thesphererp | those magnificent bonds, so boring they make me puke

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those magnificent bonds, so boring they make me puke

When the feed begins, it's in a dimly lit classroom. A boy is tied down to a chair, his eyes blindfolded. "Dave," he pleads, his voice frightened. "C'mon, you can't let her do this."

Nearby, the sharp cackle of a girl can be heard. The owner of the laugh walks into view, a hand smugly placed at her hip, and her grin widens as she looks at him, then turns to Dave appraisingly. "Aww, too bad. You didn't think your friendship with him was real, did you? I mean... You already know by now that everything here's fake."

The boy gulps, his voice shaking as he tries to come up with something to say to that. "S...Sure! Maybe the classroom is fake, and we're not real classmates. B-But...! That's why, in a world where everything's fake, isn't the time we spent together even more real?"

There's a heavy silence, and the girl's brows furrow, her expression changing to one of exasperated confusion. "Hey Strider, you got any idea what this idiot is saying?"

Dave doesn't reply, so the boy continues. "Wh-what I'm saying is... all those days we spent eating lunch together, helping each other with our homework, working together for the school festival - that-- that wasn't fake!"

The girl's nose wrinkles in disgust at the sentiment, and she turns to regard him for a moment with the sort of expression a person might wear on their face if they just saw a fly land in their soup. Then it softens into a chipper smile, and she turns back to Dave, excited. "Hey, hey, do you wanna break it to him, or should I?"

Dave hesitates, then shrugs. His voice is completely even when he replies. "You sound like you're pretty keen on it, so I might as well let you have it."

"Hmmm..." She places a finger to her lips as if in consideration, but is quick to follow it up with an elated, "Okay!"

Sauntering over so she's circling the boy like a shark, she begins her explanation. "Here's the thing; the Dave Strider you knew, the one you were so nauseatingly chummy with? That one was a fake with a capital F. F-A-K-E. He doesn't even exist. So beg for mercy all you want, tug at all the heartstrings you think you're capable of in the hopes of saving your own skin, but face it: you don't know a thing about Strider."

"That's not true!" This time, the boy sounds determined. "Dave is kind, and he's always looking out for others even when he's trying to play it off like he's too cool for that, and-- and you're the one who doesn't know him!"

The outburst learns another laugh from the girl. "Wow, I really can't tell if you're just desperate or if you're actually deluded enough to believe the shit coming out of your mouth right now. Can you even see yourself right now? --Oh wait, of course you can't!" Another laugh, this time louder and more raucous. Wide-eyed, she turns to Dave, excitement palpable. "Hey, hey, Strider--"

"That's enough." Dave's voice is, as before, flat. The girl's grin falters, and for a moment, the boy looks relieved. "Let's just get this over with already."

"Aww~ you're no fun," the girl replies, though her grin is back, and it doesn't seem as if she's too bothered. "But," she says, whirling back to face the boy, "You heard it yourself. Nice try, though."

Dave steps forth, placing a set of headphones onto the boy, and the feed ends to the sound of screaming.

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What the hell is this shit? Bro watches, annoyance beating out how perplexed he is by all this. Bro’s glad his annoyance is more prevalent. To let out that he doesn’t understand something would be embarrassing and weak as fuck.

“I’m pretty sure that kind of shit is against the Geneva Convention bro,” he says. Stoic as ever.

What the fuck?? Did this place just broadcast his memories for everybody to see?

Why is he even asking, of course it did, Christ. And of course Bro saw. Fantastic.

"I'm pretty sure the Geneva Convention stopped being relevant the moment the earth went up in flames. Sort of just an ancient relic of a bygone civilization now; might as well bring the Corpus Juris Civilis into this if we're gonna go that route." Everything is totally cool here, okay?

“So what am I looking at here exactly?” Bro asks. “This dude does not seem excited for the demo your smashing his eardrums with?”

"It grew on him."

It's a non-answer, but it's also an understatement. It'd be too bad Bro lacked the context to appreciate the joke, except that Dave is absolutely keen on depriving him of said context in this instance.

"You know how it is when you're the trailblazer; genius ain't ever appreciated in its time and all that shit."

Bro tilts his head, just a little, at that. Dave’s game has gotten far better in regards to playing around unknown context. Bro will have to give it to him on that. Bro can feel pride at that.

Yet he can also feel astoundingly pissed off. There are things he does not understand about Dave since getting here, and Bro doesn’t like that. Links are missing in the chain between himself and his brother, and Bro likes that chain to be motherfucking taut, enough so Bro should know everything about Dave’s movements and actions. Bro doesn’t like to be perplexed in general. He fucking hates it in this case.

“Don’t remember people weeping when Wu Tang played their first gigs,” Bro replies. “So this the work you knew this chick from?”

"Yep." Dave sees his opportunity, and like fuck is he gonna let it get away from him. If he can move the topic of conversation to Marie Mizuguchi, then by all means, he's going to. "The funny thing was she was the type of honors student too perfect to exist outside of parents' fantasies outside of this. Top of her class, volunteered for all the extracurricular shit, made a show of getting to know her classmates and help them out with their shit if they were running into any issues; basically the opposite of what you just saw there."

“And on her off time she tortured dudes by handing out her second class beats,” Bro says. He crosses his arms as he leans against the wall, looking at Dave. “Sounds like mom and dad could’ve spent a little more time with their little wonder.”

"Oh man, get this: she had fake versions of her parents she kept around her house to torture. Dunno what the story behind that is, but I get the vibe more family time wouldn't have fixed whatever was going on with the Mizuguchi household."

Also you never spend time with him either, you fuck. You just watch him through a bunch of cameras, which is a totally inadequate substitute for actual interactions. But Dave totally isn't bitter about that or anything.

Dave he spent plenty of time with you. Come on. He was a busy guy and in the modern times you have to learn and adjust with parenting styles.

“Huh,” Bro says. If he feels any distress or unnerved by that little tidbit, he does not once bother to show it. As always, Dirk Strider is a fucking brick wall on the emotional front. Pure hard concrete, devoid of emotion or concern. “Sounds like she must have had some killer house parties. Invitation only, BYOB, make sure to have your own knives, electrical cords, and car batteries.”

What the fuck does BYOB mean. Dave can't keep up with this, he has never been to a party in his life. All he's seen are shitty film depictions of parties.

Clearly, the solution is to keep moving the topic forward. So far, this is good; Bro's totally forgotten all about the role Dave played in that memory. In fact, it could be said to be a distant memory now. Dave's a verifiable genius.

"What's fucked up is she was probably one of my more well-adjusted coworkers. One of the others was a master peeper who dressed up as a fuckin' bird in spandex like some sort of ultra shitty knockoff porno parody of a comic book hero."

“Sounds like you need to make friends outside of ‘work’, bro,” Bro says. “Don’t see hanging with a furry super hero and teenage Rhoda Penmark here.”

Dave stiffens a little at that. Is silent for just a bit as he chooses his next words and tries to make sure they come out completely nonplussed and casual.

"I don't really need friends."

Bro is quiet a moment. Shifts a bit as he goes from leaning against the wall to standing, arms still crossed. His stare, hidden behind his shades, is unreadable as always. It’s hard to tell what he’s thinking if he’s thinking about anything regarding this at all. Since when has Bro Strider given a fuck?

“Yeah?” Bro asks.

Those are Dirk words, not Dave words, coming from Dave. They’re one of the mantras Bro has lived his life by, that he in all honesty taught Dave through his own example. It shouldn’t feel weird hearing them coming from Dave.

They do. They feel like words strained through a speaker system that is all fucked up. Like the cheap speakers in a super market calling out names for some dipshit to clean this up on aisle eleven, or for some asshole to get to the fucking service desk please because his terror spawn are chewing up the linoleum flooring and they just remodeled that shit last month. They’re words Bro understands but feels like he didn’t hear quite right above the din of his own, usually underfed, emotions.

There is a part of him that doesn’t want to hear Dave say shit like that.

“Good for you,” Bro says anyway. His lip quirks up, just a little. “Got tired of every asshole pushing you underwater when they wanted to horseback in the pool, huh?”

That moment of silence is the most nerve-wracking thing. He isn't sure how to read it, doesn't want to think too much on it - he spends it staring past Bro, his eyes hopefully obscured enough by the shades that Bro doesn't notice him staring at the ground like a loser.

The thing with Bro Strider is that if you've fucked up, he doesn't let you know immediately. He lets it sink in, gradually, through a period of time. He lets the shame slowly drown and suffocate you.

And Dave, now eighteen years old, finds, painfully, that his ascendance into adulthood has done nothing to make that idea less terrifying. That the thought of letting his brother down still hurts as much as it ever did.

Then he hears it. Good for you, words that rarely ever pass through Bro's lips. Hell, Bro is even smiling - or coming as close to a smile as he's capable of, probably, Dave thinks; the guy is a stone cold unfeeling ninja, after all.

And Dave... can't seem to even process it at first. Marie's words echo in his head as his brain struggles to restart its operating system.

"Everybody's always talking about how much they care about their friends or how much they value their relationships, but when their ass is on the line, it takes 'em no time at all to abandon those so-called beautiful bonds. In the end, all anybody ever cares about is themselves; they just want to dress it up all pretty and pretend they're above that, as if they're not just making these friendships so they can profit from 'em. Makes me wanna puke."

And hadn't she shown him that, time and time again? Friends backstabbing each other to save their own skin, friendships collapsing over tiny things. Friendships that, ultimately, amounted only to convenience and were soon abandoned the moment they ceased to be convenient.

Bro would feel that way too, wouldn't he? Bro would laugh at the idea of friendship, of needing friends. Bro doesn't need friends, after all. He's strong, he's self-sufficient - and he'd want Dave to be that way, too. It... makes sense.

A part of Dave's brain clicks into place. Yeah, he thinks. It's so obvious; how could he ever have missed it before? That this is the way to earn Bro's approval - that it's always been the way to earn his approval.

He'd just... been too blinded by his own loneliness to see it before. He'd been weak - pathetic, like Marie said.

And look where it'd gotten him.

Well, no more. Dave forces a grin onto his face, a feigned cockiness in his voice as he answers, "You know it. Ain't got time enough in the world to spend on charity cases for fools anymore."

This is right. It has to be.

Bro nods. That might as well be a fucking hug, coming from Bro. Bro has never understood the role model or figure he is to Dave. Having never had one himself, never having a permanent father figure or role model, Bro isn’t sure how he’s supposed to be a model. He never had one to look up to, and with how informal he’s always been, he had always assumed Dave would do the same.

Sure, Dave copies him when he was a kid, but Bro assumes that was natural kid shit. Certainly, Dave would eventually abandon the idea of a role model, at least in regards to Bro. He’d be his own man, no stops.

“Can’t be wasting time with people fucking about on your dime,” Bro says. “Dumbasses here don’t seem any better.”

Not that Bro would fucking know. He’s been as unsociable as he was back home. Being transported to a different world is apparently not at all fucking interesting to Bro.

"I mean, did you see their collective decision to air all their dirty laundry publicly last month? We got killers, stalkers, and fuckin' serial masturbators."

He's still not sure what the fuck is up with that.

"It's like I got teleported into the shittiest jail imaginable, and they didn't even have the decency to tell me when my sentence ends."

“I browsed,” Bro says. He was tempted as fuck to make fun of some of them. Who knows if it was a good thing he didn’t rattle any hornets nests on that end. He probably will eventually. “I’m not sure why the fuck people we’re jumping to keep going on the network just to crow the dirtiest shit they got. Think at least one person would think logging on is maybe a bad idea.”

"One of the guys I hit up claimed the place made him confess. If you ask me it sounds like a shitty excuse for not having to own up to the consequences of your own actions, but this place also sucks major dick, so who knows."

It did fucking broadcast one of his memories earlier. But Dave is going to conveniently avoid mentioning that.

We’ve moved on from talking about the memory of course. That shit is old news, talking about the people here is the new hotness.

“People never want to own up to their own shit,” Bro says. “It’s why they air it in the first place. They want everyone else to tell them they don’t smell anything.”

"Basically, yeah. I actually heard him say some shit like 'everyone else has secrets too' when I told him his shit was fucked up. It's like a little feedback loop here of everybody normalizing their fucked up shit."

Which is... unpleasant, to say the least.

"The serial masturbator was probably my favorite person that month."

“You probably made that dude’s day,” Bro says. “If I ran into that dude, I probably would have just read Chick Tracts at him.”

"Oh my God."

Dave has to give it to Bro; nobody can troll like he does. Not even literal trolls.

"Honestly, I'm kinda surprised you didn't add to the pile with your own confession, except make it something totally fuckin' mundane as kind of a slap in the face. Some shit like, I dunno, 'Tarantino is overrated and I've got no idea why everybody's got a hardon for him when Tom Holland could direct circles around that chump.'"

“Tarantino is a non-figure far as cinema is concerned. Dude pretty much just plagiarizes Euro crime films and Asian cinema tone and aesthetic. That wouldn’t even be bait. It’d just be the truth.”

Bro rubs his chin a little.

“Still, probably about time I got my ass to crawl out of the cave and mess up the camper’s picnic baskets.”

Edited 2020-04-30 23:43 (UTC)

"It being the truth doesn't stop Tarantino from having a positively retarded amount of frothing fans. I think they might all be foot fetishists? It's the only thing that makes sense, anyway."

Regardless, Dave is interested in what Bro is plotting.

"What're you cookin' up?"

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those magnificent bonds, so boring they make me puke

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