Work Text:
The inside of the corner store bathroom smells elegantly of piss.
“Now,” Oblina says as they approach the silver door, “we shall go about this scare with caution, integrity, guts, and most of all-“
“You go to one side and get really small, and then I’ll go to the other side and get really, really big! It’s genius, c’mon, Oblina, let’s-”
“Honestly, Ickis, I do not understand how you remember to feed yourself with an attention span as teensy-tinsy as yours.”
“It’s easy. Every time you nag, I eat. Oh, would you look at that.” A rusty screw goes from the floor to his mouth, crunching it gone with a smug delight.
Oblina doesn’t laugh.
“I swear,” she mutters instead, opening the door on one strict palm, “if I am ever assigned you on a pair scare again, the Gromble will be hearing from me-”
“The whole world’s gonna be hearing from you if you don’t stuff it, Ms. Lip!” Ickis whispers at her. His soft feet find their way ahead of her, sneaking beneath her arm and out the ajar door. Oblina snarls quietly before making after his shadows.
At midnight, the store’s mostly humanless. That tends to happen, they've noticed, around the time the red sign on the door flips over. But one does linger back, sandwiched betwixt the hip-high counter and wallpaper of cigarettes behind him. Oblina, where they crouch just afront that counter together, gestures silently toward the tall, nametagged man. Ickis nods. In his grin, the fluorescent light catches over fangs.
The man’s orange hat finds the floor and his lungs beat the brass tune of a shrieking sax. Nothing especially fancy. He flees the store and leaves the top bell singing, Oblina and Ickis already having their fill of the tasty green paper in the button machine on the counter.
Ickis burps and holds up a twenty. “Mm. Why do I feel some sick kind of delight over eating pictures of human faces?”
“Eating humans would be against everything we stand for as monsters, Icky,” she says, a handful of pennies rolling down her long, thin throat. “Besides, yuck. I hardly want to imagine what they’d taste like.”
Like it were a diving board, Ickis launches himself off the drawer of the button machine and pads across the shiny linoleum. Outside, the world is black and starlit.
“Ickis, where are you going?”
“Just around the aisle, sister, let me live a little, jeesh!”
Oblina balks back enough to place a fist at her hip. “Well.”
She, too, hops from the counter to stomp the sticky floor, drink machines unwiped and dripping the sugar poison humans trade tasty paper for. How absolutely inane, the way they live, honestly.
And then Ickis screams. One of the most instantaneously recognizable noises in her daily life, perhaps just above Krumm’s snoring.
“Ickis?” calls her instinct, the same way her feet patter off toward the shrill. “What is the matter?”
“They- They-!” Ickis stammers where he stands before the bright white of a refrigerator box, shelves upon shelves of cans hidden inside. His voice squeals like an unintelligible bus break, though she’s patient enough for him to find the gusto to pull a claw from his nibbling teeth and point at the cans. “They drink monsters!”
This time, his voice rests deep in his throat, crouching beneath both ears.
“Oh, would you get a hold of yourself, Ickis?” she insists, then marches close enough to the fridge to suction it open in a few harsh tugs. Invisible condensation wets her thumbprints when she picks a black can off the bottom shelf and squints at the bright green lettering. “There is no possible way that humans are harvesting real monsters for their sugar juices. Need I bring up the day of the lobsters?”
“Okay, okay, sure, but it’s real this time! It says it right on there, Monster Energy! They’re harvesting our energy, Oblina, we gotta get out of heeere!”
Ickis traps her within the wrap of his two shaking arms.
“This does not look like getting a hold of yourself!” Oblina, writhing from him, shouts. She sighs shortly. “Look, Ickis…like I said, it is simply not possible that humans are harvesting us. That would require them to find out about monsters, and I do not think the very first thing they’d do with us is…make juice.”
Bug-eyed, Ickis backs into a darker corner and sways his gaze around. “How do you know? You’re no expert on humans, not even the Gromble can predict what they’ll do next! Haven’t you ever seen it, two humans’ll be getting along great!, then all’ve a sudden one of them mentions he squishes on boys and the other one throws a punch?!”
“Why is that the very first example to come to your mind," Oblina wonders quiet enough to count rhetorically, moving on just to toss the black can over her shoulder and be done with the whole charad. “Now let us get back to the dump and tell Krummy about our scare. And then I shall volunteer for the viewfinder tomorrow, to be sure there isn’t any nonsense involved in our presentation.”
“Whaddaya mean, noonsense?” he mocks. Where she starts toward the bathroom again, Ickis instead approaches shyly the bath of liquid leaking from the thrown can. She watches him poke a finger into it before that same one lifts toward his mouth- and freezes.
“Ickis!” gets him squealing again, but he shakes the shock off and glares over his shoulder with the reverence of a spitting punk rockist.
“Wha-aaat?! You’ve been on my back all day, I was merely sniffing it.”
“Merely sniffing it…” Her eyes roll. “Come along now, the Snorch’ll be around to check who’s out of bed soon.”
“Yeah, yeah, sure, I’m coming,” Ickis says, going toward her just to appease her into turning forward again. His finger pokes into his mouth. The black of his pupils go large.
(On the next pair scare, Oblina crumples up the handwritten Ickis in a violent, shattering fist. Krumm’s the reticent middleman between she and Ickis’ sheepish giggling. The Gromble, as usual, stares questionably at all three of them, though Oblina distracts with a second go at the bin full of paper names in his hands. A smile wires open her pretty mouth. “Oh, Dizzle, how absolutely wonderful!”).