Chapter Text
“Babe, can you pass the mayo?”
“There you– Barbara.”
“What?”
"Barbara.”
"Walt, What?”
“On your pizza, dear?”
“Excuse you, I’m not the one who got Hawaiian.”
Barbara chomps an overzealous bite out of her goo-dripping slice of pepperoni, mushroom, and “yes, mayo,” bobbing her head from side-to-side at the stiff-shirt crumpling at the end of her sofa. He slouches, a thing that without witnessing, she might never have believed, digging into his own (”obscene,” “says the pot”) fruity slice.
The kitchen is a wreck-site of bent pizza boxes. The dining room explodes loose papers like the faithful reenactment of a piñata massacre. Shoes and briefcases lean in the entryway like the cubby wall of a collegiate kindergarten.
Research had gone well tonight. Barbara was home. Jim was not. It was therefore decided that dinner for the hazy-eyed, coffee-bereft changelings and troll-turned-human to whom she’d opened her home as a temporary “Hall of the Superfriends” would be pizza. As much of, and any way they wanted.
“They do get along,” whispers Blinky in Troll between plain cheese and shots of whipped cream.
“Didn’t I tell you?” replies Nomura over her peppers-and-sardine. “I’m shocked it’s taken you this long.”
“He is such a prude. How could I have noticed before seeing it with my own six, er, two eyes?”
“Shall we put a plan afoot?”
“Hush!”
Walt shoots them a look from his–swiftly becoming Barbara’s–side of the couch, then is quickly distracted by a slim hand with a napkin poking playfully at his chin.
The schemers exchange glances and withdraw further to the edge of the room. They are not noticed. Barbara scoops up the remote from the coffee table and she and Walt tussle for control.
“So?”
“The question is more about him than her.”
“Obviously. I let her into the balcony like you suggested the other day. You should have seen her eyes when Walt changed. Sunk.”
Blinky smiles warmly. “Blind fool. I worry, truly, that he seems so bent on not believing what he preaches.”
“She’s in on anything we can come up with. I already asked.”
“Hmm,” Blinky rubs his chin. “Tobias once showed me a human film, a travesty of Troll potential in cinema, really–they called us, of all inane things, ‘love doctors’–but it does give one…ideas.”
Nomura makes a face. “What film?”
“Irrelevant, but,” Blinky’s grin would make a matchmaker dance tippy-toe in anticipation, “our tragic likenesses referred most aptly to the target of their concerted efforts as…a ‘fixer-upper.’”