Chapter Text
It starts, as these things often do, with a drag show.
Joel was tired of sitting miserably alone in his room, okay? And yeah, maybe he was a little bit to blame for all the friends he had lost. Maybe he was still a little bit sad about Lizzie transferring halfway across the country to a school he couldn’t get into, but it was fine. He wasn’t going to think about that right now. Also, his hands were bleeding.
That was probably a cause for concern.
He looked at his hands again. They were, in fact, covered in a spiderweb of dried blood that went clear across his knuckles, which would have been an easy fix, if he had owned his own lotion. Joel looked around his room. He thought. He picked up the open container of Lizzie’s old lipstick sitting on his desk and rubbed it across his knuckles.
Today, Joel decided, was one of those days where you just go back to sleep and then pretend that you didn’t wake up. But just when he was about to do that, his phone buzzed. Joel weighed his options. He could throw his phone across the room, which would both provide him the satisfying thunk sound and a bonus of more sleep, or he could read the text, which would sate his curiosity.
He chose the second option.
Etho: Do u have plans tonight?
Etho: I found a thing
Etho: To go to
Now Joel was kind of glad he’d actually looked at his phone.
Joel: What thing
Joel: You can’t just say that ethi
Joel: Etho*
Joel: etho
Joel: what thing
Joel: the curiosity
Joel: is killing me
Joel: hey etho
Joel: tell me the thong
Joel: the thing
Joel: autocorrect
Joel: etho
Joel: etho
Joel: etho
Joel: etho
Etho: joel I’m in class
Joel: Tell me the thing
Joel: what class
Etho: Japanese
Etho: I’ll tell u after class
Joel: rude
Joel: weeb
Etho: stop texting I want to pay attention
Joel: and yet you’re texting back
Joel: lame
Joel: Etho
Joel: etho
Etho: I’m going to mute my phone
Joel: You’re a weeb
Etho has notifications silenced
Joel sighed. Leave it to Etho to be a good, responsible student, while Joel…. Well, Lizzie called it Joel-depressed. Different from regular depression in a slight, but distinguishable way. Joel-depression meant skipping classes, staying in bed for far too long, and not doing homework, just like normal depression, but it also included picking up a new hobby, spending hundreds of dollars on that hobby, and ultimately abandoning it in the back of his closet, where he’d pick up another expensive hobby, and repeat the process until he had circled back around to the first hobby, or gotten out of the Joel-depression loop. What made this difficult is that Joel usually did his best work at three A.M. in a Joel-depression spiral. The method behind the madness was that eventually his hobbies would circle back around to Greek architecture, and then he could do all his classwork for the semester, giving him buffer time should he fall into a different fixation during his Joel-depression. Currently, though, Joel had gotten very good at drawing skulls. He was also skipping his Hellenistic Greek class for the third time this week.
Joel: Etho
Joel: Etho
Joel: Etho
Joel: Etho
Joel: Etho
Joel: [7 attachments]
Joel: Etho etho etho etho etho
Joel: [2 attachments]
Joel: [4 attachments]
---
Checking his phone after class was Etho’s favorite part of the day. Joel may have been clingy, but he was also amusing, and Joel waiting for Etho to tell him something increased both the clinginess and the absurdity of Joel’s texts, so Etho did it far more often than he’d actually admit to Joel.
Besides, Joel had started talking to him again. It was nice.
Etho: I’m out of class
Etho: also, why did u send me 13 pictures of skulls? Is this a threat
Joel: ETHO
Joel: what did you have to tell me
Joel: come on
Joel: I have to know
Joel: also yes
Joel: its a threat
Etho: I’m coming to ur house
Joel: aww miss me?
Etho: impulse is @ my apartment
Joel: fine I see how it is
Joel: you’re using me
Joel: buy me dinner first
Etho: If i had money to buy u dinner I wouldn’t b in a shared room. Going to drive now. See u soon.
Etho tucked his phone in his pocket, and if he was smiling underneath the mask, nobody had to know.
---
Joel didn’t notice Etho was in his house until he slammed his hip into the sofa and heard a soft chuckle from behind him.
“God- Etho, how long have you been there? Wait, actually, no. How did you get in? I didn’t give you a key.”
“I picked the lock,” said Etho, throwing his feet over the couch as if that was the most natural thing in the world. I picked the lock.
“It’s an electronic lock.”
“I know.”
“Does it still work?”
“Yeah.”
“Great. Okay, great.” Joel paused. “What’s the thing you have planned tonight? And-” Joel ruffled Etho’s hair- “how many times did you have to bleach your hair to get it white? It’s fried, dude.”
“Your hair looks like piss,” said Etho instead of answering.
“Fuck you.”
Etho laughed. “Do you wanna drive three hours to see a drag show?”
“Three hours.”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“I haven’t seen you since the beginning of last year, dude,” said Etho. “We can catch up on the ride.”
“What if I have homework?”
“What if you did your homework?” Etho said, grabbing Joel's sketchbook. “How many skulls are in this thing?”
“A normal amount,” said Joel, reaching for his notebook. Etho stood it up and held it out of Joel’s reach, flipping through the pages, ignoring Joel jumping up and down in a futile bid for the book.
“Holy shit, dude. This is a lot of skulls. Are you okay?” Etho glanced down. “Also, why are your hands all pink?”
“My hands are pink for normal, regular, having no hand lotion reasons,” said Joel. “And that also answers your first question. Don’t we have somewhere to go?”
“Just a minute. I want to look at these skulls more. Did you draw all of these?” Etho closed the sketchbook. “These are really good. Wait- does the front of this say Black and white skulls?”
“No,” said Joel.
“It does.”
“No.”
“This implies there are other sketchbooks with colored skulls.”
“No. ”
“Come on!” Etho crowed. “I need to see those too!”
“You do not need to see those, and they also look exactly like the black and white skulls, so it’s not going to look any different.”
“Show me the skulls.”
“No.”
“Joel,” said Etho, drawing out the L sound. “Please? Pretty please? With a cherry on top?”
Joel sighed. “Fine. I show you the skulls and then we go to the drag show?
Etho pumped his fist in the air in response.
---
Etho was a comforting presence. Etho was enthusiastic about Joel’s skulls. Etho was also Joel’s only friend.
“Hey Etho, you wanna hear something funny? Well. Funny and also sad.”
Etho glanced at Joel from the passenger's seat. “Is it that you never got your driver's license? Because that wouldn't be a surprise. Actually, that would be par for the course.”
“That’s not it,” said Joel. “Well! Actually-”
Etho sighed, leaning further back in his seat. “Don’t even tell me,” he said. “I honestly don’t want to know.”
“So,” started Joel. “Remember when Scar and Grian broke up?”
“Yeah? Like they do every week?”
“Right!” said Joel, clapping his hands. “But this time Scar took the textbooks in the divorce. .” He looked at Etho for a reaction, but couldn’t see one from behind the mask.
“So?” asked Etho. “Not my problem.”
“Ah,” said Joel, “But it is my problem, see. They live next to me. And any problem that is my problem, Etho, is also your problem.”
“Oh goody. Light any fires recently?”
“No! Well-”
“Once again,” said Etho, “If I don’t know about it, it’s not my problem.”
“Scar started it.”
“The housing department does not care who started it.”
“Fine, I finished it, happy?”
“That’s actually worse, Joel.”
“Anyway!” said Joel. “Back to the lovers' quarrel going on in my apartment. Grian and Scar broke up. Scar stole Grians textbooks, so Grian has been digging through Scars things to find them. In response, Scar has been gluing hair to Grian’s door, so Grian retaliated by putting Scars cookies in the oven for longer than necessary, which caused the sprinklers to go off in our apartment, which meant I had to take my laptop into the shop for water damage.”
“Textbooks,” said Etho. “Hair. Cookies. Laptop.”
“Yup.”
“I think this is the bad place, actually.”
“You’re one to talk,” said Joel. “Didn’t bdubs start selling mushrooms out of your dorm last year?”
“I would slap you if I didn’t think it would get us in a wreck.”
Joel laughed, and held his hands up in a placating gesture. “Okay, okay, it’s just-”
“ Put your hands back on the steering wheel. ”
---
Here’s the thing. Etho didn’t try to be scary. He knew how people saw him- six feet tall, broad shouldered, always wore a mask. Though admittedly, the mask had become less intimidating in recent years. But he wasn’t actually trying to be scary. Bdubs knew that. Joel knew that, though sometimes Etho wished he didn’t. Cleo knew that. Even Impulse, Bdubs’s… something, knew that. The wider group of people he spent time with, however, didn’t know that. And Etho thought that was funny. Which might have been the seed for the plan he came up with.
“Hey,” said Etho, bumping Joel’s shoulder after the show. “Liked what you saw?”
“It was cool,” said Joel, looking up at Etho. “Also, stop wearing heels. You’re already annoyingly tall.”
“Ha-ha,” said Etho, in monotone. “Listen, I have an idea.”
“I’m listening.”
“Okay,” said Etho. “So here’s the idea. We pretend to be in a relationship to annoy Scar and Grian, because they’re both sad and lonely right now. Then we can stage an elaborate breakup so that they finally see what it’s like to be caught in the middle of it.And it’ll be funny. Mainly because it’ll be funny.”
“We also have insurance that we won’t actually fall in love,” said Joel, “because I’m straight.”
Etho stared at Joel for a couple seconds. “...Right,” he said.
Joel grinned widely. “Let’s do this.”