Work Text:
JUNE 10 2016 19:54
It’s a warm evening, not that surprising as it’s the first days of summer in California. Or just generally because it’s Cali, there will be a cold day in hell before there's one in the golden state. Ira walks along the sidewalk carrying three bags of take-out in one hand, checking his phone in his other hand waiting for a text from his boyfriend. No response. He just sighs, shoulders slouching in disappointment. He had promised he’d be there in time for the reruns of Criminal Minds and yet with six minutes to go he couldn’t have bothered to send a text that told him that he was on his way.
“Hey dipshit! Did you get the extra nachos?” A voice called from above him. God? No. It was Eric, who had somehow broken into his apartment and was currently grinning at him from his balcony.
“Of course I did, I wasn’t raised by an uncultured swine!” He yelled back. And that was it, the greatest summary of their friendship. Ever since they met back in junior year of high school at an art club that did not have enough funding at all, (“Nice teletubby.” Ira complimented. “It’s a frog.” Eric had sighed back) their relationship was a constant up and down of creative, colourful insults and infinite banter on topics they didn’t really care about anyways. It was a perfect balance of their personalities, they complemented each other perfectly, and they found out that this was all they needed for a relationship that (they hoped) will last forever.
“How did you even find the key to get inside?” Ira questioned, slightly out of breath from climbing four flights of stairs to his apartment, he had to balance out the amount of takeout he brought somehow.
“You’re acting like putting keys inside old shoes is the most creative thing ever.” Ira rolled his eyes at this, making his way into the apartment. Eric followed him after closing the door. “And I figured that because it’s such a nice night, we should watch the show in some nice fresh air, so I moved your TV to the balcony. On an unrelated note, that vase you were trying to sell is finally gone,” Eric explained, smiling to himself. They made their way to the balcony, before Eric stopped at the door, making jazz hands before he let Ira in.
“How and why did you do this?” He breathed out. His once bland other than a fold-out chair balcony had turned into an extravagant pillow fort.
Eric proudly overlooked his creation. “One word: j’adore le drame.”
“First of all, ‘j’adore le drame’ is three words. Secondly I have no idea what that means.”
“‘You're a huge dork’ is four. Maybe if you listened to anything that Mrs. Cartier taught us in class you would understand more than two words in French.”
“Oui. But consider this, her classes were boring as fuck. When am I ever going to need French anyways?”
“Maintenant,” he smiled, knowing that Ira would probably not understand this for one bit. He didn't.
“Oh shush, the show’s starting any second now.” He said, grabbing the remote to turn on the TV, whacking Eric on the head with a pillow, and settling down with the take-out.
JUNE 10 2016 23:29
It had been around three full episodes and the start of the fourth one, only for it to be interrupted by the millionth commercial break when Eric saw it. Ira was refilling drinks when it appeared, as vast as the sky itself. Sure, he believed in the paranormal and the extraterrestrial, but to see it like this was breathtaking.
“Ira, bring the fucking camera!” He yelled, like his life depended on it. Oh God. Oh sweet baby Jesus. He may not have been religious but he found himself praying to whatever religion first crossed his mind. His hands started shaking and he felt as though pins and needles had taken over his entire body. Ira rushed in, holding a camera with both hands.
“What’s wrong? What’s ha-” His eyes locked onto the sky, the blinking lights giving him a headache but he couldn’t get his eyes off of it. It was mystical, hypnotizing, never seen before. Never seen before. He lifted the camera, trying to get a good shot of it, a video, anything, but the digital screen only showed the dark sky and sparkling moon behind it.
“What the fuck?” Eric whispered, suddenly behind Ira, eyes darting from the screen to the sky. How could it not see this huge ship in the sky? He grabbed the camera from Ira’s hands, taking a couple more pictures with it, only for all of them to come out as the same sky and moon.
“It’s alien technology man, of course it wouldn’t show on camera.” Ira said, eyes glued to the blinking ship. Eric just sighed and dropped the camera, his face illuminated with every shine of the neon lights. After what felt like an eternity, as fast as it appeared it disappeared with a blinding light. The commercial break was long over and Criminal Minds blared in the background as Eric turned to Ira and simply asked: “What do we do now?” Ira lowered his gaze from Eric onto the camera lying on the floor. He grabbed Eric’s arm, pulled him onto the floor, and turned the still running camera to themselves.
“Hello whoever is watching this, my name is Ira and this right here is Eric. It’s the tenth of June, 2016. The time is eleven thirty five p.m, we’re currently in Los Angeles and we just saw a UFO.”
PRESENT DAY
When Eric was watching Ira film the van drive away with the little boy, he didn’t think about the child, or his family. He only thought about how they were finally going to get proof. Proof that they weren’t crazy like the comments on their videos said, proof that it wasn’t all a lie. And when he looked at Ira, he could see the same things going through his head.
But then came the proof, harshly if he might say. No, Ira and Eric weren’t crazy, but they had been on some fucking drugs that night. Their livelihood, their careers, their fanbase, their entire lives for the past four years was the result of them tripping out and mistaking the bright streets of L.A. for some goddamn aliens. They stood up, flustered and dazed, and exited the LAPD office. Eric looked up at Ira like he did four years prior and asked the same question: “What do we do now?”
Only this time, Ira had no idea either.