fandomtownies | Turtle & Canary; Monday [08/10].

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Turtle & Canary; Monday [08/10].

Considering she'd just broken out of ~~still being played~~ space jail yesterday, it seemed like maybe Summer could have taken the day off of work, but that just wouldn't be very her, now, would it? It wasn't like getting stuck in space jail for a weekend was that out of the ordinary for her, after all, the only thing that made this one different was that she'd been stuck in space jail with someone who wasn't a member of her own weird family for a change. And they both (SPOILER ALERT!) survived and saved Mr. PB from his evil agent, she got some sweet new guns out of it, and she found out that the beam of a portal gun actually could melt off a person's face!

Overall, it was a pretty good weekend. She was one-hundred percent sure that Seivarden would not agree with her on that even a little, but whatever.

The only problem was that it left her terribly distracted, to the point where she realized she was going down the same aisle about fifty times without even taking stock for orders, so she just gave up, foisted the clipboard onto Apu to finish them up for her this week, and then settled behind the counter so she could focus on ordering the whirlwind of thoughts in her brain. Because now she knew that Rick was probably going to be more careful about where he kept the portal gun, which meant that she really needed to see about figuring out how to just make her own so she didn't have to steal it every time she wanted to try a coordinate, and she would definitely have to figure out how to fix that whole stupid battery issue, because, seriously, what the fuck, and....and....and....

Today's Squishy Flavors
Peanut Butter
Peanut Brittle
Red

Turtle & Canary is open! If distracted...

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Barry had spent most of the weekend in his lab and listening to Jeremy, his BFF back home, blather about his life all weekend. And now god damn it, Barry had an irrational desire for Oreos.

Damn it Jeremy.

So for the first time... actually ever, Barry went to T&C to buy junk food. Quite frankly the Cheese Panda was worrisome but not as much as the Squishy machine.

"What the fuck is red supposed to taste like?"

Which is just Barry's way of saying "hello".

To be fair, that was a more than reasonable and surprisingly frequent way to start a conversation in this shop.

Summer sort of looked up from where she was frowning at the counter thoughtfully, blinked herself out of her head and back to the store, and then considered the actual question.

"Food colouring, honestly," she said after a moment, "with the slight tang of mild regret. But that could also be from the fact that the lines probably don't get cleaned out nearly as much as they should."

And after that, she felt a lot more present and offered up a faint smile. "Hey, Barry. How's it going?"

Barry was about to take out a cup to find out what regret tasted like until Summer mentioned the bit about the lines not being cleaned. Yep. That’s a pass.

“Things are fine,” he said picking out a pack of double stuff Oreos. “Been working on a few things out the warehouse and getting my lab set back up. I’m probably going to head home this weekend to visit my friends. How about you? Still working 20 jobs?”

They actually were cleaned probably more than most machines of its ilk were; it was sort of a point of pride for Apu, but that wasn't a very high bar, so still not a bad move.

There were plenty of more sanitary ways of learning about the taste of regret, besides (though not more sanitary by much).

"Just the three!" The question made her grin a little, though, almost a little proudly. "Though I did get to moonlight this last weekend as a BFF saver."

Aaaaand also definitely added another planet to the list of ones she might need to avoid for a while due to being on a Most Wanted criminal list, likely to be shot on sight, but she did not know Barry well enough to know if he'd be impressed by that.

But she did have...a thought.

"What kind of things have you been working on?" she asked. "And where is home for you, anyway?"

“Earth but just a more normal version than most people here. No super heroes. No magic. Only strange thing about that place is me,” he said with a shrug. “I haven’t actually been back in ten years so it’s about time I saw my friends in person. As for what I’m working on is a training system for Rey. She was using a bunch of woodchucks to throw wood at her. I thought I could come up an improvement.”

He plopped the Oreos on the counter. “So how did you save your BFF?

"Oh, you know," said Summer, modestly, as she took her time picking the Oreas up to scan them, "just your typical, run-of-the-mill rescue someone from the oppressive weight of their own fame and the explotive nature of the entertainment business and celebrity-obsessed culture. No big deal."

Actually, when she put it that way, it didn't really seem like a big deal, because she was cutting out a lot of the good stuff, because, again, she didn't know Barry that well yet, but she wanted to, and that was not a gamble she was going to take quite yet.

"Anything else except the Oreos?" she asked, which worked as a nice buffer, she felt, before glomping on to: "So you've met Rey, huh? She's a good friend of mine. And, yeah, anything sounds better than relying on woodchucks..."

“I met her the other week. I wouldn’t call ourselves BFF but the woodchucks were pretty pitiful. If you want good training you have to do better than rodents and sticks,” Barry said as he looked around the place to see if there was anything else he wanted and on impulse grabbed a bag of Kale chips. “Now back up a minute. Who was the celebrity? It wasn’t Kylie fucking Jenner, right?”

You might lose points with Barry if it was, Summer.

"Ohmygod," said Summer, "can you even imagine?"

Because Summer could, because she had imagined, probably an embarrassing amount of times.

"But, no," she said. "His name is Mr. Poopybutthole, and you've probably never even heard of him, he's been a family friend for, like, ever, and I didn't even know he was a super celebrity until he rerouted my portal to his home planet this weekend, but, like, apparently, he's a huge deal. To the point where me and my friend Seivarden got arrested and almost executed for kidnapping and brainwashing him when he tried to make the announcement that he was quitting the biz. But it's fine, we busted out and got him out of there for good."

And now Barry was looking at Sunner with raised eyebrows. “There’s a lot more to you Summer that meets the fucking eye. First spaceships and now saving alien celebrities. What the hell are you doing working a bar and a convenience store?”

And there was that moment, where Summer could feel a slow heat creep up on her face as her skin seemed to be attempting to match her pink shirt like she was a fucking chameleon over here, with that little flutter in her chest for that unfamiliar-until-fairly-recently feeling of actually being acknowledged for how badass she was...

....and not having any idea what to even do with it.

Except sort of shrug her shoulders a little and give a small hopeful sort of smile and a kind of lame, "I get bored easily?"

Which didn't even make much sense if you spent more than two seconds thinking about it, so she then added, as the moment of glowing pleasure sort of slipped more toward something akin to confidence, "Plus, I had to blow up the jello shop I had in space that I was using as a secret rebel information hub against an evil galactic empire, and got kind of perma-banned from that dimension so this was kind of Plan B?"

BARRY. THIS WAS BARELY EVEN THE TOP LAYER.

"Oh," she then said, "and your total's ~~handwavey."~~

Well. That would be Barry taking a few moments to let that sink in.

Jello shop masquerading as a rebel information hub? Evil Galactic Empire?

"Fuck."

It was a simple word but the way it was drawn out clearly denoted that Barry was very impressed. He took out his wallet and began to fish through it. "If that's what you do when you're fucking bored, I'm scared to see what you do when you are sincerely motivated. And I thought my life was fucking nuts."

That little annoying worm called doubt was starting to crawl through Summer's gut a little bit, which was sort of putting a damper on how that single expressive use of the word fuck was, like, kind of one of the best feelings ever right now? Like maybe she was talking herself up too much, or exaggerating to make her sound way cooler than she ever could actually be, which was odd considering these were pretty much just facts, weren't they? But now it felt like she was setting bars that might not actually get to be reached...

...and also getting super distracted from her intial thought because she was feeling validated by a cute boy, which would still and forever feel like a commodity more precious and rare than any Kalaxian crystal or Isotope-322 could ever hope to be.

It also totally validated what she'd said to Seivarden when they were sitting and jail the other night, too. Bonus.

"I mean," she said, grasping for some tone of modesty and barely getting wisps, but she tried, "it doesn't really seem that crazy to me, but then again, I taught a whole class about whacky space adventures thinking, hey, this is Fandom, everyone's life is fucking nuts around here, and even then radio was all, 'what the hell, Summer?' But still! I never built, what was it, three whole spaceships and a fucking submarine, either."

"Yeah, well, there's normal and Fandom normal," Barry said using his hands to denote that Fandom normal was jacked up high and normal was way low. "And yeah, I fucking build shit but I'm lucky to get twenty minutes of sleep at night. What the fuck else am I going to do? I mean... shit. You built a spaceship and piss off galactic empires because you get bored. That's kinda hot."

Barry blinked. Did he say that out loud?

"Uh."

And that would be Barry's ears turning a slight shade of pink.

"Um. You got change for $100?"

Edited 2020-08-11 15:09 (UTC)

Ohmygod, he did just say that out loud.

"You're using a hundo to pay for Oreos and kale chips?" Summer asked, because focusing on that and trying to decide if that was baller or not (and if it was baller, was it incidentally so or strategically so, in which case, ohmygod) was better than focusing on the fact that she might have been staring a bit and holding back a very strong temptation that involved leaping over counters and grabbing things.

And then she was punching it into the register because, yeah, they definitely had change for that, and then, since she had less control over her mouth than her physical urges, apparently, she said, "But it wasn't just because I was bored."

Summer, you idiot, he said it was HOT, why are you JUSTIFYING IT, you big dink?

"I did it because my friends needed the help."

Pause.

"And I was bored."

Lest he forget, you know, the whole 'pissing off galactic empires because you're bored' being hot thing from a whole second ago.

Okay. The fact that Summer was staring at him was just making his ears turn a darker shade of red. As well as his face. Thank God that Summer did not jump over the counter.

Suddenly his wallet was really interesting. Yep. Good old fashion wallet. Oh look, there's his old solar power generator next to his bank card. "I... uh. Just came from the ATM and-"

And what Barry?

"Helping your friends is also pretty fucking cool. As well as being bored. Um."

Yeah. Smooth. Very smooth, Barry.

Forgive him Summer, he's just floundering now and that exit door is looking very handy.

Yeah, Summer had been kind of actively curbing impulses like that since the last time she did something like that, she wound up being married to a post-apocalyptic warlord who actually really sucked...

For now, though, she was sort of wondering what she might have said that suddenly made that wallet so interesting.

"I mean," she said, putting Barry's stuff into a bag, "I could probably do without the boredom, but, um, well...you know."

Epic, Summer. Truly fascinating discourse there, for sure>/i>.

Well. It wasn't anything that Summer said that made Barry interested in his wallet. It's him admitting that she was hot and then being stared at by said hot person.

Despite having a 350+ IQ and being ten years out of High School, Barry's ability to socialize made him act like an idiot.

And now there was awkwardness.

"Right. Well if you have friends, you're rarely bored, right? Ha ha."

Did he just say "Ha ha"?

So he reached for his bag trying desperately to think of something else to say. "So. Looking forward to seeing that spaceship one day. Right?"

Yes. Technology. He could work with that.

Ohmygod, did he just say 'ha-ha'?

It had to have been the hundo comment, right? That was the only thing that made sense, maybe he was kinda loaded, but super humble about it, which was kind of adorable? That was obviously the only thing that made sense, right? It wasn't like...

Unless...

Summer bit her lower lip through a moment of consideration.

"Oh, yeahhhh," she said, "that's right, you still haven't seen her yet...you knoooow....she is overdue for some maintenance. I'll probably swing by after my radio on Friday, and of you've got time before you leave to see your friends..."

"

“Friday? Fuck yeah. Friday. That’s cool. Yeah. Definitely Friday,” he said trying to make it not sound like a big deal. “Coolcoolcool.”

Okay. It came off as nervous. What just happened here?

He could feel the heat coming off his face which was definitely red now. “See you on Friday.”

Wait. How many times had he said Friday?

Too many. Shit.

He forced a grin and headed for the door. Leaving behind the Oreos and the kale chips. Whereupon he smacked his face turned back, grabbed the bag and said “bye!” as he headed to the door.

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Turtle & Canary; Monday [08/10].

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