Ex-Boyfriends and Evil Twins (September 2021)
JETHRO
With an old portable radio blasting alternative rock and a generous pitcher of lemonade set on the plastic folding table, Jethro had much the appearance (and yet none of the urgency) of breaking down in the middle of nowhere following a hostile attack.
There were no bandits, no aliens to blame. After (inadvertently) making swiss cheese out of the RV, their glorious leader was now making good on his word to fix it. Beneath the beating Abbadon sun, his idea of a day out wasn’t shaping up to the bonding experience he thought it would be.
Hot, sticky, sweltering.. an umbrella was made moot by the fact that he was constantly on the move to patch the holes. The sight of two kakapo chasing small lizards across the dunes was enough for him to crack a smile, but not avert his devilish plan.
Tugging at the chin strap of his space-safe welding helmet, Jethro smirked at the sunning Promethean as a river of sweat ran down his front. As he leaned over Percy, the waterfall started dribbling over his resting (and presumably unaware) form.
“You look comfortable!” Too comfortable, in fact! Under the guise of puppy love, Jethro embraced him in a very moist hug.
“How’s my drip?”
ENFIELD FLEISCHER
A small vessel sped across the wastes of Abaddon, a fair way above the sand but still kicking up a line of it as it went. Inside Enfield was wearing the most stylish 'desert gear' he could find, leather bound goggles with yellow tinted lenses, a red bandana around his neck and his favorite red leather jacket with a brown shirt on underneath. He felt like he was rocking the mad max vibe he was feeling lately, though maybe not that well. All he could say was that he was glad for his air conditioning. Not that an Edaschian can't handle some heat now and then, they're practically dragons, he breaths fire for crying out loud!
He has Jax on speaker on the phone "Yeah there were five burrows at the co-ordinates I sent you... maybe we can head to those on the last day of our trip before I leave? Must be some big daredevils in them, they were wide openings. - Anyway dude, bro, I'll be back in like five minutes and-"
There's a pause as he squints into the distance. Is that...?
"...Hey bro uh, I'll call you back. Might be a bit late, don't worry" He hangs up before Jax can even respond and draws closer. Holy shit, it is the RV??? He feels a cold chill of dread crawl up his spine. Why would it just be here? What if something happened to Percy? to Marvin? Daphne???
He pulls on over quickly and the dust and sand kick up before he can get a good scope of anything. He doesn't wait for it to clear, quickly popping the hatch of his vessel up before hopping out. The dust clears quickly enough... and beyond it, what he sees breaks his heart in barely a fraction of a second. He's frozen to the spot, tail hanging limply against the sand, wings slowly sinking down behind him as he stares at the two of them there, lips hanging parted, eyes full of pain.
PERCY
Jeth was going to make good on the terms of his forgiveness and Percy was going to enjoy bearing witness to every last, negotiated condition. (Oh yes, Kilroy, re-initiation to the Sidewinders was a’coming, this was just your appetizer course.)
Where one boy suffered laboriously under the sweltering Abaddon sun, the other sprawled luxuriously there, just having a veritable day at the beach (albeit just sand, no surf). Honestly, this was probably the first moment where he’d actually just allowed himself to pause a tick and relax, where he wasn’t just go go go keeping himself busy with friends or work or…you know, long lost “friends” showing up on your doorstep in the middle of the night with gunfire hot on their heels.
At a glance, it might have seemed like everything was normal, like everything had just picked back up from where it left off in the good old days. In some ways it had. In some ways, it hadn’t.
“You missed a spot,” Percy called out rather cheekily to Jeth before taking a super long and noisily exaggerated (siiiiiip) draw from his icy cool beverage. Linking two arms behind his head, adjusting his sunglasses with a third, and rubbing the fourth—the one which had just set down his perspiring drink—over his bare chest to cool himself off, the Promethean had juuuuust gotten into that sunbather’s sweet spot and closed his eyes when…
Drip. Drip. Drip.
By the time his eyes opened again to the realization that it was not the umbrella casting its shadow over him all of a sudden—it was too late.
“Ack! Get off! Get off! Fuck! Come on!” Percy howled his immediate objection, feigning annoyance in a way that managed to stave off any surprised laughter. It was a good thing too, as that would have just added a whole new layer to the awkwardness he didn’t yet know they was in for.
Pushing off of his lounge chair, the green Sidewinder grappled and wrestled within the sweaty circle of his leader’s embrace. With all those arms, it wouldn’t take long for Red to find the tables had turned either, as Percy promptly put Jeth in his place…in a headlock being squeezed by that boa constrictor of a muscular bicep.
Under any other circumstance, Percy would have been happy to hold Jeth there until he tapped out or cried (read: gasped) Uncle, but unfortunately, it was in that instant the Promethean turned just enough to spot the Edasichian who—out of an abundance of concern and the most tragic of coincidence—had just rolled up on the RV.
Instead, seeing Enfield there, so clearly shocked and devastated, had Percy panic and likely drop Jeth, sweaty face-first, into the sand. “E-En!” the normally surefooted Promethean stammered, sounding guilty for reasons a clearer head couldn’t have even justified.
JETHRO
Getting (and staying) on his teammate’s nerves was a pastime that Jethro thought he earned the right to indulge in after making some progress on repairs. One step forward, two steps back, as they say!
“What, why?! I thought you missed me!”
Their squabble didn’t last long. Seized by the many arms of his Promethean pal, Jethro straight up squealed. That instant was enough proof that when it came to pure muscle, the “Machamp” had him beat every time.
“MEIN THROAT!”
Flipping over the chair and straight into the sand, comfort came in the form of the bottom half of a (still twitching) lizard deposited in his lap. Thanks, May!
“Eugh.. What the hell, P?!”
With the protection from having his pretty face melted off still attached, a very sticky (now sandy) Jethro wasn’t as easily identifiable as his handsome, shirtless companion. Maybe it didn’t matter, or that Enfield had a lingering hunch..
Like someone cozying up to his ex-boyfriend wasn’t bad enough.
Needless to say, a visitor wasn’t exactly part of today’s plan. Red’s fist closed around the wrench dangling from his belt.. until he recognized the operator of the unknown vehicle by his most distinct features:
“Hey, Wings!”
Ignorant to anything amiss, he gave the kakapo a quick pat on the potato-y head before waving with both arms.
“I still owe you that race!”
ENFIELD FLEISCHER
Enfield stood there silently, stunned. It was that nightmare come true, the one he'd told Percy about once. That he'd come up to the RV one day and it'd be him and Jethro he found. He'd set it aside as a bad dream, of course, he put every bit of trust in Percy then. He'd worried, he'd confessed his worry early on to Percy and those words rang through his mind right now. Time slowed down to allow them to echo in his mind.
"Y-yeah. I was...scared for a while, It was stupid... I was scared ... um, you know, he'd come back and all your old feelings would too... I trust you though, and I don't mean that lightly, ever.
I trust you with my heart... I love you... I know I joke about too, but you're my one and only."
"When I see red, I think of you, Enfield. I want to travel across time and space with you. Worlds, dimensions, the whole nine yards. In the end, it’s gonna be you and me, no matter where we go, doesn’t make a difference where we end up. I'm yours in this universe and any other you want me in."
The rockstar, so out of place here, starts to tremble. It's not as noticeable in his arms and legs but his wings shiver endlessly as he meets Percy's eyes and then...Jethro's. What his 'red rival' said snapped something. Jethro didn't even know, Percy hadn't even brought him up. And all that time Percy hadn't responded to his message, how could he be so stupid? He took a step back, looking pale and queasy. His adrenaline was too high to let him even produce tears.
Without another word he turns to head back into the shuttle, he's already climbing into it within seconds without a word to either of them, fumbling horribly with the buttons as his hands turn to jelly. He should never have come here, he shouldn't have stopped.
PERCY
In that moment, Enfield was living his worst nightmare and Percy knew it. Worse? He’d been the one to—however unintentionally, however unwittingly—inflict what he swore up and down would never happen.
Percy was stunned, frozen and guilty. Enfield was stunned, frozen and aching. And Jeth? Well, he might have been slow to the jump, but he wasn’t stupid. Especially not when the Edasichian turned tail and hastened, heartbroken, back to his shuttle…only for the Promethean to leap over his still fallen teammate and give chase!
“Enfield! Enfield, wait!” Percy shouted and stumbled across the dunes, just barely recovering his balance in time to fall at the steps of the small spacecraft before the space dragon could shut the door on him and take off. “I—I didn’t know what to say! I didn’t know how to tell you. I…I wanted…I saw your text and…I never thought you’d talk to me ever again after that night when you…”
There were no winners in this moment. There was nothing that could be said—would be said—that could make this even a modicum better…only so so much worse. Because no, aside from the one-way transmissions Percy sent out into the voids of space that he was certain Jethro had never even heard, the Promethean had not mentioned Enfield. When would he have? Even under the best, most peaceful of circumstances—a happy reunion, even!—Percy was simply not equipped to handle all that he felt, then and now.
There was no denying, even in Kilroy Axelrad’s brand of blissful ignorance, what he was bearing witness to. Broken up or not, Percy obviously still cared deeply for Enfield. To hear him try to explain, try to justify, try to communicate that things had been so impossibly complicated even before Jeth came back…Percy not only felt horrible, but felt like the biggest hypocrite in the whole damn galaxy.
But things had changed between him and Enfield before Jethro showed up. They hadn’t adventured this or any other dimension together. So much of Percy for so long had been domesticated and whittled down into something manageable and compartmentalized because he had so dearly wanted to fit into the pocket of space the rockstar had cultivated for him. Somewhere along the way, Percy had missed who he was and stopped being happy just being Enfield’s boyfriend and number one fan. Well, that and…it’d be a lie to suggest he hadn’t been holding onto the most futile and selfish of hopes for exactly the person he had here now to return home.=
It’d been an impossibility when he made that promise…yet here they were.
“I’m sorry, Enfield. I didn’t want you to find out this way,” Percy admitted at last. He did not hang his head shamefully now, for no matter how awful the feeling was, he did not wish to convey a betrayal beyond the promise he had broken. “Kilroy came back. Came home. He’s a part of this. I’m still a Sidewinder: I always have been, I always will be. To have my team back was all I ever wanted.” The truth, as the saying went, hurt. “I didn’t know how to tell you because I didn’t want you thinking…it’s not…I mean…it’s…not…I didn’t…it’s complicated.”
Oof.
JETHRO
Jethro and Enfield hadn’t the best of starts, but they made peace before his disappearance many months ago. Without reason to assume that changed, he cupped his hands over his mouth to project his voice loud and clear.
So well-intentioned, and yet.. so damn oblivious.
“Hey! Minefield! Heeey! ..Do you think he heard me?”
Apparently not, as the Edasichian then turned tail and ran the other way.
“What’s his problem?”
Rather than receive some sort of speculation, Jethro was left to watch—flabbergasted—as his best friend leapt over him like a gazelle to give chase. Since when did Percy give a shit about Enfield?
Left in the dust, he and May exchanged a look before he stumbled after them.
“Woah, woah, woah! What, you guys fuck or something?” he laughed and laughed, and then.. gradually stopped laughing.
It was like asking if someone died and finding out that way, except somehow worse, because he was left with a sneaking suspicion that his boyfriend-not-boyfriend had actually, irrevocably and against everything he took for granted, boned his rival-not-rival in his absence. Now, instead of being dead, it was something that all three of the unluckiest people on the planet had to live with.
“..No.. no.. come on, dude..”
If heaven was a place on Earth, hell was certainly to be found on Abaddon. Running his hands over his helmet (not that it made much of a difference with his nonexistent hair), whereas Percy was at a loss for words, Jethro couldn’t spit them fast enough to get to the bottom of everything he wanted to hear.
“Find out what? Part of what?” he demanded, still holding on to the sliver of a prospect of this being some stupid prank. Oof indeed.
“This is a joke, right? El-oh-el jay-kay, we got you? Let me guess, Mo—no, no—Callista is still getting led on by Sir Baby Shit for Brains, too?”
ENFIELD FLEISCHER
Enfield had hardly 'cultivated a pocket of space' for Percy, but likely the Promethean had felt that way perhaps because he'd always just wanted to go back ....well, here. Confirmed as much by his own words. When Enfield heard that he flinched as if he'd been hit, He'd thought he might become a sidewinder, really, there had been talk of a jacket or something but it hadn't really happened so it hurt even more. He can't seem to voice a single thought, his mouth hopelessly opening and closing.
Jethro comes over and unintentionally makes it worse. Enfield figures he's going to feel shit about it too, but at least he has Percy in his life to help him through it, right?
A million things he wants to say but his muscles are so tense, he can't stop shivering and shaking. He needs to get out of here, he just can't believe this is happening. He weakly squeaks, voice cracking with the effort of forcing words out "You won't hear from me again" it's a broken rasp, his trembling hand reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket and produces what looks like some retro cassette tape, but it has ports so that it can be connected to a computer. The label on the front says 'Percy'
"I-i ...d-didn't know if i'd see you b-before I l-left s-so i .. I just recorded it-" he stutters, taking a deep breath. Fuck he needs to go. He hands it to Percy a little too quickly and desperately reaches for the hatch of his vessel to pull it down over him, or try to anyway, anyone could reach to stop it. But as he does so his broken gaze flits to Jethro for barely a few seconds.
PERCY
Percy was desperate, and had reached the point of no return. He’d kept his shit together for longer than anyone would have hedged their bets on, but this was his breaking point. “SHUT THE FUCK UP JETHRO! IF YOU DIDN’T SEE THE RING ON MODRY’S GODDAMN FINGER YOU REALLY ARE FUCKING STUPID!” Life had gone on without him! To wrap his head around Modry being Mrs. Harlo was one thing, but this?
There was not a single person involved that wasn’t going to come out hurting when all was said and done, even the most oblivious of boyfriend-deniers.
“N-no. Please. Enfield. Just…I need to—explain! You gotta let me……please understand.” That had always been the cornerstone of Promethean’s innermost being: understanding why. To have the opportunity to explain, though he knew full well it was a selfish want in this moment that he simply did not deserve, he just wanted—needed—to fix things. Things that couldn’t possibly be fixed. He promised Enfield so many things. He’s broken so many promises. But of all people he should’ve known better than to swear and avow in the first place. These weren’t new feelings he’d been feeling, these were emotions he’d had to stuff way deep down in the darkest, farthest recesses of his mind and heart and try to move on.
He had tried, Enfield. He really had.
Percy tried to grab Enfield’s hand beyond the tape, but given how urgently the Edasichian was trying to get away from him, the Promethean would be left juggling the tape to keep it from falling—and in not wanting it to seem like he didn’t care for the gesture, gave the space dragon just enough room and split-second’s time to escape. “W-wait! Just wait!” Percy begged, but knew it was too late.
JETHRO
There was a time when Jethro would snatch the cassette out of his quivering hands, snap it in half, and ground the pieces under his heel, but he currently found himself so taken aback by how sad Enfield was that he just.. fizzled like a wet match. He’d broken plenty of hearts in his day, but was clever enough to get the hell out of Dodge lest he face the consequences of his actions. If nothing else, this served as a brilliant reminder as to why it never paid to make things personal..
“..What the fuck did you do?” he asked, a mixture of amazement and disgust, the latter of which grew in multitudes as he flinched beneath Percy’s uncharacteristic outburst.
Jethro blinked.
Ring on Modry’s..? Had she worn a ring on her finger? Thinking back to the deft digits stitching his neck wound together, he was already wandering away as Percy abandoned him for Enfield, chalking them up to a lost cause.
“Right.. stupid, Jethro.. Stupid.”
His recitation was hollow as he ducked behind a veil of indifference. Red was the color of the leader, but more so the shade of wrath as he picked up the blowtorch and aimed it at the RV he just spent a good portion of the afternoon repairing.
T-R-A-probably should have started a little closer to the side, actually—wait a second.. Y?
The letters he scrawled out of white hot rage should have hit a nerve with his dear friend, as they were once painted in the Promethean’s own blood only to be doubled done with fire by the least likely of suspects—the very person who once erased them.
Assuming Percy was yet preoccupied with his (apparently) preferred lover, Jethro finished his botched job with a bow.
“There.. and.. done! Ta-dah! Go fuck yourself.”
Scooping the birds up in his arms, he strutted back towards the general direction of their base. Without Modry to vent to, it was time for some much needed.. “introspection”.
ENFIELD FLEISCHER
Enfield feels awful for more reasons than one, because he just needs to get out of here before he starts crying and looks like a stupid baby in front of his ex and well... Jethro.
The door is slammed shut, but he doesn't miss Percy asking him to wait. He barely glances at him before he revs up the engine and slowly rises up above the sand, trying to reduce the amount of sand kicked up by moving away from Percy first. Once he's up in the air he looks ahead and speeds off in the direction of the nearest habitat where he knows Jax is waiting at their hotel.
He just can't stay, he speeds there as fast as he can, leaving the two behind to adjust to what had just happened and ask/answer some perhaps much needed questions.
PERCY
Percy stared hopelessly at Enfield through the shuttle window until he was forced to turn and shield his eyes from the sand that got kicked up in its inevitable ascent.
Having been busy trying to make amends with one red lover, by the time he turned further, apologetic efforts back to Jethro, well…Kilroy Axelrad had always been the best Sidewinder at holding grudges, hadn’t he?
Horrible spelling aside, the word Red had chosen was done so with malice in his heart. His intent was to cut Green down when he was already clearly at a devastating low…and it worked (perhaps better than his leader could have even hoped?).
Standing there and staring at the mile high sign of his worst failure—simultaneously falling short with two young men he cared very deeply for—the longer the Promethean stared at the burnt siding of his RV, the deeper he internalized that single, scarring word.
No wonder Jethro had left then.
No wonder Enfield had left now.
And once again, Percy was all alone.
Picking the blowtorch up from where the welder chrome artist had angrily thrown in down in favor of collecting not one but both birds, Percy turned the flame on, letting the flame flare out before refining it to a fine, white-hot point…and corrected Jeth’s spelling, solidifying the same message those Alpha Corp. goons had written upon his chest the last time his not-yet-shed soul had still been inside of it.
TRAYITOR.
Yeah, that sounded about right.
Rather than return to the RIG, rather than try to justify or explain himself to yet another boyfriend who clearly didn’t want anything to do with him, Percy just climbed into the torched, still-half-bullet-peppered RV and let the door slam noisily behind him.
JETHRO
Shuffling out of the brig with an empty tray in hand, Jethro was equally devoid of expression as he frisbee’d it into the sink. He didn’t check to see what shattered.. Kind of like Percy hadn’t even looked at him as he did.
It was like he wasn’t even there.
Enfield might not have made the necessary adjustments for the Promethean to thrive as his second half, but Jethro had long since committed to the person he thought he knew: a starring role in his life’s work—his team—and a place that few “privileged” people had ever left their impression—his heart.=
Not that it did him any good now.
Stupid. Fucking stupid!
Taken by the sudden urge to purge, to feel clean again, Red was relieved to find the communal bathroom empty save for a few stray dune roaches that ran for cover as the lights flickered on. Avoiding his reflection as he stripped was a conscious decision, though it followed him all the way into the stall.
His thoughts weren’t as easy to thwart, and behind the molding curtain ran numerous as droplets circling the drain. Goodbye, dirt. Goodbye, sweat.
Goodbye, tears.
There was a dull thud as his head collided with the tile wall.
Which part of his survival needed explaining, anyway? Everything he ever cherished, gone up in flames.. all because the cat came back. Maybe he should have stayed away.
He’d leave a note this time. This time, it’d be on purpose..
PERCY
Percy had sat there, head in hands (and even more hands) for the longest time and agonized over everything he’d ever done wrong—not just in love but—in life. Why was this the way things always seemed to go for him? A step in the right direction…and then the blaring horn and blinding light of an oncoming train.
But there was one person he’d park himself on the tracks for…and it wasn’t Enfield. That dawning realization hit him as hard in the back of the head as Marvin’s thrusting Elvis pelvis used to before May came along. It got him up. It got him going. It had him hitting that still-Swiss cheesed RV door at a run.
And it had him leaving that corded cassette tape on the fold down dining room table inside: not forgotten, but decidedly unlistened to for now.
The Promethean might have jumped over the cyborg in the moment, might have let him take a face full of sand when panicked push came to shove, but make no mistake, he had never forgotten him. Jethro had been there, a thorn in the lion’s paw that not even the most fastidious of mice could yank out, even when he wasn’t there.
“Jeth?” Percy called out as he raced down the main corridor of the Rig. “Jethro?” He braced himself to be struck in the face with any innumerable object from his teammate’s hoard the moment he stuck his green head between those eternally jammed pod bay doors. Nothing. “J?” Percy was on the move again, working his way deeper into Sidewinders HQ and checking all of his leader’s long lost but still favorite haunts. The game room: “J?” The garage: “Red?” The four-armed alien grew more and more desperate as he searched, continuing to holler as though, like Rumpelstiltskin, this Grimm game of hide and seek could not be won without the proper name. “Kilroy? Axelrad? Jethro pl—!”
The Promethean slammed on the brakes as he passed what sounded like rainfall down one of the dormant, dormitory hallways of the vacant passenger wing. No one really used the communal bathroom, at least, they hadn’t had a reason to since sneaking out of earshot to Modry’s bedroom so long ago. What had been a secret then felt like a distant and impossible to reconcile memory now…but damn if that would stop Percy from trying.
The green Sidewinder made no attempt to disguise the sound of his bare feet on the wet tile as he migrated into the stalled shower space. Rather than rip the curtain back and really make things awkward (which, trust me, the desperate man had considered for a split second), instead he pressed his shirtless back to the far wall and slid down it into a huddled, crouching seat.
“Bet you don’t remember the last time we were in here together,” Percy piped up after what long pause was necessary to muster his nerve. No folks, this wasn’t about to be some hot and steamy tale. Well…at least not the part the Promethean chose to remind his ‘friend’ of. “You snapped me in the nuts with a wet towel so hard I literally thought I was going to puke.” Percy laughed and ran two hands through his hair, pulling at its ends, while the other two rubbed the coarse stubble on his face.
He sighed. What was he trying to pull, really? This wasn’t how he was going to get anything accomplished.
Even though Jeth had done so in the moments long before Percy arrived on the scene, the boys proved rather alike in how they conveyed their frustrations and emotional upheaval as the Promethean too thumped his head punishingly against the tile wall.
“Jethro, out there…I was begging for a chance to explain, the opportunity to make someone understand what I was going through. I realize now that…had he…had Enfield actually given me the chance, I wouldn’t have honestly known what to tell him. Except…maybe…I’m sorry and that…that he was right. That his worst fears about me were spot on all along. That I’m still in l…”
Percy sucked his teeth and took a hard left turn, fearful to say anything more on that right now.
“I wouldn’t have known what to say to him, Jeth, but I’ve never…we’ve always figured it out. You’ve always let me get it out. And I’ve got to hope you’re…you’re in there right now, maybe hating my guts, but still willing to…listen like we do whenever the other one has something they need to sort out.”
Percy was so afraid that, if he stopped now, if he gave Jethro even a moment of social space to consider, he’d deny him the opportunity. So Percy simply couldn’t give him the same chance again. There would be no silence to fill, only an outpouring of broken honesty he’d only ever had the courage to confess to the blinking red light of that secure transmission channel.
“I was all alone without you. I had Modry, but I didn’t have you, Jethro. I didn’t have what we had—not even any of that but everything else. You were gone and I was lost. And what was worse was that I was so sure it was because of me. Because of what I was then…and who I wasn’t any longer. The timing was…” Percy sighed but hastily pushed on, not allowing quiet to ever settle. “We have moments where we are so fucking alike it’s scary, Jethro. When I get sad…or scared…all I know how to do is get mad…and get even. So when Enfield showed up at the bar one night…”
The sound he made then was a pitiful one, one of shame and disgust and guilt and regret that no length nor heat of shower (nor death shedding) could ever scald from his skin.
“I knew you would have hated it. And looking back now, at so many points in my relationship with Enfield, that was my driving force.” This was not to suggest that the feelings which had developed for the space dragon had not been real, but that the motivation behind them—behind promises made that couldn’t possibly be kept or fulfilled—were unendingly, deludedly selfish in hindsight.
“I broke up with Enfield having no clue you were even still out there, let alone coming home after all this time. I left because…” Tell him why. Tell him why. “…I left because I haven’t felt like myself since the day you disappeared. So I came back here. So I picked up right where I left off, even if it meant striking out on the Sidewinder beat solo this time around. I just needed to get back to whatever I had left of this.”
“…of you.” Had those last two words been too softly spoken to hear over the steamy hiss of a rusty, sputtering showerhead?
JETHRO
The scope of Percy’s panic was so significant that any person present, be it their feathered friends or current captive, roused to the cry for the leader missing in action. Their collective concern was obvious given the precedent set by his former absence.
Not again, damnit.
Whether deafened by the faucet or simply “playing” dumb, Jethro did not respond for a distressingly long while. As soon as the door squeaked open, the conductor of no insignificant number of Percy’s problems caught himself at the crest of a wail and expelled his grief as one last audible, shaky breath.
Their leader in mourning made himself a statue as he listened and waited, striking sparks that tried and tried but couldn’t catch on his damp skin. The groundwater expelled by the faulty pipes was bone cold, but kept his temper even and mind relatively clear.
Just another thing he’d have to fix in this godforsaken place.
Convinced even before it was confirmed that his pursuit of Enfield was in large part due to spite, Jethro was both figuratively and literally seeing green as the alien prattled on and on about the how’s and why’s.
Given their combative past (in which even Percy played a small part) it only figured that the edaschian snuck in one last blow at his pride. Indeed, it was once upon a time that their relationship consisted of him pissing Jethro off, and his best friend reacting in kind—quite the groundwork for romance!
That “someone” (anyone?) Percy confessed to needing in his time of crisis lent to the unkind idea that with his ex on the opposite end of the planet by now, he was just making due with what he had left. Which.. wasn’t much, to be fair.
His purported plan B emerged from behind the veil, a far cry from his former days as Adonis in the flesh with his threadbare towel and naked head.
“Well, here it is: what’s left of me.”
It took two long years for him to claw his way out of that crater with nails that cracked and split down to the cuticle. Yet from the top of that hill all he could see of the promise of a future that kept him alive until this point was too little, too late.
“Was it worth it?”
As yesterday’s man—the thorn in his paw, the pain in his ass—stood dripping and bereft of expectations, he sincerely doubted it.
PERCY
Silence had never been an unnerving thing for the Promethean. Be it stubbornness or a propensity towards being rather stoic himself when deep in thought, the four-armed alien could sit in the most deafening quiet and not be bothered in the slightest...until now. And was it any wonder why the silence made Percy so uncomfortable? Jethro, as a rule, never shut the fuck up! That's what made the team's resident loudmouth giving either Green or Blue the cold shoulder so damn effective, even after all this time!
Once more, Percy's head fell into his hands. He held his breath and squeezed his eyes shut, suspending animation until his lungs screamed and his heart strained inside of his chest.
The draw of the plastic curtain had the Sidewinder gasping even more than the need to replenish his oxygen in that moment. Snapping his gaze up and finding the shell of his brokenhearted best friend staring back, Percy scrambled back up the wall with an awkward, clumsy shimmy and stood there before Jeth.
How was it that, in that moment, they both ended up awaiting some sort of judgment from the other? Having been eaten straight through by the most ulcerative of guilt, the green Sidewinder regarded the red leader's rhetoric as if it were a trick question. To answer--at least, to answer honestly--was to not only fess up to all of his selfishness, but to embrace it.
...well, that wasn't only thing Percy'd end up embracing at the end of all this.
"You really are fucking stupid," The Promethean accused the cyborg, but before the buzzed head of the hair-god himself could be sent spinning by presumed cruelty or rejection, he was blitzed, caught in all four arms, and sent falling right back into that shower stall--right back against the tile, where he'd be pinned and held tightly.
"I thought I'd never see you again," Percy whimpered, and rather than aim to take anything more from Jeth that had not been freely given, instead buried his face in the red Sidewinder's chest.
I think it's safe to say, Jethro: whatever was left was worth it.
JETHRO
In the brief window of opportunity presented for Percy to positively ruin him, he welcomed whatever fate became him with open arms.
It was his best friend that encompassed him in turn. Thrust against the partition with a grunt, Jethro didn’t struggle, didn’t hug back, but.. stacked against him like a house of cards. Who was embracing who?
“Yeah, I know..” Like he’d forget so soon after Percy was kind enough to remind him.
“I wanted—more than anything—for things to go back.. back to the way they were.. just the three of us..” he murmured into those vibrant green waves. In the early days, not even in the name of team spirit could Jethro convince Percy to dye his hair.. yet here he was, maintaining it of his own accord.
“I wasn’t here when I needed to be. I let you guys down.”
He perceived it—the preface of that coveted “l” word—but held it at a distance, hesitant to juggle that dynamite stick in such close quarters yet. Percy must have misspoken.
“Turns out I’m way better at hurting people than I am at loving them.”
Jethro hurt Percy. He hurt Percy a lot. And as much as he wanted to, he couldn’t reasonably promise he wouldn’t do it again. His anger was indiscriminate, its bite venomous.
“There were so many times I thought, ‘this is it, Jeth’—that I was gonna die. Not a hero, but alone.. in a cell, in the dark.”
With not a bang, but a whimper.
“After all the shit that went down after I came back, I almost wished I did.”
Pulling away, he pressed a palm flat to the smudged mirror and stared his doppelganger down.
“The old guard had it all figured out.. and then, ‘Kilroy Axelrad’ came along.”
Busted even at his best, Jethro’s tried (but hardly true) method of “fake it til’ you make it” was looking less and less feasible the more that others suffered for its sake.
PERCY
Even though the Promethean had doubled down on his accusation, his questioning of the cyborg’s intelligence the second time around bore none of the same angst—and therefore, in hindsight, the first would be the only instance in which Percy might consider apologizing to Jethro later on. He didn’t think their red leader was stupid (he really didn’t, even when he undoubtedly was sometimes)…he just wished he could shake some much-needed clarity into his dumb stupid bitch ass body. And bless him, because he tried. Percy kept trying.
Jethro’s stupidity wouldn’t be the only thing Percival refused to relent on in the here on now, not where brutally candid confessions were concerned. And where Red wasn’t willing to handle even one stick of dynamite, there Green was with all four arms loaded like kindling with sentimental explosives.
“Modry missed you too, Jethro, I’d never deny her that…but she only had to carry on. I had to move on. Try to, at least.” Oh yes, there was a heavy distinction there, not just continuously made, but stressed and emphasized upon. Jeth might not have wanted to acknowledge all the singular I’s in these statements, but there wasn’t a we to be found anywhere anymore. After all, backing down now could mean giving the long lost Sidewinder room to run, still under some false impression that he was too little, too late. So no, Jethro, you were not truant of heart to the team, but to one teammate in particular.
As much as Percy wanted to, he didn’t follow in well-trained attendance at Jeth’s heel. The cyborg would see him there, beyond his reflection in the mirror, but the alien had already turned and busied himself with the rickety coils of the faucet which—much like one Kilroy Axelrad—just needed some extra care and focus in reparative efforts to warm right up. The water that came out of the showerhead next wasn’t bone cold anymore, but steamy and welcoming to the body which stripped and commandeered the stall. (What? Jeth had been gone; they hadn’t had a mechanic/plumber, so the Sidewinder had picked up what bare necessities kept the place from falling apart.)
“You can’t possibly be so much of an egomaniac as to believe that,” Percy sighed as he pulled the plastic curtain, peering around it’s taken cover at Jethro still. “M’s told me all of the stories, J. Reid saw in you the same thing Blue and I did—and still do.”
Quite sure Red wasn’t done with his pity party self-reflection and the quietly persisting doubt of insecurities, Green would take a different approach.
Should Jeth object, should he insist he’d fallen short, that they deserved more than he was capable of giving, that he couldn’t ever hope to live up to the aforementioned Sidewinder legacy—blahblahblah—Percy would pull the curtain the rest of the way and disappear behind it. “I’m sorry Axelrad, what was that last bit?” The four-armed silhouette asked, the Promethean raising his voice as if he could no longer maintain this distant heart-to-heart over the hiss of the water. “Oop! Sorry, still can’t hear you~” Percy feigned again, before gargling water infuriatingly and adding to the bathroom white noise.
Clearly, if this conversation was to continue, Jethro would need to step into Percy’s office to say whatever else he needed to, and when he finally did? He’d be caught in yet another embrace and dragged inside, this one intended to show just how much he’d been missed rather than tell.
JETHRO
Jethro’s dumb stupid bitch ass body remained firmly parked infront of the glass as he picked himself apart, finding the ribbing provided by his well-intentioned friend unsatisfactory given that he voiced (what he thought were) very real concerns. It was an uncertain Jeth that chewed the bone Percy threw him, turning back the slightest degree to check..
“..She did?”
Either way, bitching benefitted no one. Time to boss up! Slapping a little life back into his complexion, he turned his attention to the heat emanating from the stall he previously evacuated.
“Ooh, thanks for warming it up for me!” he charged through the curtain as through a matador’s red cape to find.. a bare ass alien on the other side.
“Woah, you’re naked already?!” he made a big show of looking away.. and then looking.. and then looking away again. Nice.
“Well, if you’re busy, I’mma ‘bout to find out what’s on that tape! Later!”
Ignoring any cries of protest to such a blatant invasion of privacy, Jethro tried to pull a sneaky and slip out of the danger zone unimpeded (easier said than done with four arms ready, willing, and able to suplex his half-chrome dome into the ground).. and hopefully not on the very wet tile beneath his feet!
Should he fail to catch the nuisance, Percy’s options in the buff were few..
PERCY
“Yeah, she did.”
Facts were facts, man. Percy wouldn’t deny Jethro that.
…though he might wish he had the moment Assholerad capitalized on his naked vulnerability and fucking took off on him!
“Mother fucker!” the Promethean swore as the cyborg mentioned Enfield’s tape, a very sentimental piece of evidence which he’d left wholly unguarded in his haste to make peace with his teammate!
Snatching at Jethro the moment he made his mischievous intent known (there was no sense of privacy amount the Sidewinders, just ask Moe’s diary!), the only thing Percy had to grab onto—at least that didn’t involve slamming his friend’s face into a wall from the momentum of an at-run chase…was that threadbare towel wrapped around his waist.
Tit for tat, and likely bare ass versus bare ass now, the Promethean proved impervious, refusing to succumb to his own bit of discreet staring at that bubble butt he’d uncovered…and instead immediately dawned on the idea of making that towel into the same weapon Jethro had once used against him!
Held from one far corner to the other, the thinning fabric proved scarily aerodynamic and auspiciously loud with each crack of one-sided, cotton gunfire. The four-armed alien was nipping at the cyborg’s heels, he was catching literally the most sensitive bits of flesh known to man! (At least when said man was facing away and fleeing.)
And he was gaining on him!
Snap! Snap!! Snap!!!
It was at this point, if Percy was Jason Vorhees and Jethro was some horny camp counselor (which, let’s be real, he 100% had that “dumbass pretty boy always dies first” horror movie energy), he would have tripped and fallen to the ground just short of escaping.
His only option was to turn and fight!
And when he did?
Snap.
Yep. Percy cracked him square in the nuts, like some goddamn rope throwing rodeo star, and paid him back for the long lost memory he had shared back there in the bathroom in the first place.
“You misspelled TRAITOR—its an I, not a Y—by the way.” The naked Promethean loomed over his friend’s undoubtedly doubled over body—had that towel actually connected, of course—with all four arms crossed.
JETHRO
Sliding into the corridor with pure adrenaline pumping in the miss-matched circuitry of his veins, the literal mother fucker was looking less risky business and more pending hospital visit as he shirked the bear he poked to the best of his ability. A towel was a small price to pay for a squeaky clean getaway! Alas, it was soon weaponized against him!
“No, no, NO! I’M JUST A BOY!”
Buff, dogged, and scorching hot on his tail, it wasn’t the Jets but an exceptionally “armed” alien closing in. Percy could snap at him all he wanted, but being very much present as they poured over Moe’s diary front to back (or, more accurately, as he read it to Jeth), he was hardly the innocent party here! With any juicy tidbits in the R.I.G. fair game to prying eyes and nosey.. noses, even Jethro knew better than to leave his secrets laying out in the open. That’s why they were stashed away for safekeeping in his pretty little head!
“Shiii—!” There was an audible thump as his foot collided against a stack of crates, and both Jethro and their contents were sent flying. Wipe out! He hardly had the chance to react to the can that nailed him straight in the forehead when Percy came to collect his bounty.
Even in his exposed state, his opponent bestowed him not the slightest bit of mercy. Percy held him tit for taint, tearing a scream from his throat that broke halfway.
“OH, FU-CK!” he cupped his groin in pain that was greatly exaggerated, curling into the fetal position to prevent further abuse against his poor nads.
“I need those, P!”
The “dumbass pretty boy” was so preoccupied with the shock and pain of his best friend’s betrayal that he genuinely hadn’t the slightest idea as to what mistake he was referring to.
“..Wha..?” he slowly blinked, expecting an explanation.
In the meanwhile, he curled between Percy’s legs like a cat on its back.. not plotting anything in the slightest, honest!
“So, uh.. Seeing as I’m already naked, how’s about that upgrade?”
PERCY
Percy knew full well the if you can find it, it's fair game rule of the Sidewinder house, why do you think he was trying to stop Jeth instead of just scold his bad behavior?! Hypocrisy now would mean no guilt-free snooping around Moe and Jax's loveshack later, looking for Volume Two!
From an air-catching snap to a nut-jostling crrrack, the Promethean cackled mercilessly as his already fallen comrade went full-on fetal. "Need them for what?!" Percy demanded of Jeth, and would whip his bare ass (which would have to remain unprotected in favor of sheltering Kilroy's crown jewels--shame he didn't have more hands like someone) again and again until he had no choice to change his tune. Here's how well Percy knew Jeth, here's how easy it was to predict the he doth protest too much half of his teammate's dialogue was:
Percy, ever the unapologetic top he was, cracked poor Jethro over and over on his towel-abused cheeks until pleas of the ladies, P! I need them for the ladies! changed to a different sort of crying Uncle. Percy was going to make Jeth acknowledge, one way or another, that he still owned that particular piece of real estate. Yep. Property of one Oscar G. Machamp.
With Jethro belly up, be it verbally or just physically so, Percy scoffed and toed the red leader's ribs with obvious frustration as he proved too dense to realize just how deeply he'd hurt his teammate with what he'd scrawled on the RV outside. Percy wasn't going to explain. He was going to make Jethro confront what he'd done in a moment of self-centered anger (no matter how borne from heartache himself).
"I left the tape inside the RV. Have at it." The Promethean waved a hand dismissively before heading back in the obvious, trackable route to his room. To ensure he was followed, however, rather than abandoned for more persisting, mischievous intent, he'd plant bait of yet another topic in need of explaining--
"Upgrade? Hah. I actually used the part you've had your eyes on on someone else."
Wait...what? What? WHAT?! That was his dong, Percy!
WHOSE CYBERNETIC PENIS HAVE YOU BEEN TOUCHING IF IT HASN'T BEEN JETH'S, PERCY?!?!
Yep, the tape was definitely going to have to wait.
JETHRO
What the hell, Percy?! You’d think if he was so keen on claiming Jethro’s posterior as his property, he’d go easy on the merchandise, but it wasn’t so! Beaten into a temporary submission, both pairs of Jethro’s cheeks burned bright as he dribbled wet strands of spittle all over himself and the floor.
“G-Gee, thanks!” he sputtered too soon, for the dilemma posed between picking one object of interest over the other—as predicted—was too great for him to handle.
How could he possibly depart on that note? Enfield’s warbling could wait, for the greater act of disloyalty warranted justice be delivered as swift as the blows to his sac!
The foot that nudged him became his next target, and closing around Percy’s thick calf, he’d allow himself to be dragged several feet without letting go.
“You’re lying.. you’re lying!”
How long had he pestered Percy for that penile promotion, that erection enhancement? With a mouth as big and loud as his was, he needed a schlong at least half as long to back it up. Merely average wouldn’t make the cut!
Flabbergasted as the same ruthless aim he took when administering pain was fixed to shatter his soul, Jethro’s grip waned as the score set in.
“You thought I died and gave my dick away? Some friend you are!”
A true bestie would have buried him with it!
Lying flat on the ground, any will to live oozed and puddled beneath his motionless body like a slug’s slimy trail.
“..Who?” Ah, yes. The burning question. “Who’d you give it to?”
Regardless of the answer he received, Jethro wasn’t about to tear off an innocent’s ding-a-ling for the sake of getting even. No, no. Climbing to his feet, the cyborg tried not to let the fact he was rock hard interfere in what he was about to say.
“I’m gonna make it happen with or without your help! And when I do, I’m gonna fuck somebody with it—somebody that isn’t you!”
PERCY
Neck and neck, the race for most stubborn Sidewinder was almost too close to call. This one was going to be a photo finish, folks!
Even as Jethro latched onto his leg, Percy neither slowed nor stopped. Nope, he just dragged the degenerate right along with him, his bare ass likely squeaking along the tiles uncomfortably with every step.
“Well you weren’t gonna use it! And I didn’t even have anyone to bury it with!” Oh shit! Who’s the best friend now, Kilroy?! See! Oscar, a true OG, would have at least honored your final wishes and put you to rest with dick in hand.
When Jethro asked the million dollar question, Percy scoffed and rolled his eyes. “You don’t know him,” he replied callously, knowing an answer this flippant would burn Axelrad up. WELL OBVIOUSLY NOT!
A moment more, that naked skid mark made just a few feet longer, and the Promethean would halt and give his shackled foot a stamp. “His name is Dante. He was scrambled eggs when I found him out in the desert; some schmo’ gave him the Humpty Dumpty treatment and then tried to pass it off like the wormhole had chewed him up and spit him out.”
Given the bedroom hardware mentioned was cybernetic in nature, even Jethro could take an educated guess as to what Percy’s rescue was: an android. And ooo, if that didn’t just make the betrayal worse!
Staring Jethro down as he stood, Percy’s gaze was just as hard as his… God, I really want to make a one-eyed snake joke here. You know, because he’s a Sidewinder. Get it?! And now back to your regularly scheduled programming…
“I told the kid he could stay until he figured shit out. I put him in the hatch,” Green concluded with a sniff. There remained a dutiful degree of separation there: the Sidewinder having given temporary aid and shelter to Dante like so many other strays they’d saved from the wormhole. And while the decision had been made in lieu of their team’s leadership role, it wasn’t likely Red would see it that way. Was this mutiny? This felt like mutiny!
It was the way that Percy said the words. It was knowing that Dante was here, no matter that there was an entire med-bay and cargo hold between them. It was threatening to fuck someone else while simultaneously imagining four-arms here had already been playing savior with a sizable Italian sausage that should have been his!
“I hope you do.” Percy crescendo’d, confronting the threat of Jeth getting his implant done elsewhere head-on. (Pun absolutely intended.) “And I hope that when you do, you can never get hard again.” Gasp! And then he flicked it.
Oh yes. You read that right. He reached down and sproinged that overt stiffy as if to say: May this be your last hard-on, and May you always know that I was the one who caused it.
JETHRO
God damn did Jethro hate when Percy was right and he was wrong. Not that he’d ever give him credit where it was due, but his pathetic excuse for a response was proof enough that the promethean was coming out on top (surprise, surprise).
“It had my name on it.. ‘property of Kilroy “Danger” Axelrad’, bitch!”
Not anymore, though! He’d have to pry it from Dante’s tiny, twink body, and there were no winners in that situation..
Nor here. Pissed when Percy withheld information, and sickened when he freely gave it, Jethro’s eyes flashed this way and like he had popped a driver as he bridged the gaps.
No white bread human could survive such complete dismemberment. A cyborg’s chances were just as slim.
“There’s an android. Here. Right now,” he specified, part pointed statement, part burning question.
From the dawn of their very first day as partners, Red had made his feelings on full-bodied machines painstakingly clear. As the last straw floated onto the pile, any semblance of control he once held over the Sidewinders dissipated like a piss stream in the wind.
He threw his arms in the air.
“Why not? Why not a hundred androids? Jesus christ, P, what didn’t you do when I was gone?!”
Jeth would’ve been less offended if he threw a rager and wrecked the place!
“You put him there? Meaning he’s still here?”
He didn’t care how or even if it was a good idea. He needed to see this so-called “kid” for himself!
Aiming to rush passed the beefy alien, he nut checked himself on the hand that merely meant to tap him.
Poor Jeth. Poor “ladies”.
“Ohhh.. just punch my dick off, why don’t you?..”
There was one way Percy could make up for castrating him. Why not kiss it better?
JETHRO
With an old portable radio blasting alternative rock and a generous pitcher of lemonade set on the plastic folding table, Jethro had much the appearance (and yet none of the urgency) of breaking down in the middle of nowhere following a hostile attack.
There were no bandits, no aliens to blame. After (inadvertently) making swiss cheese out of the RV, their glorious leader was now making good on his word to fix it. Beneath the beating Abbadon sun, his idea of a day out wasn’t shaping up to the bonding experience he thought it would be.
Hot, sticky, sweltering.. an umbrella was made moot by the fact that he was constantly on the move to patch the holes. The sight of two kakapo chasing small lizards across the dunes was enough for him to crack a smile, but not avert his devilish plan.
Tugging at the chin strap of his space-safe welding helmet, Jethro smirked at the sunning Promethean as a river of sweat ran down his front. As he leaned over Percy, the waterfall started dribbling over his resting (and presumably unaware) form.
“You look comfortable!” Too comfortable, in fact! Under the guise of puppy love, Jethro embraced him in a very moist hug.
“How’s my drip?”
ENFIELD FLEISCHER
A small vessel sped across the wastes of Abaddon, a fair way above the sand but still kicking up a line of it as it went. Inside Enfield was wearing the most stylish 'desert gear' he could find, leather bound goggles with yellow tinted lenses, a red bandana around his neck and his favorite red leather jacket with a brown shirt on underneath. He felt like he was rocking the mad max vibe he was feeling lately, though maybe not that well. All he could say was that he was glad for his air conditioning. Not that an Edaschian can't handle some heat now and then, they're practically dragons, he breaths fire for crying out loud!
He has Jax on speaker on the phone "Yeah there were five burrows at the co-ordinates I sent you... maybe we can head to those on the last day of our trip before I leave? Must be some big daredevils in them, they were wide openings. - Anyway dude, bro, I'll be back in like five minutes and-"
There's a pause as he squints into the distance. Is that...?
"...Hey bro uh, I'll call you back. Might be a bit late, don't worry" He hangs up before Jax can even respond and draws closer. Holy shit, it is the RV??? He feels a cold chill of dread crawl up his spine. Why would it just be here? What if something happened to Percy? to Marvin? Daphne???
He pulls on over quickly and the dust and sand kick up before he can get a good scope of anything. He doesn't wait for it to clear, quickly popping the hatch of his vessel up before hopping out. The dust clears quickly enough... and beyond it, what he sees breaks his heart in barely a fraction of a second. He's frozen to the spot, tail hanging limply against the sand, wings slowly sinking down behind him as he stares at the two of them there, lips hanging parted, eyes full of pain.
PERCY
Jeth was going to make good on the terms of his forgiveness and Percy was going to enjoy bearing witness to every last, negotiated condition. (Oh yes, Kilroy, re-initiation to the Sidewinders was a’coming, this was just your appetizer course.)
Where one boy suffered laboriously under the sweltering Abaddon sun, the other sprawled luxuriously there, just having a veritable day at the beach (albeit just sand, no surf). Honestly, this was probably the first moment where he’d actually just allowed himself to pause a tick and relax, where he wasn’t just go go go keeping himself busy with friends or work or…you know, long lost “friends” showing up on your doorstep in the middle of the night with gunfire hot on their heels.
At a glance, it might have seemed like everything was normal, like everything had just picked back up from where it left off in the good old days. In some ways it had. In some ways, it hadn’t.
“You missed a spot,” Percy called out rather cheekily to Jeth before taking a super long and noisily exaggerated (siiiiiip) draw from his icy cool beverage. Linking two arms behind his head, adjusting his sunglasses with a third, and rubbing the fourth—the one which had just set down his perspiring drink—over his bare chest to cool himself off, the Promethean had juuuuust gotten into that sunbather’s sweet spot and closed his eyes when…
Drip. Drip. Drip.
By the time his eyes opened again to the realization that it was not the umbrella casting its shadow over him all of a sudden—it was too late.
“Ack! Get off! Get off! Fuck! Come on!” Percy howled his immediate objection, feigning annoyance in a way that managed to stave off any surprised laughter. It was a good thing too, as that would have just added a whole new layer to the awkwardness he didn’t yet know they was in for.
Pushing off of his lounge chair, the green Sidewinder grappled and wrestled within the sweaty circle of his leader’s embrace. With all those arms, it wouldn’t take long for Red to find the tables had turned either, as Percy promptly put Jeth in his place…in a headlock being squeezed by that boa constrictor of a muscular bicep.
Under any other circumstance, Percy would have been happy to hold Jeth there until he tapped out or cried (read: gasped) Uncle, but unfortunately, it was in that instant the Promethean turned just enough to spot the Edasichian who—out of an abundance of concern and the most tragic of coincidence—had just rolled up on the RV.
Instead, seeing Enfield there, so clearly shocked and devastated, had Percy panic and likely drop Jeth, sweaty face-first, into the sand. “E-En!” the normally surefooted Promethean stammered, sounding guilty for reasons a clearer head couldn’t have even justified.
JETHRO
Getting (and staying) on his teammate’s nerves was a pastime that Jethro thought he earned the right to indulge in after making some progress on repairs. One step forward, two steps back, as they say!
“What, why?! I thought you missed me!”
Their squabble didn’t last long. Seized by the many arms of his Promethean pal, Jethro straight up squealed. That instant was enough proof that when it came to pure muscle, the “Machamp” had him beat every time.
“MEIN THROAT!”
Flipping over the chair and straight into the sand, comfort came in the form of the bottom half of a (still twitching) lizard deposited in his lap. Thanks, May!
“Eugh.. What the hell, P?!”
With the protection from having his pretty face melted off still attached, a very sticky (now sandy) Jethro wasn’t as easily identifiable as his handsome, shirtless companion. Maybe it didn’t matter, or that Enfield had a lingering hunch..
Like someone cozying up to his ex-boyfriend wasn’t bad enough.
Needless to say, a visitor wasn’t exactly part of today’s plan. Red’s fist closed around the wrench dangling from his belt.. until he recognized the operator of the unknown vehicle by his most distinct features:
“Hey, Wings!”
Ignorant to anything amiss, he gave the kakapo a quick pat on the potato-y head before waving with both arms.
“I still owe you that race!”
ENFIELD FLEISCHER
Enfield stood there silently, stunned. It was that nightmare come true, the one he'd told Percy about once. That he'd come up to the RV one day and it'd be him and Jethro he found. He'd set it aside as a bad dream, of course, he put every bit of trust in Percy then. He'd worried, he'd confessed his worry early on to Percy and those words rang through his mind right now. Time slowed down to allow them to echo in his mind.
"Y-yeah. I was...scared for a while, It was stupid... I was scared ... um, you know, he'd come back and all your old feelings would too... I trust you though, and I don't mean that lightly, ever.
I trust you with my heart... I love you... I know I joke about too, but you're my one and only."
"When I see red, I think of you, Enfield. I want to travel across time and space with you. Worlds, dimensions, the whole nine yards. In the end, it’s gonna be you and me, no matter where we go, doesn’t make a difference where we end up. I'm yours in this universe and any other you want me in."
The rockstar, so out of place here, starts to tremble. It's not as noticeable in his arms and legs but his wings shiver endlessly as he meets Percy's eyes and then...Jethro's. What his 'red rival' said snapped something. Jethro didn't even know, Percy hadn't even brought him up. And all that time Percy hadn't responded to his message, how could he be so stupid? He took a step back, looking pale and queasy. His adrenaline was too high to let him even produce tears.
Without another word he turns to head back into the shuttle, he's already climbing into it within seconds without a word to either of them, fumbling horribly with the buttons as his hands turn to jelly. He should never have come here, he shouldn't have stopped.
PERCY
In that moment, Enfield was living his worst nightmare and Percy knew it. Worse? He’d been the one to—however unintentionally, however unwittingly—inflict what he swore up and down would never happen.
Percy was stunned, frozen and guilty. Enfield was stunned, frozen and aching. And Jeth? Well, he might have been slow to the jump, but he wasn’t stupid. Especially not when the Edasichian turned tail and hastened, heartbroken, back to his shuttle…only for the Promethean to leap over his still fallen teammate and give chase!
“Enfield! Enfield, wait!” Percy shouted and stumbled across the dunes, just barely recovering his balance in time to fall at the steps of the small spacecraft before the space dragon could shut the door on him and take off. “I—I didn’t know what to say! I didn’t know how to tell you. I…I wanted…I saw your text and…I never thought you’d talk to me ever again after that night when you…”
There were no winners in this moment. There was nothing that could be said—would be said—that could make this even a modicum better…only so so much worse. Because no, aside from the one-way transmissions Percy sent out into the voids of space that he was certain Jethro had never even heard, the Promethean had not mentioned Enfield. When would he have? Even under the best, most peaceful of circumstances—a happy reunion, even!—Percy was simply not equipped to handle all that he felt, then and now.
There was no denying, even in Kilroy Axelrad’s brand of blissful ignorance, what he was bearing witness to. Broken up or not, Percy obviously still cared deeply for Enfield. To hear him try to explain, try to justify, try to communicate that things had been so impossibly complicated even before Jeth came back…Percy not only felt horrible, but felt like the biggest hypocrite in the whole damn galaxy.
But things had changed between him and Enfield before Jethro showed up. They hadn’t adventured this or any other dimension together. So much of Percy for so long had been domesticated and whittled down into something manageable and compartmentalized because he had so dearly wanted to fit into the pocket of space the rockstar had cultivated for him. Somewhere along the way, Percy had missed who he was and stopped being happy just being Enfield’s boyfriend and number one fan. Well, that and…it’d be a lie to suggest he hadn’t been holding onto the most futile and selfish of hopes for exactly the person he had here now to return home.=
It’d been an impossibility when he made that promise…yet here they were.
“I’m sorry, Enfield. I didn’t want you to find out this way,” Percy admitted at last. He did not hang his head shamefully now, for no matter how awful the feeling was, he did not wish to convey a betrayal beyond the promise he had broken. “Kilroy came back. Came home. He’s a part of this. I’m still a Sidewinder: I always have been, I always will be. To have my team back was all I ever wanted.” The truth, as the saying went, hurt. “I didn’t know how to tell you because I didn’t want you thinking…it’s not…I mean…it’s…not…I didn’t…it’s complicated.”
Oof.
JETHRO
Jethro and Enfield hadn’t the best of starts, but they made peace before his disappearance many months ago. Without reason to assume that changed, he cupped his hands over his mouth to project his voice loud and clear.
So well-intentioned, and yet.. so damn oblivious.
“Hey! Minefield! Heeey! ..Do you think he heard me?”
Apparently not, as the Edasichian then turned tail and ran the other way.
“What’s his problem?”
Rather than receive some sort of speculation, Jethro was left to watch—flabbergasted—as his best friend leapt over him like a gazelle to give chase. Since when did Percy give a shit about Enfield?
Left in the dust, he and May exchanged a look before he stumbled after them.
“Woah, woah, woah! What, you guys fuck or something?” he laughed and laughed, and then.. gradually stopped laughing.
It was like asking if someone died and finding out that way, except somehow worse, because he was left with a sneaking suspicion that his boyfriend-not-boyfriend had actually, irrevocably and against everything he took for granted, boned his rival-not-rival in his absence. Now, instead of being dead, it was something that all three of the unluckiest people on the planet had to live with.
“..No.. no.. come on, dude..”
If heaven was a place on Earth, hell was certainly to be found on Abaddon. Running his hands over his helmet (not that it made much of a difference with his nonexistent hair), whereas Percy was at a loss for words, Jethro couldn’t spit them fast enough to get to the bottom of everything he wanted to hear.
“Find out what? Part of what?” he demanded, still holding on to the sliver of a prospect of this being some stupid prank. Oof indeed.
“This is a joke, right? El-oh-el jay-kay, we got you? Let me guess, Mo—no, no—Callista is still getting led on by Sir Baby Shit for Brains, too?”
ENFIELD FLEISCHER
Enfield had hardly 'cultivated a pocket of space' for Percy, but likely the Promethean had felt that way perhaps because he'd always just wanted to go back ....well, here. Confirmed as much by his own words. When Enfield heard that he flinched as if he'd been hit, He'd thought he might become a sidewinder, really, there had been talk of a jacket or something but it hadn't really happened so it hurt even more. He can't seem to voice a single thought, his mouth hopelessly opening and closing.
Jethro comes over and unintentionally makes it worse. Enfield figures he's going to feel shit about it too, but at least he has Percy in his life to help him through it, right?
A million things he wants to say but his muscles are so tense, he can't stop shivering and shaking. He needs to get out of here, he just can't believe this is happening. He weakly squeaks, voice cracking with the effort of forcing words out "You won't hear from me again" it's a broken rasp, his trembling hand reaches into the inside pocket of his jacket and produces what looks like some retro cassette tape, but it has ports so that it can be connected to a computer. The label on the front says 'Percy'
"I-i ...d-didn't know if i'd see you b-before I l-left s-so i .. I just recorded it-" he stutters, taking a deep breath. Fuck he needs to go. He hands it to Percy a little too quickly and desperately reaches for the hatch of his vessel to pull it down over him, or try to anyway, anyone could reach to stop it. But as he does so his broken gaze flits to Jethro for barely a few seconds.
PERCY
Percy was desperate, and had reached the point of no return. He’d kept his shit together for longer than anyone would have hedged their bets on, but this was his breaking point. “SHUT THE FUCK UP JETHRO! IF YOU DIDN’T SEE THE RING ON MODRY’S GODDAMN FINGER YOU REALLY ARE FUCKING STUPID!” Life had gone on without him! To wrap his head around Modry being Mrs. Harlo was one thing, but this?
There was not a single person involved that wasn’t going to come out hurting when all was said and done, even the most oblivious of boyfriend-deniers.
“N-no. Please. Enfield. Just…I need to—explain! You gotta let me……please understand.” That had always been the cornerstone of Promethean’s innermost being: understanding why. To have the opportunity to explain, though he knew full well it was a selfish want in this moment that he simply did not deserve, he just wanted—needed—to fix things. Things that couldn’t possibly be fixed. He promised Enfield so many things. He’s broken so many promises. But of all people he should’ve known better than to swear and avow in the first place. These weren’t new feelings he’d been feeling, these were emotions he’d had to stuff way deep down in the darkest, farthest recesses of his mind and heart and try to move on.
He had tried, Enfield. He really had.
Percy tried to grab Enfield’s hand beyond the tape, but given how urgently the Edasichian was trying to get away from him, the Promethean would be left juggling the tape to keep it from falling—and in not wanting it to seem like he didn’t care for the gesture, gave the space dragon just enough room and split-second’s time to escape. “W-wait! Just wait!” Percy begged, but knew it was too late.
JETHRO
There was a time when Jethro would snatch the cassette out of his quivering hands, snap it in half, and ground the pieces under his heel, but he currently found himself so taken aback by how sad Enfield was that he just.. fizzled like a wet match. He’d broken plenty of hearts in his day, but was clever enough to get the hell out of Dodge lest he face the consequences of his actions. If nothing else, this served as a brilliant reminder as to why it never paid to make things personal..
“..What the fuck did you do?” he asked, a mixture of amazement and disgust, the latter of which grew in multitudes as he flinched beneath Percy’s uncharacteristic outburst.
Jethro blinked.
Ring on Modry’s..? Had she worn a ring on her finger? Thinking back to the deft digits stitching his neck wound together, he was already wandering away as Percy abandoned him for Enfield, chalking them up to a lost cause.
“Right.. stupid, Jethro.. Stupid.”
His recitation was hollow as he ducked behind a veil of indifference. Red was the color of the leader, but more so the shade of wrath as he picked up the blowtorch and aimed it at the RV he just spent a good portion of the afternoon repairing.
T-R-A-probably should have started a little closer to the side, actually—wait a second.. Y?
The letters he scrawled out of white hot rage should have hit a nerve with his dear friend, as they were once painted in the Promethean’s own blood only to be doubled done with fire by the least likely of suspects—the very person who once erased them.
Assuming Percy was yet preoccupied with his (apparently) preferred lover, Jethro finished his botched job with a bow.
“There.. and.. done! Ta-dah! Go fuck yourself.”
Scooping the birds up in his arms, he strutted back towards the general direction of their base. Without Modry to vent to, it was time for some much needed.. “introspection”.
ENFIELD FLEISCHER
Enfield feels awful for more reasons than one, because he just needs to get out of here before he starts crying and looks like a stupid baby in front of his ex and well... Jethro.
The door is slammed shut, but he doesn't miss Percy asking him to wait. He barely glances at him before he revs up the engine and slowly rises up above the sand, trying to reduce the amount of sand kicked up by moving away from Percy first. Once he's up in the air he looks ahead and speeds off in the direction of the nearest habitat where he knows Jax is waiting at their hotel.
He just can't stay, he speeds there as fast as he can, leaving the two behind to adjust to what had just happened and ask/answer some perhaps much needed questions.
PERCY
Percy stared hopelessly at Enfield through the shuttle window until he was forced to turn and shield his eyes from the sand that got kicked up in its inevitable ascent.
Having been busy trying to make amends with one red lover, by the time he turned further, apologetic efforts back to Jethro, well…Kilroy Axelrad had always been the best Sidewinder at holding grudges, hadn’t he?
Horrible spelling aside, the word Red had chosen was done so with malice in his heart. His intent was to cut Green down when he was already clearly at a devastating low…and it worked (perhaps better than his leader could have even hoped?).
Standing there and staring at the mile high sign of his worst failure—simultaneously falling short with two young men he cared very deeply for—the longer the Promethean stared at the burnt siding of his RV, the deeper he internalized that single, scarring word.
No wonder Jethro had left then.
No wonder Enfield had left now.
And once again, Percy was all alone.
Picking the blowtorch up from where the welder chrome artist had angrily thrown in down in favor of collecting not one but both birds, Percy turned the flame on, letting the flame flare out before refining it to a fine, white-hot point…and corrected Jeth’s spelling, solidifying the same message those Alpha Corp. goons had written upon his chest the last time his not-yet-shed soul had still been inside of it.
TRAYITOR.
Yeah, that sounded about right.
Rather than return to the RIG, rather than try to justify or explain himself to yet another boyfriend who clearly didn’t want anything to do with him, Percy just climbed into the torched, still-half-bullet-peppered RV and let the door slam noisily behind him.
JETHRO
Shuffling out of the brig with an empty tray in hand, Jethro was equally devoid of expression as he frisbee’d it into the sink. He didn’t check to see what shattered.. Kind of like Percy hadn’t even looked at him as he did.
It was like he wasn’t even there.
Enfield might not have made the necessary adjustments for the Promethean to thrive as his second half, but Jethro had long since committed to the person he thought he knew: a starring role in his life’s work—his team—and a place that few “privileged” people had ever left their impression—his heart.=
Not that it did him any good now.
Stupid. Fucking stupid!
Taken by the sudden urge to purge, to feel clean again, Red was relieved to find the communal bathroom empty save for a few stray dune roaches that ran for cover as the lights flickered on. Avoiding his reflection as he stripped was a conscious decision, though it followed him all the way into the stall.
His thoughts weren’t as easy to thwart, and behind the molding curtain ran numerous as droplets circling the drain. Goodbye, dirt. Goodbye, sweat.
Goodbye, tears.
There was a dull thud as his head collided with the tile wall.
Which part of his survival needed explaining, anyway? Everything he ever cherished, gone up in flames.. all because the cat came back. Maybe he should have stayed away.
He’d leave a note this time. This time, it’d be on purpose..
PERCY
Percy had sat there, head in hands (and even more hands) for the longest time and agonized over everything he’d ever done wrong—not just in love but—in life. Why was this the way things always seemed to go for him? A step in the right direction…and then the blaring horn and blinding light of an oncoming train.
But there was one person he’d park himself on the tracks for…and it wasn’t Enfield. That dawning realization hit him as hard in the back of the head as Marvin’s thrusting Elvis pelvis used to before May came along. It got him up. It got him going. It had him hitting that still-Swiss cheesed RV door at a run.
And it had him leaving that corded cassette tape on the fold down dining room table inside: not forgotten, but decidedly unlistened to for now.
The Promethean might have jumped over the cyborg in the moment, might have let him take a face full of sand when panicked push came to shove, but make no mistake, he had never forgotten him. Jethro had been there, a thorn in the lion’s paw that not even the most fastidious of mice could yank out, even when he wasn’t there.
“Jeth?” Percy called out as he raced down the main corridor of the Rig. “Jethro?” He braced himself to be struck in the face with any innumerable object from his teammate’s hoard the moment he stuck his green head between those eternally jammed pod bay doors. Nothing. “J?” Percy was on the move again, working his way deeper into Sidewinders HQ and checking all of his leader’s long lost but still favorite haunts. The game room: “J?” The garage: “Red?” The four-armed alien grew more and more desperate as he searched, continuing to holler as though, like Rumpelstiltskin, this Grimm game of hide and seek could not be won without the proper name. “Kilroy? Axelrad? Jethro pl—!”
The Promethean slammed on the brakes as he passed what sounded like rainfall down one of the dormant, dormitory hallways of the vacant passenger wing. No one really used the communal bathroom, at least, they hadn’t had a reason to since sneaking out of earshot to Modry’s bedroom so long ago. What had been a secret then felt like a distant and impossible to reconcile memory now…but damn if that would stop Percy from trying.
The green Sidewinder made no attempt to disguise the sound of his bare feet on the wet tile as he migrated into the stalled shower space. Rather than rip the curtain back and really make things awkward (which, trust me, the desperate man had considered for a split second), instead he pressed his shirtless back to the far wall and slid down it into a huddled, crouching seat.
“Bet you don’t remember the last time we were in here together,” Percy piped up after what long pause was necessary to muster his nerve. No folks, this wasn’t about to be some hot and steamy tale. Well…at least not the part the Promethean chose to remind his ‘friend’ of. “You snapped me in the nuts with a wet towel so hard I literally thought I was going to puke.” Percy laughed and ran two hands through his hair, pulling at its ends, while the other two rubbed the coarse stubble on his face.
He sighed. What was he trying to pull, really? This wasn’t how he was going to get anything accomplished.
Even though Jeth had done so in the moments long before Percy arrived on the scene, the boys proved rather alike in how they conveyed their frustrations and emotional upheaval as the Promethean too thumped his head punishingly against the tile wall.
“Jethro, out there…I was begging for a chance to explain, the opportunity to make someone understand what I was going through. I realize now that…had he…had Enfield actually given me the chance, I wouldn’t have honestly known what to tell him. Except…maybe…I’m sorry and that…that he was right. That his worst fears about me were spot on all along. That I’m still in l…”
Percy sucked his teeth and took a hard left turn, fearful to say anything more on that right now.
“I wouldn’t have known what to say to him, Jeth, but I’ve never…we’ve always figured it out. You’ve always let me get it out. And I’ve got to hope you’re…you’re in there right now, maybe hating my guts, but still willing to…listen like we do whenever the other one has something they need to sort out.”
Percy was so afraid that, if he stopped now, if he gave Jethro even a moment of social space to consider, he’d deny him the opportunity. So Percy simply couldn’t give him the same chance again. There would be no silence to fill, only an outpouring of broken honesty he’d only ever had the courage to confess to the blinking red light of that secure transmission channel.
“I was all alone without you. I had Modry, but I didn’t have you, Jethro. I didn’t have what we had—not even any of that but everything else. You were gone and I was lost. And what was worse was that I was so sure it was because of me. Because of what I was then…and who I wasn’t any longer. The timing was…” Percy sighed but hastily pushed on, not allowing quiet to ever settle. “We have moments where we are so fucking alike it’s scary, Jethro. When I get sad…or scared…all I know how to do is get mad…and get even. So when Enfield showed up at the bar one night…”
The sound he made then was a pitiful one, one of shame and disgust and guilt and regret that no length nor heat of shower (nor death shedding) could ever scald from his skin.
“I knew you would have hated it. And looking back now, at so many points in my relationship with Enfield, that was my driving force.” This was not to suggest that the feelings which had developed for the space dragon had not been real, but that the motivation behind them—behind promises made that couldn’t possibly be kept or fulfilled—were unendingly, deludedly selfish in hindsight.
“I broke up with Enfield having no clue you were even still out there, let alone coming home after all this time. I left because…” Tell him why. Tell him why. “…I left because I haven’t felt like myself since the day you disappeared. So I came back here. So I picked up right where I left off, even if it meant striking out on the Sidewinder beat solo this time around. I just needed to get back to whatever I had left of this.”
“…of you.” Had those last two words been too softly spoken to hear over the steamy hiss of a rusty, sputtering showerhead?
JETHRO
The scope of Percy’s panic was so significant that any person present, be it their feathered friends or current captive, roused to the cry for the leader missing in action. Their collective concern was obvious given the precedent set by his former absence.
Not again, damnit.
Whether deafened by the faucet or simply “playing” dumb, Jethro did not respond for a distressingly long while. As soon as the door squeaked open, the conductor of no insignificant number of Percy’s problems caught himself at the crest of a wail and expelled his grief as one last audible, shaky breath.
Their leader in mourning made himself a statue as he listened and waited, striking sparks that tried and tried but couldn’t catch on his damp skin. The groundwater expelled by the faulty pipes was bone cold, but kept his temper even and mind relatively clear.
Just another thing he’d have to fix in this godforsaken place.
Convinced even before it was confirmed that his pursuit of Enfield was in large part due to spite, Jethro was both figuratively and literally seeing green as the alien prattled on and on about the how’s and why’s.
Given their combative past (in which even Percy played a small part) it only figured that the edaschian snuck in one last blow at his pride. Indeed, it was once upon a time that their relationship consisted of him pissing Jethro off, and his best friend reacting in kind—quite the groundwork for romance!
That “someone” (anyone?) Percy confessed to needing in his time of crisis lent to the unkind idea that with his ex on the opposite end of the planet by now, he was just making due with what he had left. Which.. wasn’t much, to be fair.
His purported plan B emerged from behind the veil, a far cry from his former days as Adonis in the flesh with his threadbare towel and naked head.
“Well, here it is: what’s left of me.”
It took two long years for him to claw his way out of that crater with nails that cracked and split down to the cuticle. Yet from the top of that hill all he could see of the promise of a future that kept him alive until this point was too little, too late.
“Was it worth it?”
As yesterday’s man—the thorn in his paw, the pain in his ass—stood dripping and bereft of expectations, he sincerely doubted it.
PERCY
Silence had never been an unnerving thing for the Promethean. Be it stubbornness or a propensity towards being rather stoic himself when deep in thought, the four-armed alien could sit in the most deafening quiet and not be bothered in the slightest...until now. And was it any wonder why the silence made Percy so uncomfortable? Jethro, as a rule, never shut the fuck up! That's what made the team's resident loudmouth giving either Green or Blue the cold shoulder so damn effective, even after all this time!
Once more, Percy's head fell into his hands. He held his breath and squeezed his eyes shut, suspending animation until his lungs screamed and his heart strained inside of his chest.
The draw of the plastic curtain had the Sidewinder gasping even more than the need to replenish his oxygen in that moment. Snapping his gaze up and finding the shell of his brokenhearted best friend staring back, Percy scrambled back up the wall with an awkward, clumsy shimmy and stood there before Jeth.
How was it that, in that moment, they both ended up awaiting some sort of judgment from the other? Having been eaten straight through by the most ulcerative of guilt, the green Sidewinder regarded the red leader's rhetoric as if it were a trick question. To answer--at least, to answer honestly--was to not only fess up to all of his selfishness, but to embrace it.
...well, that wasn't only thing Percy'd end up embracing at the end of all this.
"You really are fucking stupid," The Promethean accused the cyborg, but before the buzzed head of the hair-god himself could be sent spinning by presumed cruelty or rejection, he was blitzed, caught in all four arms, and sent falling right back into that shower stall--right back against the tile, where he'd be pinned and held tightly.
"I thought I'd never see you again," Percy whimpered, and rather than aim to take anything more from Jeth that had not been freely given, instead buried his face in the red Sidewinder's chest.
I think it's safe to say, Jethro: whatever was left was worth it.
JETHRO
In the brief window of opportunity presented for Percy to positively ruin him, he welcomed whatever fate became him with open arms.
It was his best friend that encompassed him in turn. Thrust against the partition with a grunt, Jethro didn’t struggle, didn’t hug back, but.. stacked against him like a house of cards. Who was embracing who?
“Yeah, I know..” Like he’d forget so soon after Percy was kind enough to remind him.
“I wanted—more than anything—for things to go back.. back to the way they were.. just the three of us..” he murmured into those vibrant green waves. In the early days, not even in the name of team spirit could Jethro convince Percy to dye his hair.. yet here he was, maintaining it of his own accord.
“I wasn’t here when I needed to be. I let you guys down.”
He perceived it—the preface of that coveted “l” word—but held it at a distance, hesitant to juggle that dynamite stick in such close quarters yet. Percy must have misspoken.
“Turns out I’m way better at hurting people than I am at loving them.”
Jethro hurt Percy. He hurt Percy a lot. And as much as he wanted to, he couldn’t reasonably promise he wouldn’t do it again. His anger was indiscriminate, its bite venomous.
“There were so many times I thought, ‘this is it, Jeth’—that I was gonna die. Not a hero, but alone.. in a cell, in the dark.”
With not a bang, but a whimper.
“After all the shit that went down after I came back, I almost wished I did.”
Pulling away, he pressed a palm flat to the smudged mirror and stared his doppelganger down.
“The old guard had it all figured out.. and then, ‘Kilroy Axelrad’ came along.”
Busted even at his best, Jethro’s tried (but hardly true) method of “fake it til’ you make it” was looking less and less feasible the more that others suffered for its sake.
PERCY
Even though the Promethean had doubled down on his accusation, his questioning of the cyborg’s intelligence the second time around bore none of the same angst—and therefore, in hindsight, the first would be the only instance in which Percy might consider apologizing to Jethro later on. He didn’t think their red leader was stupid (he really didn’t, even when he undoubtedly was sometimes)…he just wished he could shake some much-needed clarity into his dumb stupid bitch ass body. And bless him, because he tried. Percy kept trying.
Jethro’s stupidity wouldn’t be the only thing Percival refused to relent on in the here on now, not where brutally candid confessions were concerned. And where Red wasn’t willing to handle even one stick of dynamite, there Green was with all four arms loaded like kindling with sentimental explosives.
“Modry missed you too, Jethro, I’d never deny her that…but she only had to carry on. I had to move on. Try to, at least.” Oh yes, there was a heavy distinction there, not just continuously made, but stressed and emphasized upon. Jeth might not have wanted to acknowledge all the singular I’s in these statements, but there wasn’t a we to be found anywhere anymore. After all, backing down now could mean giving the long lost Sidewinder room to run, still under some false impression that he was too little, too late. So no, Jethro, you were not truant of heart to the team, but to one teammate in particular.
As much as Percy wanted to, he didn’t follow in well-trained attendance at Jeth’s heel. The cyborg would see him there, beyond his reflection in the mirror, but the alien had already turned and busied himself with the rickety coils of the faucet which—much like one Kilroy Axelrad—just needed some extra care and focus in reparative efforts to warm right up. The water that came out of the showerhead next wasn’t bone cold anymore, but steamy and welcoming to the body which stripped and commandeered the stall. (What? Jeth had been gone; they hadn’t had a mechanic/plumber, so the Sidewinder had picked up what bare necessities kept the place from falling apart.)
“You can’t possibly be so much of an egomaniac as to believe that,” Percy sighed as he pulled the plastic curtain, peering around it’s taken cover at Jethro still. “M’s told me all of the stories, J. Reid saw in you the same thing Blue and I did—and still do.”
Quite sure Red wasn’t done with his pity party self-reflection and the quietly persisting doubt of insecurities, Green would take a different approach.
Should Jeth object, should he insist he’d fallen short, that they deserved more than he was capable of giving, that he couldn’t ever hope to live up to the aforementioned Sidewinder legacy—blahblahblah—Percy would pull the curtain the rest of the way and disappear behind it. “I’m sorry Axelrad, what was that last bit?” The four-armed silhouette asked, the Promethean raising his voice as if he could no longer maintain this distant heart-to-heart over the hiss of the water. “Oop! Sorry, still can’t hear you~” Percy feigned again, before gargling water infuriatingly and adding to the bathroom white noise.
Clearly, if this conversation was to continue, Jethro would need to step into Percy’s office to say whatever else he needed to, and when he finally did? He’d be caught in yet another embrace and dragged inside, this one intended to show just how much he’d been missed rather than tell.
JETHRO
Jethro’s dumb stupid bitch ass body remained firmly parked infront of the glass as he picked himself apart, finding the ribbing provided by his well-intentioned friend unsatisfactory given that he voiced (what he thought were) very real concerns. It was an uncertain Jeth that chewed the bone Percy threw him, turning back the slightest degree to check..
“..She did?”
Either way, bitching benefitted no one. Time to boss up! Slapping a little life back into his complexion, he turned his attention to the heat emanating from the stall he previously evacuated.
“Ooh, thanks for warming it up for me!” he charged through the curtain as through a matador’s red cape to find.. a bare ass alien on the other side.
“Woah, you’re naked already?!” he made a big show of looking away.. and then looking.. and then looking away again. Nice.
“Well, if you’re busy, I’mma ‘bout to find out what’s on that tape! Later!”
Ignoring any cries of protest to such a blatant invasion of privacy, Jethro tried to pull a sneaky and slip out of the danger zone unimpeded (easier said than done with four arms ready, willing, and able to suplex his half-chrome dome into the ground).. and hopefully not on the very wet tile beneath his feet!
Should he fail to catch the nuisance, Percy’s options in the buff were few..
PERCY
“Yeah, she did.”
Facts were facts, man. Percy wouldn’t deny Jethro that.
…though he might wish he had the moment Assholerad capitalized on his naked vulnerability and fucking took off on him!
“Mother fucker!” the Promethean swore as the cyborg mentioned Enfield’s tape, a very sentimental piece of evidence which he’d left wholly unguarded in his haste to make peace with his teammate!
Snatching at Jethro the moment he made his mischievous intent known (there was no sense of privacy amount the Sidewinders, just ask Moe’s diary!), the only thing Percy had to grab onto—at least that didn’t involve slamming his friend’s face into a wall from the momentum of an at-run chase…was that threadbare towel wrapped around his waist.
Tit for tat, and likely bare ass versus bare ass now, the Promethean proved impervious, refusing to succumb to his own bit of discreet staring at that bubble butt he’d uncovered…and instead immediately dawned on the idea of making that towel into the same weapon Jethro had once used against him!
Held from one far corner to the other, the thinning fabric proved scarily aerodynamic and auspiciously loud with each crack of one-sided, cotton gunfire. The four-armed alien was nipping at the cyborg’s heels, he was catching literally the most sensitive bits of flesh known to man! (At least when said man was facing away and fleeing.)
And he was gaining on him!
Snap! Snap!! Snap!!!
It was at this point, if Percy was Jason Vorhees and Jethro was some horny camp counselor (which, let’s be real, he 100% had that “dumbass pretty boy always dies first” horror movie energy), he would have tripped and fallen to the ground just short of escaping.
His only option was to turn and fight!
And when he did?
Snap.
Yep. Percy cracked him square in the nuts, like some goddamn rope throwing rodeo star, and paid him back for the long lost memory he had shared back there in the bathroom in the first place.
“You misspelled TRAITOR—its an I, not a Y—by the way.” The naked Promethean loomed over his friend’s undoubtedly doubled over body—had that towel actually connected, of course—with all four arms crossed.
JETHRO
Sliding into the corridor with pure adrenaline pumping in the miss-matched circuitry of his veins, the literal mother fucker was looking less risky business and more pending hospital visit as he shirked the bear he poked to the best of his ability. A towel was a small price to pay for a squeaky clean getaway! Alas, it was soon weaponized against him!
“No, no, NO! I’M JUST A BOY!”
Buff, dogged, and scorching hot on his tail, it wasn’t the Jets but an exceptionally “armed” alien closing in. Percy could snap at him all he wanted, but being very much present as they poured over Moe’s diary front to back (or, more accurately, as he read it to Jeth), he was hardly the innocent party here! With any juicy tidbits in the R.I.G. fair game to prying eyes and nosey.. noses, even Jethro knew better than to leave his secrets laying out in the open. That’s why they were stashed away for safekeeping in his pretty little head!
“Shiii—!” There was an audible thump as his foot collided against a stack of crates, and both Jethro and their contents were sent flying. Wipe out! He hardly had the chance to react to the can that nailed him straight in the forehead when Percy came to collect his bounty.
Even in his exposed state, his opponent bestowed him not the slightest bit of mercy. Percy held him tit for taint, tearing a scream from his throat that broke halfway.
“OH, FU-CK!” he cupped his groin in pain that was greatly exaggerated, curling into the fetal position to prevent further abuse against his poor nads.
“I need those, P!”
The “dumbass pretty boy” was so preoccupied with the shock and pain of his best friend’s betrayal that he genuinely hadn’t the slightest idea as to what mistake he was referring to.
“..Wha..?” he slowly blinked, expecting an explanation.
In the meanwhile, he curled between Percy’s legs like a cat on its back.. not plotting anything in the slightest, honest!
“So, uh.. Seeing as I’m already naked, how’s about that upgrade?”
PERCY
Percy knew full well the if you can find it, it's fair game rule of the Sidewinder house, why do you think he was trying to stop Jeth instead of just scold his bad behavior?! Hypocrisy now would mean no guilt-free snooping around Moe and Jax's loveshack later, looking for Volume Two!
From an air-catching snap to a nut-jostling crrrack, the Promethean cackled mercilessly as his already fallen comrade went full-on fetal. "Need them for what?!" Percy demanded of Jeth, and would whip his bare ass (which would have to remain unprotected in favor of sheltering Kilroy's crown jewels--shame he didn't have more hands like someone) again and again until he had no choice to change his tune. Here's how well Percy knew Jeth, here's how easy it was to predict the he doth protest too much half of his teammate's dialogue was:
Percy, ever the unapologetic top he was, cracked poor Jethro over and over on his towel-abused cheeks until pleas of the ladies, P! I need them for the ladies! changed to a different sort of crying Uncle. Percy was going to make Jeth acknowledge, one way or another, that he still owned that particular piece of real estate. Yep. Property of one Oscar G. Machamp.
With Jethro belly up, be it verbally or just physically so, Percy scoffed and toed the red leader's ribs with obvious frustration as he proved too dense to realize just how deeply he'd hurt his teammate with what he'd scrawled on the RV outside. Percy wasn't going to explain. He was going to make Jethro confront what he'd done in a moment of self-centered anger (no matter how borne from heartache himself).
"I left the tape inside the RV. Have at it." The Promethean waved a hand dismissively before heading back in the obvious, trackable route to his room. To ensure he was followed, however, rather than abandoned for more persisting, mischievous intent, he'd plant bait of yet another topic in need of explaining--
"Upgrade? Hah. I actually used the part you've had your eyes on on someone else."
Wait...what? What? WHAT?! That was his dong, Percy!
WHOSE CYBERNETIC PENIS HAVE YOU BEEN TOUCHING IF IT HASN'T BEEN JETH'S, PERCY?!?!
Yep, the tape was definitely going to have to wait.
JETHRO
What the hell, Percy?! You’d think if he was so keen on claiming Jethro’s posterior as his property, he’d go easy on the merchandise, but it wasn’t so! Beaten into a temporary submission, both pairs of Jethro’s cheeks burned bright as he dribbled wet strands of spittle all over himself and the floor.
“G-Gee, thanks!” he sputtered too soon, for the dilemma posed between picking one object of interest over the other—as predicted—was too great for him to handle.
How could he possibly depart on that note? Enfield’s warbling could wait, for the greater act of disloyalty warranted justice be delivered as swift as the blows to his sac!
The foot that nudged him became his next target, and closing around Percy’s thick calf, he’d allow himself to be dragged several feet without letting go.
“You’re lying.. you’re lying!”
How long had he pestered Percy for that penile promotion, that erection enhancement? With a mouth as big and loud as his was, he needed a schlong at least half as long to back it up. Merely average wouldn’t make the cut!
Flabbergasted as the same ruthless aim he took when administering pain was fixed to shatter his soul, Jethro’s grip waned as the score set in.
“You thought I died and gave my dick away? Some friend you are!”
A true bestie would have buried him with it!
Lying flat on the ground, any will to live oozed and puddled beneath his motionless body like a slug’s slimy trail.
“..Who?” Ah, yes. The burning question. “Who’d you give it to?”
Regardless of the answer he received, Jethro wasn’t about to tear off an innocent’s ding-a-ling for the sake of getting even. No, no. Climbing to his feet, the cyborg tried not to let the fact he was rock hard interfere in what he was about to say.
“I’m gonna make it happen with or without your help! And when I do, I’m gonna fuck somebody with it—somebody that isn’t you!”
PERCY
Neck and neck, the race for most stubborn Sidewinder was almost too close to call. This one was going to be a photo finish, folks!
Even as Jethro latched onto his leg, Percy neither slowed nor stopped. Nope, he just dragged the degenerate right along with him, his bare ass likely squeaking along the tiles uncomfortably with every step.
“Well you weren’t gonna use it! And I didn’t even have anyone to bury it with!” Oh shit! Who’s the best friend now, Kilroy?! See! Oscar, a true OG, would have at least honored your final wishes and put you to rest with dick in hand.
When Jethro asked the million dollar question, Percy scoffed and rolled his eyes. “You don’t know him,” he replied callously, knowing an answer this flippant would burn Axelrad up. WELL OBVIOUSLY NOT!
A moment more, that naked skid mark made just a few feet longer, and the Promethean would halt and give his shackled foot a stamp. “His name is Dante. He was scrambled eggs when I found him out in the desert; some schmo’ gave him the Humpty Dumpty treatment and then tried to pass it off like the wormhole had chewed him up and spit him out.”
Given the bedroom hardware mentioned was cybernetic in nature, even Jethro could take an educated guess as to what Percy’s rescue was: an android. And ooo, if that didn’t just make the betrayal worse!
Staring Jethro down as he stood, Percy’s gaze was just as hard as his… God, I really want to make a one-eyed snake joke here. You know, because he’s a Sidewinder. Get it?! And now back to your regularly scheduled programming…
“I told the kid he could stay until he figured shit out. I put him in the hatch,” Green concluded with a sniff. There remained a dutiful degree of separation there: the Sidewinder having given temporary aid and shelter to Dante like so many other strays they’d saved from the wormhole. And while the decision had been made in lieu of their team’s leadership role, it wasn’t likely Red would see it that way. Was this mutiny? This felt like mutiny!
It was the way that Percy said the words. It was knowing that Dante was here, no matter that there was an entire med-bay and cargo hold between them. It was threatening to fuck someone else while simultaneously imagining four-arms here had already been playing savior with a sizable Italian sausage that should have been his!
“I hope you do.” Percy crescendo’d, confronting the threat of Jeth getting his implant done elsewhere head-on. (Pun absolutely intended.) “And I hope that when you do, you can never get hard again.” Gasp! And then he flicked it.
Oh yes. You read that right. He reached down and sproinged that overt stiffy as if to say: May this be your last hard-on, and May you always know that I was the one who caused it.
JETHRO
God damn did Jethro hate when Percy was right and he was wrong. Not that he’d ever give him credit where it was due, but his pathetic excuse for a response was proof enough that the promethean was coming out on top (surprise, surprise).
“It had my name on it.. ‘property of Kilroy “Danger” Axelrad’, bitch!”
Not anymore, though! He’d have to pry it from Dante’s tiny, twink body, and there were no winners in that situation..
Nor here. Pissed when Percy withheld information, and sickened when he freely gave it, Jethro’s eyes flashed this way and like he had popped a driver as he bridged the gaps.
No white bread human could survive such complete dismemberment. A cyborg’s chances were just as slim.
“There’s an android. Here. Right now,” he specified, part pointed statement, part burning question.
From the dawn of their very first day as partners, Red had made his feelings on full-bodied machines painstakingly clear. As the last straw floated onto the pile, any semblance of control he once held over the Sidewinders dissipated like a piss stream in the wind.
He threw his arms in the air.
“Why not? Why not a hundred androids? Jesus christ, P, what didn’t you do when I was gone?!”
Jeth would’ve been less offended if he threw a rager and wrecked the place!
“You put him there? Meaning he’s still here?”
He didn’t care how or even if it was a good idea. He needed to see this so-called “kid” for himself!
Aiming to rush passed the beefy alien, he nut checked himself on the hand that merely meant to tap him.
Poor Jeth. Poor “ladies”.
“Ohhh.. just punch my dick off, why don’t you?..”
There was one way Percy could make up for castrating him. Why not kiss it better?
PERCY
“Yeah, yeah. Kilroy Donger Axelrad.” Percy rolled his eyes, obviously over this whole robo-penis debacle. It was hard to sympathize, especially considering how fond he was of what Jeth was already packing. I mean, that’s ultimately what it came down to, right? You should take it as a compliment, J!
But alas, out of the frying pan and into the fire. No longer was it just that Percy had given away the bedroom hardware Jeth had called dibs on, but it was who he’d given it to…and all the other special treatment the baby faced android had been bequeathed thereafter.
“Not here. There. In the hatch. You know, where survivors go. Kind of the team’s whole raison d'être, remember?”
…really Percy? Really? This motherfucker didn’t know how to spell TRAITOR correctly; you really think he’s gonna know what raison d'être means?
“Reason for existence,” Percy scoffed a necessary translation, the haughtiest little schoolboy. “Christ, J, I didn’t have a fucking android orgy. I didn’t install a damn dick on him and then ask if we could put it to use! The kid literally had an arm and an eyeball left in tact when I found him, and pardon the hell out of me for feeling like I owed it to one—just one—of them after all the oth…UGH! It’s impossible to talk to you about this shit!”
Jethro knew the bleak history Percy had with androids specifically, and for just how long he’d harbored a similar aversion to the type! This was progress! Growth! Redemption!
Honestly, even at their best, the Sidewinder boys had never been fully equipped to deal with this much emotion all at once…at least not in any functional way that wasn’t confrontation.
You could cut the tension with a knife. It was fraught with it; rife with it. (Yes, Red, synonyms. Be afraid, be very afraid.) But just what kind of tension were we really talking about here?
With Jethro effectively hobbling his own knob in an effort to brush past, where Percy could have doubled down and really given his chub a good whack (and not the fun kind), instead Green hooked Red by the waist, preventing his passage onward and threw him up and over his shoulder.
The Promethean had already dragged the cyborg nearly halfway back to his room while he’d clung petulantly to his leg…might as well carry him kicking and screaming the rest of the way.
“I still might, Assholerad.” Percy warned dangerously, before throwing Jeth onto his bed. His door—unlike Jeth’s—closed all the way behind them.
JETHRO
Well, Mr. Oscar G. Machamp, it was easy to be over a robo-penis debacle when it wasn’t your member on the line!
As a chronic shit stirrer, Red didn’t shy away from the latest blaze they gleamed from butting heads. For all the bare-knuckle brawls they’d broken into following his unforseen comeback (not pettiest of squabbles, either), it’d be hard to fault one for assuming he enjoyed feeling and treating others like shit.
“Raisin-what-now?” he scoffed, exactly as expected. Comeon, Percy. Use your kid talk! Jethro barely spoke English, nevermind French!
“Don’t be a smartass, I meant here like in the R.I.G. here!” he jabbed a finger at the ground.
While one degree of solid, steel separation was welcomed, the best place for an android to be was far, far away from their business. So like.. hundreds of steel walls apart.
“‘He’s’ not alive! ‘He’s’ a machine!”
..At least, according to the logic by which he ran things after “The Incident”. Now that Percy was privy to the true nature of his biology, the ground on which Jethro made his stand was as precarious as ever. Bring on the growing pains!
“I’m not trying to be an asshole, okay? You’d know if I was! I just.. I c—stop! Cut it out!”
When breaking free meant contending with all four of those beefalicious arms, he ceased his weak pounding against the barrier of his back and hung limp.
“All I’m saying is.. even if he means well, that can change in an instant. You know what I mean.”
But.. if that was true, would that not make it a fatal flaw in which he himself was susceptible?
Boinging once before landing on the mattress, Jethro burrowed like a prairie dog beneath the pristine sheets.
“What’s a robot need a dong for, anyway?” his snout poked out from a gap in the nest, his scowling evident even from an outside perspective.
PERCY
If Red was the shit starter, Green was the shit finisher. Adept at knowing just when and how to squash a beef with their team leader, the Sidewinder had entered the endgame phase of his tried-and-true strategy the moment those pod bay doors closed behind them.
Even after two years gone, to see Jethro make himself right at home stirred the long-still waters of Percy's heart. If the cyborg had paid attention in school while he was human back on Earth, he'd know the deepest point known to man was the Mariana's Trench...but to be privy to the Promethean's thoughts and feelings meant he'd dove into something even deeper.
The four-armed alien never spoke without thinking about what he wanted to say and how he intended to deliver the words first. (Clearly whoever said sticks and stones hurt worse had never been on the receiving end of a verbal lashing from one Oscar G. Machamp.) In equal measure to the clever but devastating things Percy might levy against Jeth's character caricature, rest assured, no one had ever spoken more tenderly, more compassionately, more forgivingly or with higher praise than he.
"Why don't you do me a favor and engage the humanity you've got left, huh Axelrad? Machines like Dante don't have that privilege. If you're going to insist you're better, be better. He's a good kid. You don't have to trust him, but trust me."
It was at this point Percy pulled free the military corners of his bedding and crawled under, not to ferret Jeth out of the sheets, but to turtle inside of the shell there with him. Rivaling a petty scowl with an amused smirk, the Promethean's voice dropped in volume to a level where secrets were often shared in sleepovers just like these.
Well, maybe not just like these...
"I mean, I like to think myself something of an expert." the debate king touted with a debauched snicker. (Are we talking robotic autonomy or about dongs specifically there, Perce?) "So I could tell you--" the tented silhouette of their bodies shifted, a tangled coil of two snakes rearranged, "--or I could show you."
The apparent, four-armed shape that loomed then leaned down, keen to shut Kilroy up: one way or another. (How far down though?)
JETHRO
It was seldom so apparent that Jethro much preferred his friend squash (his) beef in other ways than going right for the throat.. not that he’d done well to protect it. Rather than shield himself from criticisms, his prejudices increasingly warranted them.
“I told you because I trusted you.. and now you’re gonna use that against me?” he pleaded, hoarsely.
Had he made a mistake supplying the already armed promethean with the knowledge to beat him with? No sooner did he show Percy the horrors behind the holoskin was he regretting it immensely. There wasn’t enough gentleness in the world to cushion that blow.
Rising from the sea of blankets, he broke the surface tension and sent the telltale ripples of yet another altercation brewing in every direction.
“My bad, forgot to check my ‘circus freak’ privilege. Must’ve left it back in the brig,” he crossed his arms, wounded and shrinking away from the other’s touch.
“I’m not better, okay? Never said I was.. that’s why I’m giving you permission to end it if that ever happens again.. no.. not just that.. I’m asking you, as a friend.”
In lieu of informed points drawn after careful consideration, Jethro rambled effusively and from the heart.
“I was this close to being back to normal, too..” he demonstrated an inch between his fingers, “he said he knew someone that could fix us.. but when I found out that it might not be ‘me’ anymore, I just.. I couldn’t.. Fuck.”
PERCY
“Use it against you?” Percy asked, sounding alarmed. As Jeth fled, his friend quickly followed, popping up out of his fabric shell like the turtle he was with a clearly distressed look upon his face. It wasn’t often the Promethean put his foot in his mouth, but when he did, it was often with the very cyborg he now had stood before him.
“Jethro…” the green Sidewinder regarded the red’s defensive stance, both verbally and physically towards him, with grave seriousness. “J, if you trusted me enough to tell me, you‘ve also gotta believe that I would never hurt you with it.” There was no accusation in his tone of voice, no how dare you make me out to be the bad guy or anything of the sort. The way Percy spoke to Jeth now was with the sort of earnesty required to convince him that no matter what percentage—ten, five, or otherwise—the Promethean still recognized and respected him as the same man, the same leader he’d always been.
It was hard not to continue trying persuade Jethro that he had meant no harm, but Percy knew his friend well enough to know when what he needed was not to be talked at—but listened to. So that’s what the four-armed alien did: he shut up and he let Jeth get it all out. All of it. Everything he was feeling that he could only express by angrily and accusatorially projecting it onto his teammate.
It would feel like a long while for both of them before the Promethean spoke again. And while he could have doubled down on addressing all the self-damnation, circus freak comments and the like, Percy felt it far more pertinent to not even acknowledge anything other than the facts: Jeth needed to know he heard him, but also that he was not going to justify this “less-than” and “if-then” one-sided dialogue.
“…is that why you two were together in the first place? Were you…trying to…re-merge…things?” Percy frowned. If not-Jeth had wanted the merger only for Jeth to bow out at the last minute, that would certainly explain their point of contention and what had lead to one holding the other at gunpoint.
“Come here, Axelrad. Don’t do this. You’ve been so fucking far away for long enough. Just…sit. Please. I’m just trying to understand.”
JETHRO
The good news was that Red hadn’t completely shut him out as he shrank into that fragile state of existence. He peeked at Percy from the safety of his walls, that single pretty eye unblinking, yet not unassuming in its gaze. He listened as the fans of the techie’s battlestation whirred, heeding every word he spoke like a knock on his fortress door.
When he finally stirred, it was to stretch.
“..T’s why he busted me out—to be normal again. He wants to go home.”
I guess you could say Jethtwo was merely trying to save face.
“He doesn’t get it. None of this matters to him.. figures that when he’s back on Earth, Mobius might as well’ve been a bad dream.. but.. it’s stupid. Nobody’s ever gotten out of here, and even if they did.. no point.. there’s nothing waiting for him there..”
Sinking down into the pristine pillow, he continued on the brink of a much needed rest.
“I’m the only thing standing in his way. Me, and whatever’s keeping me here.”
That was the bad news.. for Percy and Modry, at any rate.
“He came to kill you.. as me. We’ve gotta do something about him,” he whispered, “or it’s never gonna stop.”
He needed a solution: something, anything to rally behind. Jethro had been alone with this dilemma for so long that he’d since lost sense of where he was going and where he’d been. For want of an answer, it nonetheless felt.. nice to get that all out.
PERCY
Percy had never looked so blank in the face, it was almost eerie. Unnerved by what he was told, and would inevitably piece together himself thereafter, for all the comfortable silences the Promethean had taught Jeth to appreciate…this was not one of them.
“…he came here knowing what you know about me?” the four-armed alien asked, a hyper-aware sort of nausea rising audibly in his still even-keel tone of voice. Percy was smart: they both knew killing him wouldn’t have killed him…but coming back to the thought that Jeth had been the one to do it? That would have killed him.
“Fuck that,” Percy piped up all of a sudden. Coming to and snapping out of whatever morose thought might have laid hands on him, the Promethean plopped down on the bed beside the pillow-clutching cyborg. “You’re home. He can’t have you.” Two statements, spoken point blank, as if the solution were as simple as that.
The green Sidewinder laid there, two hands laced behind his head, two hands interlocked upon his chest, and stared up at the ceiling. Red knew that mile long look: this was Percy the motherfucking problem solver he was dealing with now.
There was the silence again.
Fortunately for Jeth, Percy would not make him endure such unease for long.
Reaching out in amended, abusive affection—as even without hair to grab, the back of the head would do—Percy yanked Jeth under his arm and against his chest. “Your evil twin can wait. We’ll figure it out.”
And then, should his fearless leader need any further convincing? A good scritch of that buzzcut scalp was sure to do the trick.
JETHRO
“No.. not everything..” If that was the case, Jethro’s ploy of asking a question only he knew the answer to wouldn’t have worked so damn well.
“I dunno how, but.. he found us.. found the R.I.G. Prick prolly used my commlink or something..”
Leave it to his shitty luck to have an evil counterpart that was smarter than him.. in spite of that, however, Jethro’s spirits took a sharp incline. It was too easy to wonder in retrospect why he hadn’t told Percy sooner when he handled the news so well, but took only four words to make him feel the closest thing to welcome since he came back home:
He can’t have you.
No—even better. What was this? Peeling away from the weight of his body, Jethro floated a few feet above himself. He didn’t protest when yanked against Percy’s torso, but melted when subjected to the closest thing to sex in terms of jaw dropping pleasure. Like a sphynx cat, Jethro purrrrred as he massaged the naked skin of his scalp.
“Aw, yeah.. just a little to the left..” Pet him in the human, Percy!
“Maybe it’ll grow back sooner with some looove..” Having already faced his greatest fear, it wasn’t like he could get any balder!
Even as he enjoyed the kindest touch he’d had in years, Red was still scheming.
“So, I was thinkin’.. there is one way for you to make up for cheating on me..”
His grin was nothing short of nefarious as it grew in size to match the extent of his absolute cheek.
“Two words: Spacemart.”
One word, actually, but same difference!
PERCY
When it came to being Jethro’s other half, the 95% needed to understand that position had already been filled.
Percy didn’t dignify the evil twin with so much as another word—a thought or two more, perhaps, but Jeth had been through enough: they needn’t speak on it any further. At least, not now.
Smirking as he felt Red lean into his touch, Green had no choice but to obey and follow the domed coordinates to scratch his fellow Sidewinder’s itch (literally speaking, for once).
That bit of cheek, however, was dealt retribution in swift and eager measure as Percy all but smashed a pillow over Jeth’s face and feigned the intent to smother his smart aleck mouth.
Pummeling him twice with the same pillow before replacing it between them to share and each rest a cheek upon, Percy sighed his concession…and pecked Jeth on the top of the head as if his lips possessed the same green-thumb quality for hair growth that Modry did with her plants.
“Spacemart,” Percy agreed to terms without complaint, and would continue to scritch Jeth’s scalp until they both fell sound asleep.
“Yeah, yeah. Kilroy Donger Axelrad.” Percy rolled his eyes, obviously over this whole robo-penis debacle. It was hard to sympathize, especially considering how fond he was of what Jeth was already packing. I mean, that’s ultimately what it came down to, right? You should take it as a compliment, J!
But alas, out of the frying pan and into the fire. No longer was it just that Percy had given away the bedroom hardware Jeth had called dibs on, but it was who he’d given it to…and all the other special treatment the baby faced android had been bequeathed thereafter.
“Not here. There. In the hatch. You know, where survivors go. Kind of the team’s whole raison d'être, remember?”
…really Percy? Really? This motherfucker didn’t know how to spell TRAITOR correctly; you really think he’s gonna know what raison d'être means?
“Reason for existence,” Percy scoffed a necessary translation, the haughtiest little schoolboy. “Christ, J, I didn’t have a fucking android orgy. I didn’t install a damn dick on him and then ask if we could put it to use! The kid literally had an arm and an eyeball left in tact when I found him, and pardon the hell out of me for feeling like I owed it to one—just one—of them after all the oth…UGH! It’s impossible to talk to you about this shit!”
Jethro knew the bleak history Percy had with androids specifically, and for just how long he’d harbored a similar aversion to the type! This was progress! Growth! Redemption!
Honestly, even at their best, the Sidewinder boys had never been fully equipped to deal with this much emotion all at once…at least not in any functional way that wasn’t confrontation.
You could cut the tension with a knife. It was fraught with it; rife with it. (Yes, Red, synonyms. Be afraid, be very afraid.) But just what kind of tension were we really talking about here?
With Jethro effectively hobbling his own knob in an effort to brush past, where Percy could have doubled down and really given his chub a good whack (and not the fun kind), instead Green hooked Red by the waist, preventing his passage onward and threw him up and over his shoulder.
The Promethean had already dragged the cyborg nearly halfway back to his room while he’d clung petulantly to his leg…might as well carry him kicking and screaming the rest of the way.
“I still might, Assholerad.” Percy warned dangerously, before throwing Jeth onto his bed. His door—unlike Jeth’s—closed all the way behind them.
JETHRO
Well, Mr. Oscar G. Machamp, it was easy to be over a robo-penis debacle when it wasn’t your member on the line!
As a chronic shit stirrer, Red didn’t shy away from the latest blaze they gleamed from butting heads. For all the bare-knuckle brawls they’d broken into following his unforseen comeback (not pettiest of squabbles, either), it’d be hard to fault one for assuming he enjoyed feeling and treating others like shit.
“Raisin-what-now?” he scoffed, exactly as expected. Comeon, Percy. Use your kid talk! Jethro barely spoke English, nevermind French!
“Don’t be a smartass, I meant here like in the R.I.G. here!” he jabbed a finger at the ground.
While one degree of solid, steel separation was welcomed, the best place for an android to be was far, far away from their business. So like.. hundreds of steel walls apart.
“‘He’s’ not alive! ‘He’s’ a machine!”
..At least, according to the logic by which he ran things after “The Incident”. Now that Percy was privy to the true nature of his biology, the ground on which Jethro made his stand was as precarious as ever. Bring on the growing pains!
“I’m not trying to be an asshole, okay? You’d know if I was! I just.. I c—stop! Cut it out!”
When breaking free meant contending with all four of those beefalicious arms, he ceased his weak pounding against the barrier of his back and hung limp.
“All I’m saying is.. even if he means well, that can change in an instant. You know what I mean.”
But.. if that was true, would that not make it a fatal flaw in which he himself was susceptible?
Boinging once before landing on the mattress, Jethro burrowed like a prairie dog beneath the pristine sheets.
“What’s a robot need a dong for, anyway?” his snout poked out from a gap in the nest, his scowling evident even from an outside perspective.
PERCY
If Red was the shit starter, Green was the shit finisher. Adept at knowing just when and how to squash a beef with their team leader, the Sidewinder had entered the endgame phase of his tried-and-true strategy the moment those pod bay doors closed behind them.
Even after two years gone, to see Jethro make himself right at home stirred the long-still waters of Percy's heart. If the cyborg had paid attention in school while he was human back on Earth, he'd know the deepest point known to man was the Mariana's Trench...but to be privy to the Promethean's thoughts and feelings meant he'd dove into something even deeper.
The four-armed alien never spoke without thinking about what he wanted to say and how he intended to deliver the words first. (Clearly whoever said sticks and stones hurt worse had never been on the receiving end of a verbal lashing from one Oscar G. Machamp.) In equal measure to the clever but devastating things Percy might levy against Jeth's character caricature, rest assured, no one had ever spoken more tenderly, more compassionately, more forgivingly or with higher praise than he.
"Why don't you do me a favor and engage the humanity you've got left, huh Axelrad? Machines like Dante don't have that privilege. If you're going to insist you're better, be better. He's a good kid. You don't have to trust him, but trust me."
It was at this point Percy pulled free the military corners of his bedding and crawled under, not to ferret Jeth out of the sheets, but to turtle inside of the shell there with him. Rivaling a petty scowl with an amused smirk, the Promethean's voice dropped in volume to a level where secrets were often shared in sleepovers just like these.
Well, maybe not just like these...
"I mean, I like to think myself something of an expert." the debate king touted with a debauched snicker. (Are we talking robotic autonomy or about dongs specifically there, Perce?) "So I could tell you--" the tented silhouette of their bodies shifted, a tangled coil of two snakes rearranged, "--or I could show you."
The apparent, four-armed shape that loomed then leaned down, keen to shut Kilroy up: one way or another. (How far down though?)
JETHRO
It was seldom so apparent that Jethro much preferred his friend squash (his) beef in other ways than going right for the throat.. not that he’d done well to protect it. Rather than shield himself from criticisms, his prejudices increasingly warranted them.
“I told you because I trusted you.. and now you’re gonna use that against me?” he pleaded, hoarsely.
Had he made a mistake supplying the already armed promethean with the knowledge to beat him with? No sooner did he show Percy the horrors behind the holoskin was he regretting it immensely. There wasn’t enough gentleness in the world to cushion that blow.
Rising from the sea of blankets, he broke the surface tension and sent the telltale ripples of yet another altercation brewing in every direction.
“My bad, forgot to check my ‘circus freak’ privilege. Must’ve left it back in the brig,” he crossed his arms, wounded and shrinking away from the other’s touch.
“I’m not better, okay? Never said I was.. that’s why I’m giving you permission to end it if that ever happens again.. no.. not just that.. I’m asking you, as a friend.”
In lieu of informed points drawn after careful consideration, Jethro rambled effusively and from the heart.
“I was this close to being back to normal, too..” he demonstrated an inch between his fingers, “he said he knew someone that could fix us.. but when I found out that it might not be ‘me’ anymore, I just.. I couldn’t.. Fuck.”
PERCY
“Use it against you?” Percy asked, sounding alarmed. As Jeth fled, his friend quickly followed, popping up out of his fabric shell like the turtle he was with a clearly distressed look upon his face. It wasn’t often the Promethean put his foot in his mouth, but when he did, it was often with the very cyborg he now had stood before him.
“Jethro…” the green Sidewinder regarded the red’s defensive stance, both verbally and physically towards him, with grave seriousness. “J, if you trusted me enough to tell me, you‘ve also gotta believe that I would never hurt you with it.” There was no accusation in his tone of voice, no how dare you make me out to be the bad guy or anything of the sort. The way Percy spoke to Jeth now was with the sort of earnesty required to convince him that no matter what percentage—ten, five, or otherwise—the Promethean still recognized and respected him as the same man, the same leader he’d always been.
It was hard not to continue trying persuade Jethro that he had meant no harm, but Percy knew his friend well enough to know when what he needed was not to be talked at—but listened to. So that’s what the four-armed alien did: he shut up and he let Jeth get it all out. All of it. Everything he was feeling that he could only express by angrily and accusatorially projecting it onto his teammate.
It would feel like a long while for both of them before the Promethean spoke again. And while he could have doubled down on addressing all the self-damnation, circus freak comments and the like, Percy felt it far more pertinent to not even acknowledge anything other than the facts: Jeth needed to know he heard him, but also that he was not going to justify this “less-than” and “if-then” one-sided dialogue.
“…is that why you two were together in the first place? Were you…trying to…re-merge…things?” Percy frowned. If not-Jeth had wanted the merger only for Jeth to bow out at the last minute, that would certainly explain their point of contention and what had lead to one holding the other at gunpoint.
“Come here, Axelrad. Don’t do this. You’ve been so fucking far away for long enough. Just…sit. Please. I’m just trying to understand.”
JETHRO
The good news was that Red hadn’t completely shut him out as he shrank into that fragile state of existence. He peeked at Percy from the safety of his walls, that single pretty eye unblinking, yet not unassuming in its gaze. He listened as the fans of the techie’s battlestation whirred, heeding every word he spoke like a knock on his fortress door.
When he finally stirred, it was to stretch.
“..T’s why he busted me out—to be normal again. He wants to go home.”
I guess you could say Jethtwo was merely trying to save face.
“He doesn’t get it. None of this matters to him.. figures that when he’s back on Earth, Mobius might as well’ve been a bad dream.. but.. it’s stupid. Nobody’s ever gotten out of here, and even if they did.. no point.. there’s nothing waiting for him there..”
Sinking down into the pristine pillow, he continued on the brink of a much needed rest.
“I’m the only thing standing in his way. Me, and whatever’s keeping me here.”
That was the bad news.. for Percy and Modry, at any rate.
“He came to kill you.. as me. We’ve gotta do something about him,” he whispered, “or it’s never gonna stop.”
He needed a solution: something, anything to rally behind. Jethro had been alone with this dilemma for so long that he’d since lost sense of where he was going and where he’d been. For want of an answer, it nonetheless felt.. nice to get that all out.
PERCY
Percy had never looked so blank in the face, it was almost eerie. Unnerved by what he was told, and would inevitably piece together himself thereafter, for all the comfortable silences the Promethean had taught Jeth to appreciate…this was not one of them.
“…he came here knowing what you know about me?” the four-armed alien asked, a hyper-aware sort of nausea rising audibly in his still even-keel tone of voice. Percy was smart: they both knew killing him wouldn’t have killed him…but coming back to the thought that Jeth had been the one to do it? That would have killed him.
“Fuck that,” Percy piped up all of a sudden. Coming to and snapping out of whatever morose thought might have laid hands on him, the Promethean plopped down on the bed beside the pillow-clutching cyborg. “You’re home. He can’t have you.” Two statements, spoken point blank, as if the solution were as simple as that.
The green Sidewinder laid there, two hands laced behind his head, two hands interlocked upon his chest, and stared up at the ceiling. Red knew that mile long look: this was Percy the motherfucking problem solver he was dealing with now.
There was the silence again.
Fortunately for Jeth, Percy would not make him endure such unease for long.
Reaching out in amended, abusive affection—as even without hair to grab, the back of the head would do—Percy yanked Jeth under his arm and against his chest. “Your evil twin can wait. We’ll figure it out.”
And then, should his fearless leader need any further convincing? A good scritch of that buzzcut scalp was sure to do the trick.
JETHRO
“No.. not everything..” If that was the case, Jethro’s ploy of asking a question only he knew the answer to wouldn’t have worked so damn well.
“I dunno how, but.. he found us.. found the R.I.G. Prick prolly used my commlink or something..”
Leave it to his shitty luck to have an evil counterpart that was smarter than him.. in spite of that, however, Jethro’s spirits took a sharp incline. It was too easy to wonder in retrospect why he hadn’t told Percy sooner when he handled the news so well, but took only four words to make him feel the closest thing to welcome since he came back home:
He can’t have you.
No—even better. What was this? Peeling away from the weight of his body, Jethro floated a few feet above himself. He didn’t protest when yanked against Percy’s torso, but melted when subjected to the closest thing to sex in terms of jaw dropping pleasure. Like a sphynx cat, Jethro purrrrred as he massaged the naked skin of his scalp.
“Aw, yeah.. just a little to the left..” Pet him in the human, Percy!
“Maybe it’ll grow back sooner with some looove..” Having already faced his greatest fear, it wasn’t like he could get any balder!
Even as he enjoyed the kindest touch he’d had in years, Red was still scheming.
“So, I was thinkin’.. there is one way for you to make up for cheating on me..”
His grin was nothing short of nefarious as it grew in size to match the extent of his absolute cheek.
“Two words: Spacemart.”
One word, actually, but same difference!
PERCY
When it came to being Jethro’s other half, the 95% needed to understand that position had already been filled.
Percy didn’t dignify the evil twin with so much as another word—a thought or two more, perhaps, but Jeth had been through enough: they needn’t speak on it any further. At least, not now.
Smirking as he felt Red lean into his touch, Green had no choice but to obey and follow the domed coordinates to scratch his fellow Sidewinder’s itch (literally speaking, for once).
That bit of cheek, however, was dealt retribution in swift and eager measure as Percy all but smashed a pillow over Jeth’s face and feigned the intent to smother his smart aleck mouth.
Pummeling him twice with the same pillow before replacing it between them to share and each rest a cheek upon, Percy sighed his concession…and pecked Jeth on the top of the head as if his lips possessed the same green-thumb quality for hair growth that Modry did with her plants.
“Spacemart,” Percy agreed to terms without complaint, and would continue to scritch Jeth’s scalp until they both fell sound asleep.
