days of animated spinoffs of big screen properties may be long gone, but we’ll hold out a little hope for The Real Ghostbusters: Afterlife.

The post The Real Ghostbusters: The Rise And Fall of The Coolest Cartoon Of the 1980s appeared first on Den of Geek.

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atthevogue · 6 years ago

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“Tony de Peltrie” (1985)

The basics: Wikipedia

Opened: A landmark piece of computer animation, the Canadian short was part of the 19th Annual Tournee of Animation anthology that showed at the Vogue Theater in March and April of 1986.

Also on the bill: At least one Saturday in April, it was programmed in the 9:00 slot after Chris Marker’s Akira Kurosawa documentary A.K. and Woody Allen’s Sleeper, and before a midnight showing of Night of the Living Dead, which sounds to me like a very good eight-hour day at the movies. Otherwise, you could have had a less perfect day seeing it play after Haskell Wexler’s forgotten Nicaragua war movie Latino and the equally forgotten Gene Hackman/Ann-Margaret romantic drama Twice in a Lifetime.

What did the paper say? ★★★1/2 from the Courier-Journal film critic Dudley Saunders. Saunders described the Tournee as “a specialized event that shows signs of moving into the movie mainstream,” correctly presaging the renaissance in feature-length animation in the 1990s generally and Pixar specifically, whose Luxo, Jr. short was released that same year. Of Tony, Saunders singles it out as “one of the most technologically advanced,” and that it featured “some delightful music from Marie Bastien.” He then throws his hands up: "Computers were used in this Canadian entry. Don’t ask how.” Saunders was long-time film critic for the C-J’s afternoon counterpart, the Louisville Times, throughout the 1960s, ‘70s and ‘80s. In the late 1980s, he would co-found Louisville’s free alternative weekly, the Louisville Eccentric Observer.

What was I doing? I was six and hypothetically could have seen an unrated animation festival, though I'd have been a little bit too young to have fully appreciated it. Although, who knows, I’m sure I was watching four hours of cartoons a day at the time, so maybe my taste was really catholic.

How do I see it in 2018? It’s on YouTube.

youtube

A four-hour-a-day diet of cartoons was probably on the lower end for most of my peers. I grew up during what I believe is commonly known as the Garbage Age of Animation, which you can trace roughly from The Aristocrats in 1970 to The Little Mermaid (or The Simpsons) in 1989. The quantity of animation was high, and the quality was low. Those twenty years were a wasteland for Disney, and even though I have fond memories of a lot of those movies, like The Black Cauldron, they’re a pretty bleak bunch compared to what was sitting in those legendary Disney vaults, waiting patiently to be released on home video.

Other than low-quality Disney releases, the 1980s were highlighted mostly by the post-’70s crap was being churned out of the Hanna-Barbera laboratories. Either that, or nutrition-free Saturday morning toy commercials like The Smurfs and G.I. Joe. Of course there’s also Don Bluth, whose work is kind of brilliant, but whose odd feature-length movies seem very out-of-step with the times. Don Bluth movies seem now like baroque Disney alternatives for weird, dispossessed kids who didn’t yet realize they were weird and dispossessed. (Something like The Secret of NIMH is like Jodorowsky compared to, say, 101 Dalmatians.) Most of the bright spots of those years were produced under the patronage of the saint of 1980s suburbia, Steven Spielberg. An American Tale or Tiny Toon Adventures aren’t regarded today as auteurist masterpieces of animation (or are they?), but they were really smart and imaginative if you were nine years old. Still, the idea that cartoons might be sophisticated enough to be enjoyed by non-stoned adults was probably very alien concept in 1985.

In the midst of all of this, though, scattered throughout the world were a bunch of programmers and animators working out the next regime. Within ten years of Tony de Peltrie, Pixar’s Toy Story would be the first feature-length CGI animated movie, and within another ten years, traditional hand-drawn animation, at least for blockbuster commercial purposes, would be effectively dead. That went for both kids and their parents. Animation, like comic books, would take on a new sophistication and levels of respectability in the coming decades.

I love it when you read an old newspaper review with the benefit of hindsight, and find that the critic has gotten it right in predicting how things may play out in years to come. That’s why I was excited to read in Saunders’ review of the Tournee that he suspected animation as an artform was showing “signs of moving into the movie mainstream.” His sense of confusion (or wonder, or some combination) at the computer-generated aspects is charming in retrospect, too.

Tony de Peltrie is a landmark in computer-generated animation, but its lineage doesn’t really travel through the Pixar line at all (even though John Lassetter himself served on the award panel for the film festival where it was first shown, and predicted it’d be regarded as a landmark piece of animation). The children of the 1970s and ‘80s grew up to revere the golden era of Pixar movies as adults, and the general consensus is that not only are they great technical accomplishments, but works of great emotional resonance.

As much of an outlier as it makes me: I just don’t know. I haven’t really thought so. I think most Pixar movies are really, really sappy in the most obvious way possible. The oldest ones look to me as creaky as all those rotoscoped Ralph Bakshi cartoons of the ‘70s. Which is fine, technology is one thing -- most silent movies look pretty creaky, too -- but the underlying of armature of refined Disney sap that supports the whole structure strains to the point of collapse after a time or two.

Film critic Emily Yoshida said it best on Twitter: she noted, when Incredibles 2 came out, she’d recently re-watched the first Incredibles and was shocked at how crude it looked. "The technoligization of animation will not do individual works favors over time,” she wrote. “The wet hair effect in INCREDIBLES, which I remember everyone being so excited about, felt like holding a first generation iPod. Which is how these movies have trained people to watch them on a visual level...as technology.” There’s something here that I think Yoshida is alluding to about Pixar movies that is very Silicon Valley-ish in the way they’re consumed, almost as status symbols, or as luxury products. This is true nearly across all sectors of the tech industry now, but it’s particularly evident with animation.

One of my favorite movie events of the year is when the Landmark theaters here in Minneapolis play the Oscar-nominated animated shorts at the beginning of the year. Every year, it’s the same: you’ll get a collection of fascinating experiments from all over the world, some digitally rendered, some hand-drawn. They don’t always work, and some of them are really bad, but there’s always such a breadth of styles, emotions and narratives that I’m always engaged and delighted. They remind you that, in animation, you can do anything you want. You can go anywhere, try everything, show anything a person can imagine. Seeing the animated shorts every year, more than anything else, gets me so excited about what movies can be.

And then, in the middle of the program, there’s invariably some big gooey, sentimental mush from Pixar. Not all of them are bad, and some are quite nicely done, but for the most part, it’s cute anthropomorphized animals or objects or kids placed in cute, emotionally manipulative situations. I usually go refill my Diet Coke or take a bathroom break during the Pixar sequence.

Yeah, yeah, I know. What kind of monster hates Pixar?

I don’t hate Pixar, and I like most of the pre-Cars 2 features just fine. The best parts of Toy Story and Up and Wall-E are as good as people say they are. But when you take the reputation that Pixar has had for innovation and developing exciting new filmmaking technology in the past 25 years, and compare it to the reality, there’s an enormous gap. And it drives me nuts, because if this is supposed to be the best American animation has to offer in terms of innovation and emotional engagement, it's not very inspiring. Especially placed alongside the sorts of animated shorts that come out of independent studios elsewhere in the U.S., or Japan, or France, or Canada.

Which brings us to Tony de Peltrie, created in Montreal by four French-Canadian animators, and supported in part by the National Film Board of Canada, who would continue to nurture and support animation projects in Canada through the twenty-first century. A huge part of the enjoyment -- and for me, there was an enormous amount of enjoyment in watching Tony de Peltrie -- is seeing this entirely new way of telling stories and conveying images appear in front of you for the first time. Maybe it’s because I have clear memories of a world without contemporary CGI, but I still find this enormous sense of wonder in what’s happening as Tony is onscreen. I still remember very clearly seeing the early landmarks of computer-aided graphics, and being almost overwhelmed with a sense of awe -- Tron, Star Trek IV, Jurassic Park. Tony feels a bit like that, even after so many superior technical accomplishments that followed.

Tony de Peltrie doesn’t have much of a plot. A washed-up French-Canadian entertainer recounts his past glories as he sits at the piano and plays, and then slowly dissolves over a few minutes into an amorphous, impressionistic void. (Part of the joke, I think, is using such cutting-edge technology to tell the story of a white leather shoe-clad artist whose work has become very unfashionable by the 1980s.) It’s really just a monologue. The content could be conveyed using a live actor, or traditional hand-drawn animation.

But Tony looks so odd, just sitting on the edge of the Uncanny Valley, dangling those white leather shoes into the void. Part of the appeal is that, while Tony’s monologue is so human and delivered in such an off-the-cuff way, you’re appreciating the challenge of having the technology match the humanity. Tony’s chin and eyes and fingers are exaggerated, like a caricature, but there’s such a sense of warmth underneath the chilliness of the computer-rendered surfaces. Though it’s wistful and charming, you wouldn’t necessarily call it a landmark in storytelling -- again, it’s just a monologue, and not an unfamiliar one -- but it is a technological landmark in showing that the computer animation could be used to humane ends. It’d be just as easy to make Tony fly through space or kill robots or whatever else. But instead, you get an old, well-worn story that slowly eases out of the ordinary into the surreal, and happens so gradually you lose yourself in a sort of trance.

As Yoshida wrote, technoligization of animation doesn’t do individual works favors over time. To that end, something like Tony can’t be de-coupled from its impressive but outdated graphics. These landmarks tend to be more admired than watched -- to the extent that it’s remembered at all, it’s as a piece of technology, and not as a piece of craft or storytelling.

Still, Tony is the ancestor of every badly rendered straight-to-Netflix animated talking-animals feature cluttering up your queue, but he’s also the ancestor of any experiment that tries to apply computer-generated imagery to ways of storytelling. In that sense, he has as much in common with Emily in World of Tomorrow as he does with Boss Baby, a common ancestor to any computer-generated human-like figure with a story. When Tony dissolves into silver fragments at the end of the short, it’s as if those pieces flew out into the world, through the copper wires that connect the world’s animation studios and personal computers, and are now present everywhere. He’s like a ghost that haunts the present. I feel that watching it now, and I imagine audiences sitting at the Vogue in 1986 might have felt a stirring of something similar.

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ninjakitty15 · 3 years ago

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Chapter 8: Fear The Reaper (Loki X OFC Pairing)

To say Loki was a complicated demi god, would be more of an understatement than saying Tony Stark is a decent techie or engineer. He had more facets than the world's most perfectly cut diamond and more layers than an ogre made of onions. Lucky for me, the first few layers were just leather and metal and some really fancy fabric from a destroyed planet/realm. He wasn't kidding about the not sharing part either, in that he became not so much overly possessive per say but he was prepared to let the multiverse know no one could have me but him. Case and point, propping himself up and over me, an arm on either side of my head almost as if he was using himself to keep me in and others out. There was also love bites in several very visible spots I didn't have the heart to tell him would heal before I would leave the bedroom we ended up in. He paused between kisses he stole from me to watch me intently below him and lifted one hand up to cup my face, tilting a bit so his eyes met my heavily lidded ones. "No matter how much death comes for me, I still want more."

I chuckled at his blatant pun. "We could keep going but I think at some point you'd be pegged a necrophiliac."

"Isn't that how most people want to go out, death by violently passionate love?" he purred. "Am I too much for you then, love?"

I snickered at the challenge. "Heavens to murgatroid no, not a bad way to go though, you're right on that."

"Then pray tell, why the pause? You shouldn't be thinking as hard as I feel right now."

"I'd have more energy if certain polarities were reversed."

It was his turn to pause then as he was trying to figure out what I was getting at. "My magic is making you more mortal than necessary, but wouldn't changing that make you numb again?"

"I told you I can still feel extremes normally, not when you're switching me back to life."

"Why do I feel like there's another reason you want to do that?"

Damn him and his clever mischievous natural scheming detector. "What other reason could there be?"

"Why don't you tell me?" he dropped his head to bury itself in my neck, finding the sweet spot and sucking, nipping on it till I squirmed under him.

"I've had you as an Asgardian god, now I wanna try a Frost Giant."

"Ever the curious creature you are. You sure you want this, the effects could be dangerous."

"What? Like frostbite? That's just flesh dying of the cold, I'm already dead, no biggie. Stop asking if I'm sure, you glorified smurf." And suddenly emeralds turned to glittering rubies and the room became much cooler. I reached up with both hands and pulled his head to mine, kissing him passionately, the cold never bothered me anyway.

"You two are worse than bunnies," Tony commented much later while we were all in one of his meeting rooms for the next mission.

"Says the man that used to take a different woman home every other night," Loki quipped.

"We'd be worse than bunnies if I was prego right now but literally nothing is alive in me so your argument is invalid," I told Tony. "Bunnies aren't that great to begin with anyway, oh sure they look all cute and fuzzy but they poop everywhere, aren't great housepets and die quite easy in extreme tempts which is unfortunately the kind of temps New England is known for. Great waste of fluff and space bunnies."

Everyone in the meeting room turned to me then with different expressions but the same basic principle of "wtf" about my little rant.

"What kind of pets do you like then?" asked Clint.

"Cats. Mostly self sufficient, don't need to be constantly cared for, don't hog the bed when they want cuddles, what more can you want in a pet. Anyway, why are we all here? You interrupted my naptime."

"Spoken like a true cat person," mused Tony. "Seems there's some undead activity nearby that requires our attention."

"Don't look at me, they only come when I ask."

"Which means that there's another necromancer around that's not playing by the rules you do."

"Well you know how it is, suddenly you have the power to raise an army and it gets to your head. In an unrelated story, beheading works best in stopping power hungry necromancers."

"Does shooting the head work the same or do we have to actually separate the skull from the body?" asked Steve.

"Afraid to get a little messy, Steve-o? You're dealing with monsters here, you're gonna get messy or you're next."

"Did you just threaten Captain America?" asked Tony in mock shock. "I'm liking you more and more."

I smirked. "Depending on the level of power they have, even the most lethal of shots or slashes can heal if its clean. Loki, a dagger please?" Loki straightened an arm and one slid out of his sleeve and into an open palm which he then handed to me almost uncertainly. I took the blade and slid it against my wrist as an example. For a moment blackened blood oozes out of the cut before it sealed itself back up and the blood was absorbed back into my body. "If clean wounds are all you know, I strongly suggest any number of horror films with gore and violence warnings on the rating for ideas."

"I'm sorry I'm slightly confused here, earlier you were telling us how there's so few of you guys left yet here you are telling us how to cut you down more..." Clint spoke up.

"There's two types of necromancers, those that do their job and those that steal from the honeypot, I don't care about the latter, they disrupt the natural order we're meant to abide by. If that means we reach white rhino status, then so be it, I can live with that."

"Remind us again what white rhino status means?" asked Steve.

"You can count how many of those beasties are in existence today on one hand and still have a few free fingers, they've been hunted by poachers for their horn to near extinction and the few left are now under armed guards to ensure that doesn't happen."

"I've got a question about dead animals," Tony spoke up. "Have you tried raising them?"

"They've been on this planet a lot longer than we have and we cause them enough grief destroying it and them along with it, I leave them alone as they deserve to rest more than we do."

"What about dinosaurs, think of what you could do with your own T-rex," Clint noted.

"Ok firstly there's an entire franchise of movies explaining exactly why it's a terrible idea to resurrect dinosaurs, i mean their name even means terrible lizard. Secondly there wouldn't be much left of them to resurrect, they're millions of years old and there's a reason we only see casts and not the actual bones of them. They're brittle as fuck, the actual bones are kept in a temperature controlled vault in a basement somewhere. Sure, it would look cool as hell having an army of angry monster skeletons behind you but the second they get close to the enemy, they're literally dust. Nice try though."

"So just stick to humans then," Tony noted.

"Fuck yeah."

"So you couldn't resurrect someone old enough, say George Washington?" Clint asked.

"Putting aside the fact that every single person that knows about him or seen his portraits remembers him as a stiff stoic and heroic first president and bringing back a grinning corpse because if there's anything left of him still hanging around its gonna be bones and tattered clothes aka nightmare fuel. It also takes a lot more effort to bring back moldy oldies because not only would they have probably been at peace in their final resting place a lot longer and don't wanna go back to the fucked up world we made it in their absence, theres a lot more effort in putting them together before they rise. Any other erroneous questions and misconceptions?"

"I've got one," Tony piped up. "You've said you only feel extremes most of the time and I'm curious, can you taste pain too? I'm convinced you're actually Liv Moore under an alias."

"She couldn't control other zombies, just support and help them survive the human population that didn't like them. I could stomach a lot of spices when I was still human I think, so I can only assume I'd be ok now, why?"

"Ever had a Carolina Reaper?"

"You've been dying to challenge someone on that haven't you, pun intended."

"What's a Carolina Reaper?" Loki murmured beside me.

"One of the most painfully edible things ever bred," Clint answered for me.

"If it's so painful, why eat it then, food's meant to be enjoyed."

"Some people don't taste the pain, they taste the spice, the heat and that's what they want. So I highly recommend you don't try what I'm about to do. Tony, I accept your challenge...I'd smack you with a gauntlet but this is the 21st century," I replied.

"Why shouldn't I try this reaper, I'm a god you dead creature."

"God or not, you are a Frost Giant and this food is barely edible fire, you will be one of the reasons it's called a reaper and I'm not sure I want to bring you back to life, I only ever resurrect mortals." Tony handed me one of the bright red peppers, a whole one, not something seasoned with a reaper, not a slice, a whole fucking pepper. I took it carefully, touching as little as possible in the event I needed to rub my eyes after this ordeal and examined it curiously. "Well, it was nice knowing you all, Loki, if I don't make it back, avenge me, you have my blessing." I looked Tony in the eyes and took all but the stem and leaves in my mouth before biting down.

"How exactly does this pepper kill someone though?" Loki asked while watching me.

"The spiciness irritates the inside of your mouth so much that it inflames it, causing you to choke and suffocate essentially while you're sweating like you've run a marathon through hell so not only are you essentially becoming dehydrated but you're oxygen is cut off," explained Tony.

I chewed the evil pepper and all at once it was like eating a piece of hell itself, my entire body felt like it was on fire, not just my mouth and I had to shut my eyes to swallow like a frog, my whole body going stiff from the pain, and slammed a fist down on the meeting table before finally getting rid of it in my stomach. "That's a spicy meatball-a," I stated in a horrible Italian accent. "Anyone else wanna try food from hell? Where's Thor, he's always up for doing stupid shit like this."

Loki snorted unceremoniously. "Off playing hero somewhere or making sure his people don't get into more trouble than he does, no doubt. Give me one."

"You can try a slice of Jalapeno before you play with the big guns."

"Are you actually denying the god of mischief some fun?" Clint asked me.

It was my turn to snort. "I've given him more fun in bed than he'd find from anyone else on this planet, what I'm doing is making sure he doesn't die from a dumb challenge. The only thing missing from this redneck fun is someone saying hold my beer."

"That's because my brother is elsewhere," replied Loki. "I'll have your Holopino."

Tony disappeared to the nearest kitchen and then returned with chips and Jalapeno dip with actual slices mixed into the cheesy goodness. "You're not lactose intolerant are you?"

"I highly doubt that's actual cheese and not the processed american cheese most cheese dips here are made of," I noted.

Loki took a chip and pretty much coated the entire piece in the dip then shoved it in his mouth all at once. He didn't break out in a sweat like most weak stomached people would but then maybe Frost Giants don't do that, he also didn't choke or spit it out and managed to swallow the whole thing without complaint though he was a master of lies for a reason, his poker face was second to none. "On the scale of pain, where is the Holopino?"

"It's one of the least spicy peppers this planet has though still pretty spicy. The seeds of any spicy pepper though are what you want to avoid more than the flesh or juice though you don't want the juice either as that shit can get anywhere, people have gone blind because they got the juice on their hands, didn't wash it off well or at all and then rubbed their eyes for whatever reason. Smart people that cook with spicy peppers wear latex gloves, everyone else tempts fate."

"You're worried something spicy and edible could kill me," he mused.

"Everything is edible once," I retorted. "And there's plenty of edible things that can kill anyone, just add poison, hell we eat at least two kinds of poisonous plants without realizing its potential, potatoes and tomatoes are both belladonnas which is the most poisonous plant this planet has."

"How exactly do you know all that about poisons?" Nat asked.

"Like no one else has ever thought about ways to sneak poison into someone's drink before, if you tell me otherwise then you're a liar. There's a song by my favorite band about slipping cleaning solution into someone's coffee."

"No wonder you two are so close, so much potential to do good but so tempted to do otherwise, meant for each other really," Tony mused.

"You say that like it's a bad thing."

"We'll see. Now that I had my initial fun though, back to what I called you all here for. We have ourselves a zombie outbreak...never thought I'd say that, but there's a first time for everything. While I get the feeling you could probably handle zombies on your own, this should still be a team effort for damage control and whatnot so everyone suit up and ship out."

I grinned." You heard him, Autobots, let's roll out!"

"Sometimes you're worse than Peter with the pop culture references," muttered Tony.

"Where is the little bug anyway?"

"At school like the good genius he is, it is a week day after all and no longer summer."

"Wait a sec, it's...the fall?" I asked excitedly.

"...Yes?"

I grinned. "Things are starting to turn up Milhouse."

"Why is it a good thing for it to be autumn?" asked Loki as we made our way to the jet thing.

"I'm strongest during that season."

There were definitely zombies afoot, not a whole lot thankfully which usually meant the rogue necromancer that raised them was either doing something small scale or wasn't that much a threat and didn't have the power to raise a full army. Either way sucks to be them. I hung back in the jet as zombies themselves were super easy to handle, it was just a matter of finding the weasel that got them there and dealing with them. Loki hung back as well as you really didn't need god powers to deal with the walking dead, just something to separate the head from the body. So it was basically Clint, Nat, Tony, and America's Ass knocking heads and taking names.

"You think Thor will be pissed he's not part of the party?" I mused to Loki.

The golden god grinned at the thought of his brother being the whiny baby he knew he was. "He did particularly enjoy a similar situation to this one, fighting off the undead, despite losing our home in the end. He's not needed though so he can bloody deal with it."

"Maybe we shouldn't tell him and pretend like nothing's happened that he'd miss." Our eyes met for a moment before we both grinned wickedly. "Nah." I pressed my com out of curiosity to see how things were going outside. "Found the rogue yet?"

"All I see are dead people," came Clint's response first, causing me to crack up at the quote.

"Ha, it's not just me quoting movies now, Tony, check and mate."

"Clint, don't encourage her," grumbled Tony on the com.

"This is way easier than I expected zombies to be, I feel like I'm in a video game and this is like one of the first few levels," Clint stated.

"If the music changes, get ready for the big boss fight," I warned him.

"Anything we should look for in finding said big boss? Features that sets him apart like with you?" asked Nat.

"Only the more advanced look like death for reasons, I highly doubt this one is so look for the one that stationary or moving at a normal pace and not currently rotting at the same time. The zombies are either a distraction or sentinels so go in the opposite direction as them to find the boss. On that note, can I have a go at whoever it is, they're under my department, I feel like I should take some responsibility for it...adulting and what not."

"If there's anything else after we're done, maybe," Tony answered.

"Sharing is caring."

"Good thing I don't care then."

Another few minutes went by. "You say its easy dealing with zombies yet there's still no progress otherwise, what's going on out there? Has the music changed yet?"

"Still can't find the bastard, even when I switch to heat vision to seek out living from undead it's still all dead things," grumbled Tony. "Are we even sure he's in this area? Maybe this whole thing is a diversion from another place?"

I groaned in frustration and stood up stiffly. "This is taking too long, I'm gonna miss the Farmers Market!" I stormed out of the jet, Loki in tow of course, and walked out into the battlefield, power flowing into my hands before I shot it at every dead body near me still walking that collapsed immediately, the connection from them to their initial power source cut off.

"Nell, what the hell are you doing?" demanded Tony.

"Your job for you, I want a raise after this too." I grabbed hold of a zombie's head without cutting the connection and instead followed the connection to the source while Loki made sure there were no interruptions. "Found em." I cut the connection of that zombie after and had Loki teleport me right to the source which thankfully was still in the area just very well hidden. I let go of Loki's hand from him teleporting us and took a bee line right to the bastard who's back was turned to me. I grabbed him by the head and smashed it against the wall of the building he was hidden in. Thankfully, he was still conscious for me to play with and held his head with a grown before turning around onto his back to face me and the look on his face was just too perfect to post on instagram.

"Nell! Y-you're...you're," he stuttered in terror.

"I'm what?" I growled at him, not wasting any time as I reached down and grabbed him by the shirt, throwing him into another wall and going after him before he could scamper away.

"You're back," he squeaked. "They told me..."

"Who told you?" I demanded, a hand wrapping around his neck tight and holding him hard against the wall behind him.

One hand of his was around the hand around his neck trying to get me off him while I wasn't so blind to not notice the other reaching for something behind his back, a flash of metal telling me exactly what he was planning and even before Loki would take out his own blades, I caught his free hand that held a certain lethal dagger and broke his wrist while my nails dug into his neck so he couldn't catch his dagger as it dropped. I kicked it away from both of us. "You know who I am, then you know what your options are now. Who told you?"

Both his hands were now trying to pry my one off him and I only gave him enough air to speak and not die just yet. "We're either the hunted or the hunters, that's what they told me. They told me your head would be mounted on a wall when they caught you."

I pulled him from the wall only to slam him back against it in rage, he was working for the people, helping them hunt the rest of us, that caught me. "How did they find me?"

"I don't know!" he croaked.

"Try again." Another slam against the wall.

"I swear I don't know! I was told about you after it had already happened!"

"Nell," Steve of all people said suddenly behind me. "He's more useful to us alive."

"I disagree," I growled. "The dead are so much more cooperative."

A new level of fear filled the traitor's face, he definitely knew what his options were now. He looked past me to Loki who was simply watching the whole scene play out without a word or a motion otherwise then to Steve. "Help me! Please!"

"He's not in the business of helping people he's been trying to shut down his entire life," I reminded him coldly.

"Loki, can't you stop this?" Steve asked him.

"I am not her commander nor master, I do not as you would say, call the shots."

"Nell, drop him," Nat came in saying. "I know what you're feeling, I know what you've been through, this isn't the way to handle it."

I vaguely wondered what would happen if I killed the rat in my grasp, would the Avengers come at me, kick me out of the compound? Would I be their next mission? Would Loki come with me or stay with them? That last one got my attention and I glanced back at Loki then and our eyes met. "You aren't my master, but I still need you."

Loki was silent for a moment, taking in the hidden message I hoped his caught from that statement. It probably wasn't fair to make him choose between the ones he had probably sworn to team up with, and some dead chick he just met and banged a bunch but I needed to know who I could trust when my own people were turning on me. "And you have me," he finally responded.

I relaxed the smallest bit at the answer and was about to finish off my prey before Tony in all his armored glory burst in from the ceiling, his iron mask off so he was legit staring me down with his blaster hands poised. "You want answers from him as much as we do, right? We can get more out of him alive when all his nerve endings are still working. I don't want you to be our next big enemy here but if you kill him, you will be, and Hydra will be the least of your worries."

While the threat was barely accurate considering Hydra had more intel than Tony did on us and had a lot more minions to give the intel to, I really didn't want more enemies than I already had. I grumbled in annoyance and threw the rat to Tony then before picking up the dagger that had threatened to kill me for good and examined it, Loki stepping over to me and eyeing the blade curiously. "Did you mean that?" I asked.

"I might be known as the Lord of Lies but I always keep my word."

The rat was grabbed by Tony and surrounded by the other Avengers who guarded and guided him out of the building, Loki and myself taking the tail end. The second the rat stepped outside however, he crumbled with a bullethole in his skull, a larger one as small bullets don't always do the trick with death mages. Clint took out the Hydra sniper instantly without a second thought but the prisoner was already dead. I cackled when Nat took his nonexistent pulse at the pure irony of the situation. "You see what happens, the universe always provides. You had your chance, now it's my turn. You might wanna take the body back first before they actively try to keep it from rising again though."

Tony just frowned at my reaction and shook his head. "You are a piece of work, you know that?"

I grinned and shrugged. "Thought you liked a challenge?"

He just shook his head again. "Not even Loki was this chaotic when he first joined us."

"That's because you forced contraptions on me that dampened my powers till I behaved like you wanted," Loki retorted dryly.

"You put a fucking bark collar on him? He's a god, not a dog, you dyslexic dildo!"

"Whoa, easy there, Night Queen, this is the same guy that tried to take NYC some years back."

I snorted. "Fuck NYC, their sports teams suck and so do they."

Loki took my hand in his and I felt calm suddenly and glanced over at him questionably. "You don't have to defend me, you know?"

"Yeah well, I got my vengeance stolen by the universe just now and nowhere else to direct my rage, so sue me."

"The universe doesn't steal, it takes what belongs to it, therefore you weren't meant to kill him so relax for now," he argued.

I frowned at the questionable but near flawless logic and grumbled under my breath. "Stupid sexy Frost Giant."

#loki fanfiction #loki fanfic #loki romance #avengers #lokixNell #lokixocf #loki x original female character #necromancer #necromancy #zombies #nell the necromancer

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smokeybrand · 5 years ago

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Smokey brand Movie Reviews: Don’t Stop Me Now

The Good

All of those game references are adorable. I mean, that Mushroom World reference, tho. Outstanding.

But that sound design, tho. I mean, the rings, Sonic’s spin dash, and even that little Green Hill remix; I loved al of it!

Shout out to Crazy Karl!

The Bad

Ugh. That Floss, tho. Really?

The Verdict

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newgeekcity · 8 years ago

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New Geek City is Live Blogging MST3k The Return

Once a upon a time there was a bored kid. He just moved to a new place where he didn’t know anyone. Hair was coming in weird places. His face looked like it came from a rare Garbage Pail Kid card.

Other things were changing for the kid, namely his tastes. To him everything started to be so childlike. His books, Full House, even Saturday morning cartoons. There wasn’t anything that really appealed to him anymore.

Except for Batman the Animated Series, that was still awesome.

So one day while trying to avoid the Smurfs or some shit, the kid flipped on Comedy Central. Gamera was on. Everything sucked, but he wasn’t too big for Toho movie monsters.

Just look at it...

And see those guys on the bottom? They were cracking jokes, making astute observations. Then they would do silly musical numbers. It was the best, and for years after, no matter what, the kid would tune in to see what crazy schlock the boys of MST3k would do next.

And yeah yeah, the boy was me. Twist ending, M. Night Shyamalan style. Blah blah.

Since MST3k came into my life so early, sometimes I wonder where it started and I begin in the soup of neurons and my memories. Am I sarcastic and love terrible movies because it brings me back to my safe space? Or am I drawn to MST3k because I am sarcastic and I love 1960s Godzilla movies.

I don’t think there’s a real answer to that question. However, after a long long departure. MST3k is back and on Netflix... so lets dive into the first episode which is called... episode 1? Seriously guys? Way to be descriptive.

We got movie sign after the jump

00:00 - Hold on I need more coffee.

00:00 - Alright, back. Lets see what’s up. I’m really curious about the opening. If I remember right the opening song was sung by Mike Nelson. So lets see how this stacks up.

I’m not looking for a perfect recreation, but something in the same spirit.

1:39 - People? There’s other people in this universe? I thought there was like 10 tops in the entire world in the original series. Then there’s Wil fucking Wheaton. I don’t mind the people, but I do mind Wil Wheaton, that fucking guy. The DIY effects and models are really great though.

In what looks like the Gizmonic mission control, the staff are puppets. I love that.

Wait I know that lady... She’s Erin Gray. Colonel Deering from Buck Rogers. When I was 5 I wasn’t sure if I was going to marry her or Princess Leia.

Hey it could have happened, I was a cute kid.

But seriously, Fuck. Wil. Wheaton.

2:00 - I have to admit, I’m sort of liking Jonah. He has the same affable quality as Joel and Mike.

4:30 - Gypsy could talk? Like for reals? Weird.

I also did like the opening sequence, a lot. Its different. It feels like that’s what the sequence should have been for the movie. But I really liked it. Great work Joel.

8:00 - Invention exchange is back. Patton Oswalt is perfect as TV’s son of TV’s Frank. Although I was doubting Felicia Day, I have to admit she is charming here.

The movie doors are different, you could tell they used a computer for this one. Not sure if I like that, But whatevs its minor.

The bots voices are actually pretty good too. Crow sounds like Crow. Tom sort of sounds like Tom. I do have to get used to Jonah though.

9:00 - Its not skin, its beef. Just saying.

Delicious ground beef.

10:30 - Tom can fly! He can fly!!

13:15 - We have Super Dragon reference! Also one of the best MST3k songs

14:00 - “You know an aquarium is just a pet store that doesn’t sell anything.” Made me lol.

14:41 - Gypsy showed up and made a quip. I already forgot what it was. I wonder if it’ll be a thing.

16:35 - I’m hoping the movie picks up. I doubt it because its MST3k. But they did a “commercial break” just now. They repeated the name of the movie and showed I guess would be the Deep 13 House Band.

I think a skit would have worked better. Its not like they have to fit in actual commercials. But they’re probably trying to keep as close to the original format as possible.

18:30 - Scientist 1: “I envy that young man.”

Scientist 2: “He will be busy now.”

Me: Yeah with your daughters, you Dane weirdo.

20:00 - Who just keeps an electric eel in a tank in a hallway? Nothing is gonna go wrong there. Nothing at all....ARRRRRGHG

22:00 - I’m having a really hard time picking up who’s speaking. Particularly with Tom / Jonah.

But Jonah’s Monster Mash / Reptilicus cover was definitely out of the Joel Robinson playbook.

25:00 - Can someone tell me if that Dane blonde, scientist daughter has a single daughter along the R line? And that wound looks like pudding. Just saying it looks like delicious reptile pudding.

27:00 - Ok the skit break is this kaiju monster rap. The bots, particularly crow are more animated. He’s able to move his arms around now.

The song itself is way different from the original series. Which I’m giving it a thumbs up. It fits well into the original ethos. Its catchy, fun. Its a good update. Nice work modern MST3k writers.

32:00 - One thing I’ve noticed is the actual filmic quality of the movie. In the old MST3k’s you could still see the scratches and dust, and the warping. It looks like that this is a restored film.

Its not awful or really a distraction. But its just something I noticed as a long time fan.

35:00 - Dickweed. It makes me laugh every time.

36:00 - Of course the goofus stuck his hand in the electric eel tank. You know comedy. It had to happen. Like the sun rising, and the rain falling in the amazon.

38:00 - I wish netflix would have some way that it counts up instead of down. It would make my life easier here.

Another “commercial break” I was wrong, in the new series its Moon 13 and Patton Oswalt gave a fun fact about the doors. The house band is playing at the same time. Its very Svengoolie.

39:00 - Xanadu reference. Not sure how many youngin’s would get it. I barely do because my dad had a bootleg VHS tape.

It was awful.

41:00 - I was about to say a lot of the jokes are falling flat, but when that scientist “screamed” and one of the guys dubbed it with Opera, that was brilliant.

43:00 - I get that MST3k was never really about plot when it came to the host and bots. But they seemed to jump into the riffing really quick. I was expecting some sort of intro for Jonah, like he’d ask questions about why he’s there throughout the movie and the bots would fill him in and he’d grow into the host role.

I think it would have added some sort of dimension to it. But I would get why they would just jump right into it.

45:00 - Also I’d expect the Mads would show up more by now. Maybe in the next skit sequence?

47:00 - No Mads, but the cloning of Tom Servo in the “genesis tank that’s conveniently off camera” was real classic MST3k.

So far, Jonah I would say earned his spot. He nailed it.

Crow, yup classic Crow.

Tom, well. He’s not awful. He’s funny but I just can’t get past the voice. Kevin Murphy really owned the character. I hope its just matter of getting used to it. Like when Kevin originally took over in Season 2 (I think) of MST3k.

51:00 - Hold on I need a gif of that.. give me a few minutes.

Ok, I couldn’t get a gif. I’ll have to check into that. BUT I did grab a screenshot.

Single handedly this is my most favorite special effect ever.

54:30 - Although another stray observation, when the people are in frame, the film is alright. Like no scratches (for the most part) but when the monster is up it looks like someone went through it with sandpaper.

Which lazy bastard only did half a restoration?

55:00 - It feels like Tom should have had that ability to fly all along. His bottom always reminded me of a hovercraft.

56:00 - Yup the commercial breaks definitely is reminiscent of Svengoolie, Paton Oswalt should just show up on that set one day as TV’s Son of TV’s Frank.

It would be some great cross promotion.

BTW, go watch Svengoolie. Its not as funny as MST3k, but it’s really charming and fun.

Occasionally they show a good movie. Which I guess defeats the point, but whatever.

60:00 - We’re about at the halfway point. So far, I will admit the new MST3k is... I don’t want to say a worthy successor but Joel Hodgson really did something special. This definitely feels in place with the originals. Almost like it never went away.

I do want more Mads for this episode. Where are they?

62:00 - How did they get letters? This is like the first episode in almost 20 years. How many 8 year olds could sit still long enough to watch reruns? Aren’t they making methlabs and sexting?

63:00 - Just a note, I know nothing about modern children.

71:00 - Have you ever wondered why Kaiju are impervious to tank shells? Think about it, they’re designed to punch through concrete, steel plating, etc. I don’t think they’d have a problem with reptile skin, prehistoric or otherwise.

74:00 - Another thing I noticed is that the guy and the bots are more animated compared to the originals. They’ll move around, fly by, bring in barrels to interact with the screen.

I know the originals did similar, but it seems to be more frequent here. Its not unwelcome. Its actually nice.

77:00 - Another commercial break. Its a TV seal of quality with the Moon 13 house band. I’m still liking them.

Patton talked about how Kinga established some TV group, probably to make profit.

Its not so much how the joke was clever, I just liked how they used that to add some background of the world of MST3k. Because we really don’t know much about it, besides the SOL and Deep 13 and such.

I never thought it was missing, but now that I’ve seen some glimpses into the surrounding world I am interested in learning more. Does the world know about the Forresters? Have they always run in secret? Or they make their intentions known and the government is powerless to stop them. Who is the government there anyway?

Are they considered brilliant or total fuck ups? Are they part of something bigger? Like SMERSH or the illuminati or something?

78:00 - They’re freaking out about getting a gallon of some sort of lizard knock out drug. Do Danes know how much a gallon is? It’s not that much, if it was like an oil drum’s worth then you got problems.

80:00 - The gallon is really just a beaker. So I guess Danes don’t get the imperial system after all.

83:00 - Seriously the guy playing Crow is really good. If I close my eyes I’d have a hard time telling the difference between him and Trace Beaulieu.

Although I noticed the mouth movement on Crow isn’t as pronounced as it was in the originals. Its a little detail, but it went a long way in figuring out who was talking.

85:00 - Monster’s dead, yay I guess.

86:00 - “Push the button Max” doesn’t have the same cachet as “Push the button Frank.” But I’m glad they brought that back.

87:00 - The end credit song sounds like it was made with a real orchestra. It gives it some gravitas. Its rather lovely.

88:00 - They’re repeating the monster rap. Not bad, still cute.

89:00 - Wait, in the end credits, They gave the proper name for the Moon 13 House Band, they’re called “The Skeleton Crew.”

I like Moon 13 house band better.

90:00 - Nice touch--

And of course--

The end tag. Its nice to see some old standbys come back.

Final Thoughts -

I suppose if you really wanted to you could say its worse or better than the originals. I guess its like how you wanted to fight over Joel vs Mike.

They’re different. They had their own styles, and they were very funny in their own way.

MST3k The Return is a lot like that. There’s enough elements of the originals that it feels familiar, but stylistically its been updated. I personally think its a good thing.

With the bigger budget, and more modern delivery I feel a lot of the fun, DIY, anarchic, lo-fi qualities that was so mind blowing about the original show is very much here.

I like the new cast, except for Wil Wheaton (fuck you Wesley Crusher), and I think they’re as charming and clever as the previous casts. Just... different.

So if you loved the originals as much as I did, I definitely think its worth binging with your kids. Personally I plan to make this a Saturday morning thing like I did way back when.

One last last thing. From what I saw of the preview for the next episode it looks like Pearl, Bobo, and Brain Guy are visiting. Hopefully Mike shows up too.

I. Can’t. Wait.

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lookbackmachine · 6 years ago

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The Simpson’s Shorts History

Simpsons Shorts from Seward Street

[music]

00:05 Speaker 1: The animation industry was not in the best place in the 1980s. Disney due to expense, was considering shutting down its historic animation studio and its much needed renaissance was still far in the distance. Meanwhile, Hanna-Barbera had only produced one major hit in the 1980s with The Smurfs, not to mention that animation was continually being shipped overseas. Yet something was about to change. While Paul Germain and Jeffrey Townsend were busy at the offices of Gracie Films, something special was happening on Seward Street. Gábor Csupó and his wife, Arlene Klasky had managed to land The Simpsons shorts. Now all they had to do was make them. And that would require a team of animators that were young and hungry, so hungry in fact, two of them were ready to say goodbye to the animation business, entirely. And if they had left, The Simpsons would certainly be very different.

00:56 S1: Bill Kopp is an energetic life-long animator and a pack rat. He still has original Simpsons drawings in his storage units at undisclosed locations. This is Bill's voice when he played Eek! The Cat on a show he later created for Fox Kids.

01:10 Bill Kopp: It's swell and it's [01:10] ____ which is a green actually, but it's much more fun to say [01:17] ____ when you have a list.

01:19 S1: And this, well, this is Bill's regular speaking voice.

01:22 BK: Oh God... Okay, listen, this goes back to... The Simpsons was my third official job, there was Better Off Dead and One Crazy Summer and right after One Crazy Summer, and we did those back to back. And Wes was on there and so was David. All of a sudden, we were like out of work for the first time ever, we're like, "Wow, what do we do?" And then Wes was the one that got, that Gábor contacted. I don't know how.

01:44 S1: Wes Archer, animator.

01:47 Wes Archer: I studied at CalArts in the Film Graphics/Experimental Animation program. At CalArts there were two animation schools that were very segregated: The Disney school, they wanted you to learn how to animate Disney characters such as Bambi and 101 Dalmatians and the like. The Film Graphics/Experimental Animation, the title states, very experimental. You could do anything, it was geared more for television. At the time, I had no interest in studying Disney movies. I thought I would go to CalArts, learned how to animate and [02:19] ____ in fact I still worked on commercials. And I was looking for work, and I solicited worked from them. I called them, just cold called them and dropped off my portfolio there. It was kind of a freelance situation where I'd go work at Gábor's studio, at Klasky Csupo on Seward Street on individual commercials or whatever work he had for me as an animator.

02:42 WA: The first spot that I worked on for Klasky Csupo, was it was promoting the idea of this new thing called a CD, you could listen to Phil Collins and yes, I animated an old Victrola turning into a record player, turning into a cassette player, turned into a CD player. So one day, he said, "Wes, we have the possibility of animating a short for Matt Groening," he goes, "Well, I could tell." I was very enthusiastic about that 'cause at the time, I was pretty much ready to give it up and move back to Texas and re-educate myself as an illustrator, and a painter and just try to have a career as an artist because animation wasn't paying the bills very well.

03:24 WA: I'm serious. I was in a crappy apartment in Burbank, and actually, I was giving myself two more months in LA. And at the beginning of that two months I got a call from Klasky Csupo about the Matt Groening project. And then it began in earnest, like the third month, and I could pay my rent and I knew I could move to a better place, so I broke the lease on the apartment and moved to a better place. Before I got there he said, "Are there any other animators you could recommend?" I'm like, "Sure, Bill and David."

03:54 S1: Bill Kopp, animator.

03:56 BK: And he's like, "Hey they're short cartoons, a minute-and-a-half down at this place called Klasky... " It wasn't even called Klasky Csupo then I don't think, it was just... I don't know what it was called.

04:06 BK: It was this really funky part of town, it was like all old prop houses and little editing... Really weird, like old Hollywood. We used to call it film town and those places were populated by the grumpiest old men that all worked on all these movies. Shit. And they're like smoking, there's like [04:21] ____ film around, they didn't give a shit. I learned a lot from those guys, but it was like a fishing boat.

04:26 S1: Wes Archer, animator.

04:29 WA: Yeah, [laughter], yes. The whole area around the Seward Street was this old film town, and it was kinda creepy, it was kinda David Lynch-y. We would go out to eat somewhere, and there'd be these old editor guys... One time on a job for Klasky Csupo they sent me down the block to do some rotoscoping for some cheesy sword and sorcery film or something. It was like a scene out of a David Lynch movie where I walked through this vast old Hollywood hallway art deco building, where there was this down-shooter Oxberry camera or something, and this old crusty old guy set me up to rotoscope this footage. I would sit there quietly for four hours, tracing some footage for some old school effects animation. It's the end of the old Hollywood, I guess.

05:27 BK: And so we just rolled in there, there was Gábor, who's the nicest guy in the world, crazy little... Like a hobbit. We just parked it there, Jesus Christ, we were there for like two years or three years, something... Close to three I think.

05:41 BK: I think that there were two cartoons that were on The Tracey Ullman Show and, one was Dr. N! Godatu by a comic book artist. I think she was on a San Francisco called MK Brown. I think she had stuff in National Lampoon or whatever. And then Matt, of course, had Life in Hell, in LA... Or the Reader, and later I think the LA Week. They were each like a minute-and-a-half. And it was me and Wes Archer originally, it was just the two of us working with Matt and MK Brown. And a minute-and-a-half of animation is... Well, three minutes really with the two pieces, it was too much work 'cause... We've had to live there anyway.

06:17 WA: The work in itself was very trying, it took hours and hours. I remember I didn't have much of a social life, I felt like, you know, we were kinda these monks. I just remember having a lot of hope for the future that... I remember having a lot of hope that this job would lead me to a good future in animation, which it did.

06:43 BK: And we were doing everything, we were animating, doing the backgrounds, we had to take Matt's storyboards which were [chuckle] really funny, 'cause they were just like, you know, drawn by a three-year-old. It was great. His ideas were awesome, so we needed another guy so we got Silverman, we hired David Silverman.

07:00 S1: David Silverman, animator.

07:03 David Silverman: And then believe it or not, I was considering leaving animation, or at least taking a respite from it and just focusing on my own style, thanks to the encouragement of a friend of mine from UCLA days, Gary Baseman, who of course is a very famous artist, first started as a very successful illustrator, commercial illustrator, before he completely went to fine art. And he was doing very well at the time, and he told me he had done that, he had taken a year off, had to just worked on his style. For the full year, that was his job like 9:00 to 5:00 job, and I thought that sounds intriguing. So that was the plan for '87, and then I had heard from Bill Kopp via Wes Archer that this company he used to work for or had worked for, Wes that is, had freelanced for Klasky Csupo whenever they would get a character animation piece. Mostly they did motion graphics, which was before computer graphics took over in terms of like titles and logos, there's something called motion graphics, which simulated that by taking through several passes and back-lighting effects and top-lighting effect, things like that, with a motion-controlled Oxberry camera.

08:06 DS: And they had gotten... The small company, Klasky Csupo, had gotten the Tracey Ullman Show contract and basically at the time Klasky Csupo consisted of Arlene Klasky and Gábor Csupó, and Larry and Bill Hedge, the cameraman, and Joe Russo was [08:23] ____ assistant, I forget the name of the receptionist. And they were renting out basically the bottom couple of offices from [08:28] ____ Clampett at 729 North Seward off of Melrose. So you see I remember this stuff a little bit. [chuckle] And that's what happened, so I got called up and said "Oh yeah, it sounds interesting," and it was told to me like, something called the Tracy Ullman Show, who's Tracy Ullman? I don't know, but the animation is with Matt Groening and oh, I love Life in Hell, that would be great, I'd love to meet him and I'd love to try to animate his characters. And that's how it started. But here's the thing that was interesting about it, I almost didn't do it, because then I got a call back, I think it was from Bill, maybe Wes, saying "Oh, you know they didn't get the budget that wanted, they can only hire two animators." I said "Okay, that's fine, I still have plan A." You know, I didn't think one way or the other of it.

09:09 DS: And then I got a call on, I think it was, March 11th, they called me and they said, "We really could use your help here, we're so overwhelmed with work." Gábor brought me in and I thought it was gonna be just for two weeks because he said, "Do you want to animate the opening title sequence of the Tracy Ullman Show with the letters flying in? Would you wanna do, like help out with this animation for two weeks?" And I said, "I'll help out with the animation for two weeks." And I guess it was a day or two into it, Gábor really liked my work and he said, "You know... " because they contracted for a minute a week and they were going over, and he was paying so many extra for every second he was over, he said, "I have more than enough to hire you on as a third animator, so I'm gonna do that," and I said,"Okay, great." So that's how it happened. And then we did two weeks of Dr. Janice N! Godatu and then we did two weeks of The Simpsons. Continued with The Simpsons for 48 action-packed, fun-filled episodes. Here's the thing, I had planned to visit my parents back in DC, I didn't want to cancel, it was harder cancelling a trip then, it's pretty hard these days too, for that matter.

10:09 DS: But in any event, I had to go back east and I hadn't finished the very first Simpson, you know, episode, the 'Good Night Simpson,' I had the last segment, so I was still working on the last segment where the kids run in to bed, you know, and "there's nothing to be afraid of, now everybody go to sleep." So here I am I brought my work with me, and I didn't have an animation desk, obviously, [chuckle] this was back when you need an animation desk, so I brought a peg strip like an inking strip and I had a piece of plexiglass so I took the peg strip and taped it to the peg bar, taped it to the plexiglass, and got a lamp and took off the lamp shade and that was my animation desk while I rested the thing on my knees. And then I'm running out of animation paper on a Sunday in Maryland, so there's not a lot of stores that you can go running to, to get some more animation paper, in fact, there's none of them. And I had to finish it off, this had to be clean animation 'cause it had to go to Georgie. I think I had to FedEx it on Monday 'cause she needed it Tuesday, and I wasn't going to be back 'til like Wednesday or something like that.

11:08 DS: So I kinda worked with three pieces of paper, I said these will be my roughs and I would make sure, these are animating and then I would do my cleanup drawings and I'd erase those three pieces of paper and start over again. So I was animating three pages at a time, and I just sorta barely made it without wasting too much paper. It was forced frugality on a Sunday in Maryland back in 1987.

11:33 S1: When David Silverman says Georgie, he means Georgie Peluse. Peluse is a Hungarian color designer, she worked on George Carlin's Specials and would eventually do work on the animation of Dino DNA in Jurassic Park, but she was about to start work on what she would be known for. When others said flesh tone, Georgie said yellow, and yellow it would be.

12:00 Georgie Peluse: I was trained in Hungary, in Budapest they have one of the best animation studios. And I was working at Kurtz & Friends in Los Angeles for over 35 years, we did tons of, tons of very important commercials, film titles. When Gábor came to America, tried to get a job in animation studios, he wasn't able to, how shall I say? He didn't get a job in a studio that I worked at Kurtz & Friends. But we were a small studio. And my husband and I, we were both freelancing with Gábor, in a freelance basis. So basically, Gábor didn't hire me. What happened, this is where Paul Germain comes in the picture. When Matt Groening was ready to do his animation special, Paul Germain called, it was my husband, and wanted to know if Robert would be interested to do more animations special for a different artist. And my husband wasn't really wanting to do that. And Kurtz & Friends, who we worked with, they were very busy and successful. My husband was the one who recommended to try Gábor. So that's how Gábor got involved with The Simpsons, thanks to Paul Germain and my husband.

13:24 GP: I was working in my own studio in Pasadena. I would do the work and then I would come in. I always have worked very independent, so I would just come in with a product. When we were doing The Tracey Ullman, there was two artists, MK Brown and Matt Groening. Matt Groening was completely independent. MK Brown, her stuff was more subtle and more sophisticated. She had ideas but she basically left me to do what I wanted to do. A story goes, in the lobby, he designed a Simpsons family, which is very different from what they drawn today. They gave me the drawing and I was looking at them, and I had an idea how this family should look. I want it to be very different. I never met Matt Groening so I was basically on my own. I knew he was working in black and white before and that was wonderful because it's like an interior designer getting an empty space and they basically, she can do, or he can do whatever they want. Because his drawings are kind of charmingly primitive. It's not your regular animation design. And I wanted to do something very different. I wanted to get away from people being standardized like black and white, and good and bad.

14:46 GP: To me, yellow sounded really good. Yellow is basically very close to white. And I chose a warm yellow. You definitely want to be sure your animated characters read over a background. But I wasn't choosing it so scientifically. I really wanted it to look good. That's what animation is about. It doesn't have to be what we think it's supposed to be, we can use our imagination, and we can create and put surprises out. I wanted them to be individual people. I know they are going to interact. I remember a baby, I picked purposely blue because she was a little girl, and I think mom was green. I wanted to make her hair black color but I didn't wanted to use black. She could be sitting next to Homer and they would look very well together, but they would complement each other. I'm looking at it as a painting.

15:50 S1: Bill Kopp, animator.

15:53 BK: And then it was the three of us for a long time, so we just camped out in this one big room we had there. And we listened to Bob and Ray. Tom Waits was really... He had 'Rain Dogs' had come out and we loved that.

16:05 S1: David Silverman, animator.

16:08 DS: We'd listen to Tom Waits 'Rain Dogs' to inspire us to drink more whiskey. And we would also listen to, I think we also listened to Bob and Ray a lot. It's almost a pity 'cause Bill would say, "Man, why don't we do a documentary on them while we still can?" And we said, "Yeah." We didn't exactly have careers where we were at leisure to do these projects on the side, you know what I mean? [chuckle] 'Cause we had to work, as opposed to, like, "Ooh, now we can do it." But yeah, we were big fans of Bob and Ray and Tom Waits. They kind of worked together with us.

16:41 S1: Wes Archer, animator.

16:43 WA: Gábor was in charge. He was pretty much hands-off. We just worked as a crew. Gábor would look at what we did and laugh and make comments and say, "Great stuff, guys." [chuckle] It was a super-fast schedule. We had one week to animate the entire short. So that's why it kinda looks really funky like that, 'cause we just took Matt's drawings and pretty much went with it. We didn't even have model sheet or final design turn around the characters, no official storyboard approval, we just took his drawings and ran with it. So it was the three of us in a room, animating all day, everyday. Started trying to standardize the characters and what they looked like. Season 1 was coming to a close. I think that's when Bill went into his own career writing and directing and...

17:41 BK: Right around the time Roger Rabbit came out, we all freaked out, couldn't see that in the Cinerama Dome. And then I left the show 'cause I was done with The Simpsons... It wasn't like no one would ever go anywhere, I was like, it was really cool. But Silverman was the guy that really tidied it up and toned the look, and I just wasn't that interested and I had an offer from Disney to go be the head of story on the Roger Rabbit Shorts unit, Tummy Trouble and Roller Coaster and all that. And that was like... 'Cause I was still really thinking animation so that was like graduate work for me, I was dying to get in there, it was a great... That was a great experience. 'Cause I was just back with my CalArts buddies.

18:20 WA: But David and I were really trying hard to figure out this cartoon and how the characters worked. We would take a drawing that we thought was good, one of the better ones, and put it on the wall and start drawing like that one and following that one. And deciding which mouth shapes worked better, the proportions of the head, how many spikes in Bart's hair. It was David and I that arrived at Bart has nine spikes. David was drawing like 11 or 12. I was drawing like six or seven or eight spikes. So nine, nine or 10, nine was kind of in the middle. And that was a big deal. [laughter] Actually how many spikes in Bart's hair. And then you get into the animation design where, how high are the eyes on his forehead, how tall is his forehead? How much did the mouth stretch? All those details.

19:12 S1: David Silverman, animator.

19:14 DS: I don't know, I just remember looking over each other's shoulders saying, "How are you drawing Bart this week?" or "How are you drawing Homer this week?" I will say this, we were freelancing out and when they worked it out, I guess, for whatever tax reason, they didn't pay us a salary per se, they paid us as if we were contracted for 40 hours of work a week. But we were doing more like 70 or 80, we're just working all the time. But I didn't mind it. I felt very compelled and invested in trying to do something, if no other reason I thought this would look good in my portfolio. But at the same time, I was delighted that, hey, this is our artwork on a primetime network show. It's not us doing storyboards at Ruby-Spears or character designs at Hanna-Barbera or layout formation. We're doing, these are actual animation being on a primetime show. Maybe it's worth investing something in. So that was my attitude about it, anyhow. I think everybody else's too.

20:07 S1: That investment skyrocketed when James L. Brooks took the shorts long form. But according to a Brooks interview with the Hollywood Reporter, the idea to turn the shorts into a sitcom actually came from David Silverman.

20:20 James L Brooks: He was the one who I think is as responsible for the Simpsons being a series as anyone, because he accosted me drunk on a Christmas party, office Christmas party long ago, and just spilled out passionately how there hadn't been an animated series on television for a quarter century at that time and how much it would mean to animators to have a series out there with animation. And I was really impressed. And that, I think that moment led to doing the series as much as anything.

[laughter]

20:50 DS: I can remember talking to him like that. I guess I thought I was more sober than he said I apparently was. But I did talk to him about that. I don't know... I didn't stop the party and make a speech, but I did talk to him. I guess I may have said a few, maybe a couple of sentences [21:02] ____ continued and I ran on a bit. But, [chuckle] it was like, "Oh, there he is, okay, I'll say hi to him." I thought I was being just cool and calm and collected, but I didn't know what the look on my face was, yeah. [chuckle] And that was Jim's POV which I did not have any camera to verify what it was like. He said that I accosted him, I think I introduced myself to him. [chuckle] I think I get drunker whenever he would... Every retelling of the story. But I imagine, I don't know, 'cause I don't know how drunk I was 'cause when if you've had a few drinks, you have no idea.

21:37 DS: But I probably had a cup of courage to meet him 'cause I wanted to meet him. The respect I had for him was extremely, and still is, of an extremely high level. I find him to be just a walking genius. Based on, this is only based on the work that he had done from Mary Tyler Moore Show to Terms of Endearment, even to Room 222. And, of course, Taxi and the Broadcast News. So it's like this is a real guy that really knows about comedy and [22:02] ____ pesos, and heart. At the 100th episode party of The Simpsons series, I saw Jim at the bar, and Jim turned to me and said, "Do you know what, David? Do you remember when you first introduced yourself to me?" And I was really flabbergasted, I said, "No, Jim... Well, I do, but I didn't think you remembered." He said, "Oh, no, I remember very well." And he essentially recounted the same story.

22:26 DS: And he said that, "Basically you came up, you had a few, clearly, and you were, stuck your hand out and introduced yourself," and he said it was something along the lines of that I was really glad to be doing some great adult animation on a primetime show and that there hadn't been something like this in 25 years and it'd be great if this could be a show on its own or something like that. I think it was one of the factors, I don't think it was the factor. I think it was a factor. So, I'll take some credit but I certainly won't take the lion's share. I suspect part of it, too, was that I think Matt certainly had an enthusiasm to want it to be a series. If that helped it become a show, I'm glad I spoke up. [chuckle]

23:01 WA: When it got green light to go to series, we were like, "Oh, great. This is our chance to direct." The animation business there was really depressing and... But the good thing we had going for us when it started to pick up again is that, at that time, there weren't a lot of trained animators or a lot of, there weren't a lot of people in the animation business looking for fresh work. And a lot of people, I think, were dropping out of the animation business. So when this new project came up, I was able to get on as a director because there weren't very many out of work animation directors who had the kind of new sensibility to do a show like this. But David worked on some half hour kids show, I think, at Ruby-Spears, but I had never worked on a half hour show. We thought along with Gábor it might be best bringing someone who had directed half hours to show us the rope.

23:56 WA: As the season began, we were both given director slots and then we had to hire two or three other directors, so we hired one guy who had experience, and we hired Rich Moore and Gregg Vanzo as well, and they hadn't directed half-hours either. This other guy had and then he tried to show us the ropes and that guy's episode came back. It was kind of a disaster. I'm not understating that, it was a disaster. He didn't really take what David and I had developed and used it very well. The original episode one was Babysitter Bandit and that's the one everyone had to help fix, so it became episode 13. David is actually... They had him take the lead to fix that episode. David's episode was episode two, came back looking good. And then my episode, episode three came back looking good, or pretty decent, and that was a big relief.

24:58 WA: That proved that the first episode, the disaster, was uplift. I think that director was fired or I think they told Gábor Csupó that they had to... They didn't wanna work with him anymore. That's when David really took the lead and was on that... His way to becoming Mr Simpsons, the Simpsons director they would look to. But during season one it was... It was really everyone was feeling their way through this animation process that we thought hadn't really been done since The Flintstones.

25:35 DS: First thing I did was I did the title sequence. I worked with Matt Groening and Sam Simon on working out what the gags would be and then I figured out everything beyond that... The whole opening sequence, starting with the slow pushes in and then the skateboard and the whole staging, the whole bit. We had to invent a gag for Lisa 'cause she didn't really have a character. And it was in that meeting that she got her character, thanks to Jim Brooks. 'Cause we didn't have a gag for her, 'cause she didn't really have a defined personality in the one minute shorts per se. It kind of became apparent, because we had a gag for every other character, except not a clear one for Lisa.

26:11 DS: I just put in some lame gag there for no other reason to hang a light on the fact that we don't really have something for her. I, of course, suggested, "What if she plays in a band and what if she plays the tuba?" And Jim Brooks said, "Well, I don't like the tuba, but what if she played the baritone saxophone? In fact, what if she played it really well? She could be the genius kid of the family that nobody appreciates." And boom! Lisa had a character and later on that day they started writing an episode called "Moaning Lisa", so that's how that stuff was.

26:41 S1: The first Simpsons short aired on April 19th, 1987, and almost 30 years later, David Silverman directed The Simpsons movie. Wes Archer went on to direct a multitude of Simpsons episodes and also the pilot of the acclaimed King of the Hill, for which he became the show's Supervising Director. Bill Kopp went on to animate for the lot of Roger Rabbit shorts, created Eek! The Cat and Shnookums and Meat for the Disney Afternoon. He's working on a new show, Dumb Bunny and Jackass. Georgie Peluse continues to work at our art studio, and she's still just as vibrant as the color she gave to that family of five all those years ago.

27:22 GP: My friends called me one day and said, "You are in Playboy!" I'm going, "What?" So, I went to [27:29] ____ "Excuse me, do you sell Playboy?" "No, we don't sell Playboy." So, I went to a liquor store and I said, "I'm in Playboy!" and they said, "What?" Anyhow, Matt Groening got an interview in Playboy and it's June, 2007. And it says well, he gave me two credits for the very first time. They're asking him, how tall is your mother's hair? And he says, "In the 1960s, it was very tall." "Was it ever blue?" "No. That's another tribute to Georgie Peluse." And then [28:03] ____ first it says, "Why do they have yellow skin?" He says, "Originally, they were black and white outlined. For TV, we needed color. I thought a conventional weird pink that passes for Caucasians would look repulsive." He wanted flesh color, that's not true. So it says, so when it came to give a skin color, the animator, animation colorist, Georgie Peluse, choose yellow skin. She has never gotten proper credit, after what, almost 10 years? But that's animation... That's film industry for you, not just animation. Film industry in general. But it's a wonderful world. And as Matt Groening calls himself a father of a Simpson, I call myself a mother of a Simpson.

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