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“Say, sports, do you have a cigarette on you by chance?”
One could as well ask a boar if he shits in the forest; to both questions the answer was yes, obviously. Jack would have an easier time listing what substance he didn’t have on him, what, after the last fifteen stops at the shadiest gas stations known to man and bear alike - a good chunk of them not even actual gas stations, merely fronts for drug rings. Very bad fronts, at that, sometimes consisting only from a dirty shower curtain thrown over the backroom doors. Though between the two of them Dave was the licensed and awarded crime-connoisseur, Jack found them almost…Embarrassing. Either a toddler unaware of what meth even was would be able to tell - that, or his standards were too high and he was expecting too much.
Anyways, cigarettes. With his eyes still on the empty road and one hand on the wheel, he reached into the door pocket, from within manifesting a pack of cigarettes that had seen better days - specifically, days before it happened to fall in Jack’s hands. Without saying a word, he threw the pack to Dave, who proceeded to help himself to one of the cigarettes just out of his field of vision, a warm light briefly lightning up the car as he momentarily struggled to light it - since most things the world produced were not designed with Dave’s spindly proportions in mind, lighters included. Eventually though, he did it and both the car and Jack’s lungs were filled with—
Hold on just one moment.
“I thought you didn’t have lungs,” Jack pointed out, having remembered the minor, inconsequential detail of Dave’s anatomy - that being the lack of most of his organs. “What’s the point of smoking, then?”
“I still got a cavity where they would’a been with some bits of my trachea. That’s enough for me,” he gleefully explained, taking a generous drag of the cigarette whilst he paused. “Phoney wishes he was as low maintenance as me, sportsy.”
“He sure does,” Jack tapped his fingers on the wheel - briefly glancing at his fingernails, in dire need of another coat of polish to at least make them look like they have a fungal infection and aren’t rotting - and sighed, having smelled another depth of stink to the smoke. “You could use some extra maintenance, though. I wouldn’t be surprised if you had a scuttler nest in there.”
“You’d know if that was the case, old sport. Smoked scuttler smells fuckin’ delicious!” Dave grinned, baring his yellowed teeth and dehydrated gums to the world, currently consisting only of Jack unfortunately. Then, he too remembered a minor aspect of his partner’s anatomy. “…Oh. Shit, my bad.”
Right. With most of his nose having rotted off and leaving only two nostril holes, his sense of smell wasn’t as great as it used to be - except when it came to the dreadful matter of the stink in the mascot suits and Dave. Why smell flowers and freshly made coffee when you could instead smell a zombie running towards you from across a pizzeria? Survival was his best guess…Though usually by the time he could smell Dave, it was much too late to do anything with that information besides preparing for the inevitable. Jack shrugged off Dave’s apology as he didn’t really mind all that much, the lack of a nose being the least of his anatomy related issue.
“…What does a smoked scuttler even smell like?”
“Bacony, but with a hint of fishiness. It varies from location to location. Florida scuttlers smell like kindergarten foam.”
“I didn’t know there was a Freddy’s location in Florida.”
“No, but they do have a restaurant built around 3D printers, and for their mascots they got a fuckin’ skunk and a pair of hamsters.” Dave explained. “They want to be Fazbenders so bad they even gave the hamsters tits, to try and imitate the plastic chicken. I hate the thing, but you gotta respect the chicken’s impact. So! Naturally, I fed them each a lit firecracker when no one was watching.”
Huh. Well, wasn’t that something he would have wanted to witness for himself.
“It’s funny what comes naturally to you and what doesn’t, Dave.” the corner of Jack’s lips slightly twitched upwards for a moment, just long enough for Dave to see in the corner of his vision. “Not a moment of boredom with you around.”
“What can I say, sports? Being entertaining is my second best quality.”
“…Do I want to know what’s the first one?”
He learned regardless, and truth be told, upon asking himself what else he could have expected he found himself lacking a logical answer to his very own question. Once again resigned to his fate that he had so carefully chosen, his reply to Dave’s explanation consisted of a long, low sigh - followed by raising his hand from the wheel, presenting his middle and index fingers to the man in a wordless request and as anticipated, Dave understood. He too didn’t say a word as he pulled his cigarette away from his lips and placed it in between Jack’s fingers, receiving an acknowledging nod in turn. Upon placing the filter to his own lips, he found that Dave left a bit of saliva on it. Gross.
He took a long drag regardless and gave the cigarette back to Dave, the filter slightly damper than when he first received it. The purple man noticed, of course - but being momentarily content with the silence, he said nothing and merely enjoyed the cigarette to the best of his abilities (capabilities, more like it, considering the lack of lungs). But because he was Dave, as soon as the butt was all that remained, instead of scrounging up another cigarette he scrounged up another topic for discussion.
“So, sportsy, do you have any individual plans for Vegas? Aside from hookers and coke, that is.”
Gambling, Jack thought to answer, but that would have been too obvious, so he considered some more - and lo and behold, an answer came to mind. A brilliant one at that, in his humble opinion, the city of sin being the best possible place to execute it. Sure, while it wasn’t as random as what Dave usually came up with (and frankly, he doubted he was even physically capable of matching his creativity), but it still was something he couldn’t do while at Fazbender’s, Fredbears and so on.
“I’m going to get blackout drunk and hit up a gay bar to make up for some lost time,” Jack said casually, once again drumming his fingers on the wheel as he made a turn, avoiding a pile of roadkill consisting mostly of an ostrich with other woodland creatures mashed in. “Who knows, maybe I can still catch AIDS or something.”To that Dave slapped his thigh as amusement briefly lit up his dry, yellowed eyes ; a nice alternative to glowing with blood lust or sparking with creativity like a cut telephone wire.
“Ha, collecting diseases, good one! Done that too, back in 1984. Turns out, having your interiors reduced to just a very long tube is a pretty good vaccine for tuberculosis or liver failure!” Dave laughed, though it more sounded like something between a very long sneeze and a gargle of a dying computer fan. “Any other STDs you plan on catching?”
“None.” the orange man answered plainly, making another turn as this time he dodged a hole in the road, one almost large and deep to rival a Polish road. Not that he had ever left America, of course - but unfortunate, ignorant immigrants and their tales tended to wind up at Fazbender’s every now and then. “I’m just gonna get plowed into next month.”
Dave blinked a few times, though it looked more like someone manually pulled his eyelids up and down with tongs - and if his assumptions were correct, it was because Dave simply didn’t need to blink anymore and only did it every now and the out of habit. Typical Dave weirdness, Jack supposed - a trait almost endearing.
“…As a joke, right?”
That, however, was not endearing ; the genuine confusion, if not downright concern, in Dave’s usually jolly voice. Great, he probably just walked in on another trapdoor that led even deeper into the maze of Dave’s…Eccentrics.
“No, not as a joke, Dave.” he calmly answered.
The silence that fell upon the car was anything but comfortable. Worse, it lingered and grew, like an unwanted toddler you forgot to put up for adoption ; taking even more and more space, until the now-teenager sized silence was too heavy to bear for Dave, who had likely just broken his record for the longest amount of time he didn’t say anything.
“…Damn, I had no idea you were yes homo.”
…Wow. That was… Jack didn’t know whether he should be offended or something.
“Because I’m not, Dave. I like women as well, it’s just that—” he paused his explanation, the absurdity of Dave’s response dawning upon him like a mallet falling from the sky. Bewildered, he turned his face away from the road and towards the man-“Wait, what do you mean you had no idea?! Then what the hell was all that about?”
“What are you talking about, sportsy?” Dave appeared just as bewildered, much to Jack’s irritation, who already regretted even saying anything instead of pretending not to have any plans of his own. Not like it would have been the first time he’d be lying to Dave anyway.
“Telling me you love me whenever possible, watching me sleep, the shoulder thing—”
“What shoulder thing?”
“The one you’re doing right now, Dave!”
Indeed, he did throw his long-ass arm around Jack’s shoulders in a half embrace not that long ago. He remembered briefly scoffing at it as his nose was momentarily hit with the stank of Dave’s sweaty dead armpits, but otherwise, he made no attempts to pull the arm off and away. After all, it was one of the few displays of affection from Dave that he didn’t mind all that much, armpit stank aside.
“What man hadn’t thrown his arm over his buddy’s shoulder at least once?” Dave retorted, not moving his arm an inch, of course, since by moving it away he’d just prove Jack’s point and admit to being guilty of the non-existent crime of being a good pal. Jack, however, was having none of it.
“You literally blew me kisses whenever we parted ways!”
“So? I said no homo.”
“You referred going to Vegas as a honeymoon, and you told me to call you Big Dick Davey, for fucks sake! None of those followed by a no homo. What the hell, Dave?? I thought this whole thing was your weird way of hitting on me or something, and now you’re telling me you had no idea I was flexible?”
“Again, sportsy, I thought it was a joke!”
Well. Clearly this was going nowhere reasonable or logical. Just like trying to fix the Trashpile, the more he tried to detangle the wires of Dave’s thought processes to try and put them back together into some sort of cohesive pile, not only did he make the matters worse, but his hands would end up greasy and filthy from oil, blood and buffalo wing sauce. He let out another sigh, focusing his eyes back on the road least he’d drive into a truck and force them to steal yet another car from a gas station miles away. Still, the subject at hand was far, far from being dealt with as the teenager shaped silence had now grown into an equally unwanted adult and it was high time to kick it out onto the curb.
“Man. If this is your way of celebrating just a friendship then I don’t want to know what your take on something more serious looks like.” Jack summed up in exasperation. Hopefully, that was the end of it, and they would spend the rest of their drive to Vegas either not talking at all or discussing less personal subjects. Unfortunately for him, however, Dave was Dave.
“Just a friendship? You wound me, old sport! Deeply so! Why, I was goin’ to modify one of them robots to blow out’cha back if you decided to leave me out in the cold, just so you know,” he said while crossing his arms, either looking out the window to marvel at the landscapes that consisted largely of nothing but grass and more grass, or just looking at Jack’s reflection in the window. Which one was it? Good question, one that Jack couldn’t be bothered to try and answer after having an anvil of a reveal dropped on him from the sky, his jaw having nearly fallen off from its hinges, eyes wide open in shock. He might have as well been actually electrocuted there, all things considered. Who knows, maybe that would have been the preferable result to learning that. He also almost drove into a road sign.
“…WHAT?!” he shouted, once the imagery of the plan B settled into his brain, uninvited (though whether it was unwanted, that was a discussion for another time as it depended largely on which animal robot was it) “Dave, are you even hearing yourself?”
“Most of the time, yes. I know I can hear myself right now, sports.”
“…Jesus fucking Christ, I…” the orange man huffed out, as he was this close to just slamming his head into the car horn. “Just. Tell me what even are we in your head. This is too confusing even for me.”
“We’re family, old sport. What more is to be said? That’s all that matters in the end, no?” Dave shrugged, now opting to rest his pointy chin in his palm as he still faced away from Jack, briefly falling silent as he reconsidered the conversation once again. Keyword, briefly. In no time, he looked back at Jack, appearing almost offended. “…Besides, if you thought this was an actual honeymoon, why would you go and pay for man-hookers?”
Jack was about five seconds away from having a stroke by that point.
“Weren’t you the one who suggested hookers from day one??” he asked, shortly after taking another sharp turn. Another pothole, this time filled with some sort of liquid. It hadn’t rained for well over a week now, so it couldn’t be a rainwater puddle. Had their car been an open roof one, Dave would have probably gone flying off to Africa by then, only to return after winter time. " How is that any different???”
“We were supposed to share those hookers, sportsy!” Dave said, readjusting himself in his seat after the turn to avoid being folded like a chair the next time Jack forgot to watch the road. Thankfully, he was too offended by Jack’s answers this far to criticize his driving. “I would never leave out my favorite orange! You still haven’t answered the question, so you better hop to before I start unscrewing the car right then and there, old sport.”Indeed, when Jack glanced at Dave’s hands, one of them was already holding a screwdriver ; to the average eye, not threatening in the slightest. To Jack, or anyone else aware of Dave’s mechanical genius, it was worse than him holding a gun. Horrifying, how easily this man without a formal education could reduce anything with screws back to it’s original components in a matter of minutes - and since Jack actually really liked driving in a fully intact car, he let out another sigh before giving Dave his answer.
“It’s because I wasn’t going to put your stale, dried out eggplant dick in any of my poor holes. There, that’s the reason. I’m not even sure how you could even get it up since you don’t have a heart or a blood flow.”
“You’re one to talk, orangeade!”
“Hey now, I’m soulless, not bloodless. This meat sack is perfectly functional, peeing blood and coughing up metal aside,” Jack sneered, rolling his eyes at the remark. As much as he would have preferred not to continue this discussion, he would not let this vessel get casually insulted like that, and especially not by Dave, of all people. His meat sack sucked.
“Oh?” Dave raised an eyebrow to that. “And how are you going to prove it?”
His hands clenched a bit on the wheel as he felt his face heat up ever so faintly.
“Dave.” he said. “Either stop giving mixed signals or stop giving signals at all. This is almost as bad as trying to have a conversation with Matt.”
“Okay, okay, I was just askin’!” Dave huffed petulantly, further offended. “No need to compare me to Matt, man! Not cool!”
And that was the end of it, for the next hour or two the silence became once more a comfortable one, akin to a sleeping dog as opposed to an unwanted child. The low buzzing of the engine intertwined with the whirring of the wheels against the asphalt, cool air of a summer night, music quietly playing from the old radio ; all of it contributed to creating an atmosphere that could be called peaceful, one that Jack hadn’t experienced in a long, long time. As he found himself sitting in the pilot seat with his head pressed to the window, he couldn’t help himself but to reminisce for a bit - even though he didn’t consider himself a particularly sentimental man.
He thought of his parents’ car ; of how they’d take him to get chores done after picking him up from school, so he’d sit in the back, usually scribbling something in a notebook, bothering Peter if he didn’t have any activities at school and thus was picked up as well or later on tending to his infant sister. Occasionally, his father would use the opportunity to get him small gifts (toys early on, clothes or snacks later) and his mother would convince her husband to drive over to a restaurant, where Jack would inevitably stuff his face with fast food until his stomach hurt. After that, they would drive home, the sky already dark, yellowed street lamps being the only source of light - to which Jack would usually fall asleep, waking up only as the car stopped in front of their home. Why, just now he felt like he was about to doze off in that way. When was the last time he felt this close to being content? He couldn’t remember.
“Say, old sport, if you don’t mind me askin’…”
Never mind, what was about that dozing off just now? Lazily and groggily he opened one eye and looked at Dave, who appeared to be physically strained by the impossible chore of having to look at the road instead of Jack, as his eyesight wasn’t good enough to allow watching the road from his peripherals. He hated not having people within his line of sight, Jack especially.
“…What did you mean by making up for lost time, exactly? Were you in jail, a Mormon or somethin’?” he elaborated,
Jack began internally debating whether or not he should answer that question - as it was directly related to things he wanted to keep hidden from him, as he had no way of predicting what aubergine man would do if presented with the truth, for it’s face was anything but pretty. Then again, not answering him wasn’t a good idea either - especially now after Dave was so kind as to further enlighten him of the depths of his insanity and how he would have responded to being left out in the cold. Jack didn’t want to share his secrets, but you know what he didn’t want even more? Waking up to a robot on the other end of his bed, clad in latex with a whip in one hand and a taser in the other ; the solution to that dilemma practically circled in bright green highlighter, pointed at with arrows drawn with a red crayon.
“…Well, as it happens, my parents passed away when I was rather young,”Jack eventually began after considering his words very, very carefully. “Early high school. I had to drop out and work two jobs to support myself, so while most people my age were figuring their shit out, going to parties, swapping spit and getting pregnant, I was working from morning to midnight. I didn't have time for that kind of stuff.” That was the truth. Not mentioning where exactly he worked at night wasn’t a lie, and even if it was…Welp, happens. Sometimes youi gotta lie a little. He tapped some more, this time at the window, as he recalled those days : living off of cigarettes and raw caffeine only, barely recognizing himself in the mirror sometimes as the circles around his eyes grew and grew. " By the time I was twenty I looked as if someone took Caillou, stretched him upwards and stamped dark eyebags on him. Thank God I grew a stache, I would have killed myself if I had to spend the rest of my life looking like a tired, wrinkly baby.”
“…Old sport…”
Dave almost looked…Moved by the story, as if he hadn’t heard, experienced or done far worse. Surely, a half assed retelling of how a teenager fought against his sleep deprivation not to land on the street wasn’t something that shocking. “…I had no idea you had a mustache!” he gasped in shock. “Or that you were bald!”
…You know what? This was actually preferable to having the eggplant man pitying him, especially considering that it was technically his and Henry’s fault that he ended up losing the house he worked so hard to keep, along with…
Everything else.
So, to not dwell on it any further, Jack chuckled and pat at his head, going along with the change of subject - and immediately regretted it afterwards. Man, did his scalp feel gross.
“I’m still bald, technically. I just shaved the stache off and then glued bits of it to my head, since I look terrible in wigs,” he explained. “Every now and then I shave some hair off my legs and arms to add onto it, so it doesn’t look like a hairdresser sneezed on me.”
As soon as Jack uttered those very words, Dave almost exploded with laughter - nearly driving them both into a ditch in the process, much to Jack’s displeasure as he was further shaken out of the almost blissful state of comfort when the back of his head was knocked into the window. Ow, something definitely cracked. Again.
“Ow, what the fuck Dave! Watch the fucking road, you’ll have time to laugh yourself pissing later!” He hissed, eyes narrowed as he rubbed at the back of his head - thankfully, it wasn’t the glue that cracked. At least there was that.
“Okay, okay, fine. I’m sorry, I couldn’t help myself - no one else I knew would have thought of using their own body hair as a DIY hair transplant. You’re a crazy motherfucker, old sport.” Dave sighed, utterly delighted…as much as someone without lungs could sigh, and the sound that result from the attempt was anything but nice to hear, like a balloon being deflated on a low pitch. “I love that about you, man.”
And that was the end of it. Should have been, at least - but, what do you know…
“I’ll make fuckin’ sure this trip will be enough to compensate for your next life, too, old sport. Just you wait!”
Aaaand they just ran something over, leading Jack to wonder if they would even make it to Vegas before the feds found them, as they would only need to follow a trail of roadkill, tire marks and who knows what else.
“…I sure hope it is enough, Dave. I sure hope so.”