Work Text:
(Edit: No, Reddit mods, I’m not making this up.)
(Edit: Edit: Look, if you don’t believe me, that’s fine, but I just want a value judgment or some helpful advice. Thanks.)
Posting under a throwaway, because I’m sure many people I’m close to use Reddit.
I (30F) am a schoolteacher, and so is my boyfriend (32M). Usually when I plan to go on dates with him I get interrupted by a very close friend of mine (2000?) and we often go to planets and distant galaxies and things in his space box. (It’s fine, though, because the space box also functions as a time travel machine, so I usually arrive on time, with the occasional tan and/or bitemark from desert sand piranhas.) I’m not cheating on my boyfriend, and I’ve known this close friend from before I met him.
One day I was going about my business expecting for my friend to pick me up as usual and to go places, but this time we didn’t go anywhere? He acted as if he was hiding something, so naturally I was suspicious. Cue my surprise when my friend showed up in a trench coat and declared himself to be the new caretaker at my school!
Usually, when my friend and I go places, it’s to solve some sort of interplanetary conflict, or right some extraterrestrial injustice. We’ve both often defended the Earth from various hostile invaders. (Yes, aliens are real. I’ve often wondered if calamity follows us, not the other way round.) So naturally, when he showed up at my workplace , I was concerned. I’m a schoolteacher; it’s within my duty of care to protect all my students, even if they’re irritating and intrusive, and their parents are demanding perfectionists who believe their daughter can do no wrong.
I pressed my friend on the threat that jeopardised the entire school, and I’m sure you can imagine my surprise when I heard a death robot with a laser Gatling gun had shown up within the general vicinity of the school, attracted to the residual artron energy in the area. (Yes, that’s a real thing. Google is free.) Apparently, it had already claimed the life of a local officer, so naturally I was panicking at the ramifications of this for my students. My class in particular loves acting up and sticking their noses where they don’t belong, so efforts to keep them away or hide the death robot from them would largely be futile.
My friend told me not to worry, as if that would help things, and then told me to go ‘canoodle’ with my boyfriend. Initially I thought this meant he approved; because he’d been wandering about the campus, and I saw him interact with my boyfriend, I thought this was a good sign. (Yes, I care about the approval of my friend, no matter how archaic that is. No, I’m not cheating on my boyfriend.)
Unfortunately that night my boyfriend cancelled our date, so I spent my evening wandering around the school checking on my friend’s progress with banishing the death robot. He’d planned on using an invisibility watch to lure the robot into the theater, where he’d use chronodyne generators to launch it forward in time where it could hurt nobody. Unfortunately, due to my boyfriend being suspicious of my friend, he’d disabled the chronodyne generators during the day, and the robot was only sent forward a handful of hours into the future, instead of a billion years, once again endangering my students. But I digress.
In my haste to explain the presence of a death robot within the school, extraterrestrial technology hundreds of years beyond our reckoning, and literal actual time travel, I panicked and lied to my boyfriend. I’m not proud of this part.
I said it was part of the school play.
You’re welcome to laugh at my expense, here. I really genuinely tried to pass off the death robot (which at this point had vanished into a burst of golden sparks) as a child in a costume, but my boyfriend immediately saw through it. He asked if my friend was my father, and if I was from space (both of which are wrong), to which my friend angrily snarled something about looking exactly the same age as me. I don’t remember what I said in full clarity; as you can imagine I was in full blown panic mode.
This is where I came clean and told my boyfriend the truth. I showed him our time and space box, which was bigger on the inside, and that seemed to break his mind a little bit. My boyfriend asked me if I was cheating on him, which really hurt, and I said that I loved my friend ‘but not like that’, which didn’t really placate him as much as I’d like.
My friend seemed to retract his earlier approval of my boyfriend; he was under the assumption I was dating someone else that looked remarkably like his past reincarnation. (The ego on this man sometimes blows me away, but what can you do?) He was also really under the impression that my boyfriend was a soldier, and not a maths teacher, which I tried and failed to convince him of the opposite. (My friend is vehemently anti-war and despises anything and everything to do with it. It’s related to personal trauma, which I understand, but he tends to lash out at those he views as complicit, even if they aren’t really.)
At home with my boyfriend he seemed to struggle with the fact that I wasn’t secretly in love with my friend, no matter how much I tried to convince him. He seemed to think I was a different person when he wasn’t around, so we formulated a plan where I’d snatch my friend’s invisibility watch, sneak him onto our spacetime box, and then he could observe me ‘alone’ with my friend, and hopefully be reassured I wasn’t cheating on him with anything.
This obviously fell through, as my friend detected my boyfriend was hiding using the invisibility watch. My boyfriend revealed that he was in fact a soldier and started arguing with my friend. At this point I wanted to go home, but unfortunately for both my boyfriend and I, it was the dreaded parents’ evening.
After a few minutes of playing nice with the parents, my friend signalled to us the death robot had returned. We quickly excused ourselves, and I managed to lure the death robot into the path of my friend, who had engineered a command deck and told it to shut down. To our alarm, however, it began a self destruct sequence, endangering the entire planet (the robot had enough explosives to blow all of Earth up). Thankfully, my boyfriend saved the day by doing an impressive backflip over it, distracting it from its self destruct sequence and letting my friend finish the shut down code.
But ever since then, my boyfriend has sort of frozen me out. We haven’t exchanged much conversation recently and I’m scared he’s shutting me out.
I don’t think I’m the asshole because it’d be impossible to explain the fact that I’m time travelling with an alien best friend in tow on a first date without seeming insane, and as you can assume, it’d grow increasingly harder from there onwards into the relationship. But what else would you have me do?
AITA?