Chapter Text
“I wish more Hellmouths were like this,” Matt grins. “I mean, the ones we’ve been finding and destroying have been in such awful vacation spots.”
“Sorry, are you implying that killing demons is our vacation?” Gus asks, snorting.
“We need to unionize for real,” Skara complains. Unlike the boys in the group, Skara is lounging on a beach towel. “Get on that, Slayer Beta.”
Gus sticks out his tongue at her, going back to his sandcastle. There was a beach-wide sandcastle contest that they’d happily entered. However, he was quickly learning that while he isn’t an artist in the best of circumstances, sand as a medium is definitely not doing him any favors.
“I’m just saying. We should get more California Hellmouths.”
“Speak for yourself,” Jerbo complains. He’s wearing a comically large sunhat, along with a long-sleeved sweat-wicking shirt and pants, and even with all that he’d still covered himself head to toe in sunscreen. Gus feels like he’s going to overheat just looking at his friend. “I wasn’t built for this,” Jerbo continues, sounding dreadful.
“Poor boy afraid of a tan,” Gus teases.
“I do not tan,” Jerbo huffs, continuing his sandcastle. “I just burn miserably.”
“It’s true,” Matt says, reaching over and latching himself to Jerbo and ‘accidentally’ knocking some of the sandcastle down. “Once during the summer, he got a second-degree sunburn on his shoulders and back just from being outside long enough to help his mom bring in the groceries.”
Jerbo scowls and pushes Matt away, rebuilding from the damage his friend inflicted. “Whatever…”
The rest of them haven’t had to be too paranoid about the sun beyond the basic sunscreen protocol. Matt’s always had light freckles on his face, only really visible when Gus looked closely, but the sun darkened them. He looks pretty, which is still an obscenely embarrassing thought even after so many months of dating.
“Skill issue. Get melanin,” Skara chimes in helpfully. She rolls over on her stomach and watches them as they continue making sandcastles.
Gus focuses on his small sandcastle, ignoring his friends as they bicker. He does not stand a chance to win this competition, but that does not mean that he’ll let himself get beaten by everyone.
The Sunnydale Summer Sandcastle Skirmish (Gus thinks they probably could have thought of a name with a little less sibilance) is judged by what remains of the town’s city council. It was one of the buildings caught in the mayhem that comes with collapsing a Hellmouth. Skara had managed to convince most of the town to get out of dodge - the ones that didn’t take demons and monsters roaming the streets as a cue - but there had been a few that had been stubborn until their death.
Gus stands as he watches the judges make their way along the sandcastles. Most of the competition is literal children, and while Gus would take no pleasure in beating a four-year-old in a sandcastle contest… well, yes. He would probably take pleasure in that.
He turns to comment to Matt about it, but his eyes snag on his boyfriend’s castle. It’s annoyingly good. It’s almost as tall as him, and there are a lot of details that Gus couldn’t imagine how Matt had managed. His boyfriend waggles his eyebrows at the unspoken question and extends a very feline set of claws.
“Cheater,” Gus tells him.
“Oh, please,” Matt says, gesturing to Jerbo’s sandcastle.
“Oh.”
Jerbo’s sandcastle is even taller than Jerbo, and that was hard to do. If he’d thought Matt’s sandcastle had an annoying amount of details to it, Jerbo’s was a masterclass of sandcastles. He can’t see most of Jerbo’s face beneath his sunhat, but he can see the smug grin on his lips.
“Cheater,” Gus tells him.
“Hey,” Jerbo says dismissively, bending so he can wrap an arm around Matt and rest his chin on his shoulder. “If Matty can use his kitty claws, why can’t I use my advantage?” he asks, and with a flick of his fingers, a bright yellow smiley-face flag emerges from the top of the castle.
Matt pushes him off grumpily. “Whatever,” he says loftily. “You should be disqualified.”
“You cheated, too,” Gus reminds him with a smirk.
Matt gasps dramatically and staggers into Gus’s arms. “Gus, how could you say that?”
Gus rolls his eyes, dropping his boyfriend into the sand. “Clearly I’m going to win,” he says, confident. “Cheaters never win.”
It turns out that whoever came up with that phrase was full of shit.
Cheaters do, in fact, win.
Jerbo has the good grace not to be too smug about it.