Work Text:
Business Casual Fridays, (or biz cas fri, as they say around the office), are the highlight of Homestar Runner’s week. He looks forward to the knitted cotton of polo shirts, the smell of coffee beans roasted over an open Keurig, and the age-old conflict between khakis and chinos. But what he looks forward to more than all these things is Strong Bad. And the best part is, he gets to see him every day.
Some people say working with best friends ruins friendships, that it’ll forever tear a hole in the coffee-stained fabric of your relationship. But Homestar thinks those people must not have very good friends.
Or, wait, maybe they say those things about people you’re dating. In which case, it’s true. Him and Marzipan only lasted a day when she was working in Human Resources. And that was just the interview!
But friendships are different. You don’t go home and cuddle the people you’re friends with. Trust him. That was one hard lesson to learn. With friends, you see them and you smile without worrying about whether or not they've found the broken vase swept under the rug yet. But it’s not always easy working with friends, either.
His best friend Pom Pom is the “Big Cheese” of the company. And, sure, that means Homestar has admin privileges and gets invited to all the mid-market conventions, but he still has to work and stuff. Not much time for friends in that. Luckily, socializing is easy when you sit only a few cubicles down from one of your best friends.
Strong Bad doesn’t have admin privileges like Homestar. Pom Pom’s not too fond of him or his unconventional work ethic. (Or perhaps his lack thereof.) So, he doesn’t get as many walk-around-talk-around breaks. Poor guy, Homestar thinks. All cooped up in that cubicle, not talking to anybody...
Marzipan’s always telling him about “charity” and “helping the needy.” And what could be more charitable than friendly work-talk? Strong Bad could use the social skills. He hasn’t quite mastered the “friendly” part yet, but practice makes perfect, right?
Sometimes Homestar will pretend to drop off papers for Strong Bad to look at or sign. They’re mostly reused paper that Homestar doodles ants and ducks on during calls. Strong Bad never looks at any of them, anyway. Other times, he’ll stop by and pretend like he forgot what he was going to say and then just stand there. He must have memorized every comic strip and printed out internet meme pinned to Strong Bad’s wall by now. Oh, that dullard.
Or, sometimes, he’ll pretend to get a drink from the water cooler.
The water cooler bubbles as he holds down the button for cold water. He’s not even thirsty. He doesn’t even have a cup. A puddle of water has been forming under his shoes for the past five minutes and he hasn't even noticed.
The view of the back of Strong Bad’s head is great from the water cooler. He's sitting in his cubicle, head resting on the keyboard. The laces on the back of his head dangle limply over his neck and polo-shirt-clad back. Homestar so badly wants to walk over and play with them. But he figures Strong Bad might not like that. Another hard lesson Homestar’s had to learn.
His screen is on a blue-screen error message—something about fragrance. He doesn't look too busy.
Homestar saunters over to Strong Bad’s desk and Strong Bad must hear the squelching of his shoes because he sighs before Homestar even says anything.
“Hey there, indentured coworker,” Homestar says, smoothly. “Didja get my email?”
Strong Bad lifts his head, just enough to get his mouth past the keyboard. “Which one? You send me like a gajillion emails every freaking second.”
“The one about Fredrickson’s party after work tonight! Everybody’s heading over to his place to watch the new episode of another generic TV show! Hey, I think that’s the name of it! Another Generic TV Show!”
Strong Bad groans. “Homestar, you know I can’t check my email here, man. Besides, that stuffs all branded to twenty-year-old women without boyfriends that’re afraid to die alone and want to live vicariously through the romances they see on TV.”
“Shh!” Homestar hisses through uneven teeth. Strong Bad wipes the spit off his forehead. “No spoilers! I’m not caught up yet!”
“But…" Strong Bad sits up. "You’re going to a watch party of a new episode?”
“Oh, I’m gonna get there an hour early. For the reruns.” He leans in with a smile that could span football fields, or possibly something greater if Homestar could measure in units outside of sports-talk. “Then, you know what I’m gonna do next week?”
“Let me guess. You’re gonna tell me aaaall about—”
“I’m gonna tell you all about it!”
With a loud groan, Strong Bad’s head slams down onto his keyboard. The keys bounce. Clack! “Guess I’ll need to buy some more earplugs, then,” he says. “Or maybe a hammer to bludgeon myself over the head with.”
“Right, right.” Homestar nods with clueless affirmation. “So, you coming or no, bro? Tryna get a headcount.”
Without a second thought, Strong Bad levels him a low, firm, “No.”
“Oh.” He can’t say he’s surprised. That’d be lying, and he’s not a liar. But he is disappointed. “Cool. That's cool. Do you have plans or…” He says, biting back dejection. (Not lying, mind you).
“Eh, I dunno. I was gonna stop by Kung-Fu Dragon and maybe get some takeout. But The Cheat needs a new pair of shoes, and—”
Suddenly, Strong Bad stops short and he sits up. Homestar quirks an eyebrow.
“And,” he repeats, eyes nervously darting around his cubicle. “Aaaaand I’m too busy! With.. plans! Yeah, y’know, stuff like skydiving, bull riding, bullfighting, skydiving while bullfighting while simultaneously riding… it. So, yeah, I’m too busy with my cool-awesome cool things to come to your stupid girl thing.”
“Aw, shucks,” says Homestar, a tad forlorn. “That’s a bummer. Maybe next time!”
“Whatever.” Strong Bad stands up from his chair. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to the bathroom to stare at my phone for an hour and pretend I never have to see you again.”
As Homestar watches him go, (and after being rather rudely shoved out of the way,) the disappointment sits. He already had the whole party planned out. He figured they’d show up together, maybe find a seat on the couch together, share a bowl of popcorn. And everybody’d think, “Wow, Strong Bad and Homestar are such good friends! They must do tons of crazy things together!” Maybe they’d even be jealous. Strong Bad is the office hottie, after all.
Strong Bad slips in a puddle of water on his way to the bathroom.
Homestar doesn't take his usual run home after work—Unlike the rest of tormented office workers, who would want nothing more than to relax at home. Instead, Homestar runs to Fredrickson’s house.
As he runs, he imagines what the party will be like without Strong Bad there. Or, rather, what it would've been like if he were.
If Strong Bad were there, he’d make all the funniest jokes—He usually does during movies and TV shows. Like that one show with the robots and the science. Homestar still remembers how hard he laughed when they watched 7th Heaven together. Chocolate milk came out of his nose, even!
Homestar doesn’t think anybody else from the office could ever make him laugh that hard. Not to be too terribly rude, but the office doesn't have many funny guys. Except Rondleman. That guy's pretty hi-larious. But Strong Bad's way funnier than him. Seriously. It's just too bad he's so shy, always hiding in the bathroom and groaning when other people try to talk to him. If he only had a friend, then maybe he wouldn't be so grumpy.
Somewhere along the way, Homestar had stopped running. Standing alone in the empty field he sees Fredrickson’s house just along the horizon. It’s not too far. It would only take a few minutes for him to get there.
...
On one foot, Homestar turns around and runs to Strong Bad’s house instead. He makes sure to stop by Kung-Fu Dragon on the way.
When he gets to Strong Bad's he’s panting under the weight of six takeout bags. The evening light casts his large and blocky shadow over the pale front door. He leans forward to knock… And knock... And knock, and knock, and knock…
Eventually the door swings open, and Strong Bad answers, this time not wearing a shirt. Homestar's just quick enough to narrowly avoid knocking him in the face. Fast reflexes are something required of a terrific athlete.
“Hi, Strong Bad!" he beams, uncomfortably shuffling under the bags. They rustle and crinkle with similar discomfort. "I’m glad I caught you before you left for your skydiving thing. I thought we could watch the TV show here instead! Just you and me. Y’know since you’re not going to Fredrickson’s and all.”
Strong Bad stares at him.
“Oh, and I got you that Chinese food you wanted.” Homestar lifts the Kung-Fu Dragon bags to his chin with his knee.
Strong Bad’s eyes flick over the bags, and back to Homestar.
Homestar smiles, awkwardly. “Can I come inside now?”
“Um… Sure?”
It’s an effort to get through the doorway. By the time Homestar squeezes through, Strong Bad's already rounding the corner into the hallway that leads to the basement. "Make sure you shut the door behind you," Strong Bad calls out.
Wobbly and unbalanced, Homestar stretches his leg and weakly kicks at the door. It takes a few tries before he finally hears a familiar, Click!, and he races down the house after Strong Bad.
He trails behind Strong Bad down the basement steps. When they get downstairs, Homestar kicks off the shoes of his shoe-shaped feet at the doorway. That’s what you do after a long day at work, he’s seen it in movies. When Homestar sets the bags on the couch he notices crumpled bags of chips littered across the floor.
The TV is on the shopping channel. Strong Bad tells him he must've slept on the remote and accidentally changed the channel from Sliver Bullet Massacre to Shopping with Gram Gram. Homestar can understand that. The same thing happened to him when he was watching Golden Girls and the channel suddenly changed to one of those channels with all the girls in bikinis right as his girlfriend walked in.
They sit down, not together, but on opposite sides of the couch with the food settled between them.
“Okay, so," Homestar says, rummaging through the bags. "I got chow mein, General Tso’s chicken, egg rolls, chicken and broccoli with white rice, some dumplings, sweet and sour chicken, some sugar biscuits…”
“Jeez, why not just take the whole freaking buffet?” Strong Bad snarks.
“I tried that but I couldn't fit it all in my trench coat.”
Strong Bad settles on chow mein to start, and Homestar reaches for the chicken and broccoli. That's really the only thing he got for himself, anyway.
They change the channel from Shopping with Gram Gram to Generic TV Network and they tune in right in the middle of an episode of Another Generic TV Show. In this episode, the main girl wants to ask her crush to the dance, but he’s already got a date with the popular girl!
As expected, Homestar can't keep himself from laughing when the commentary starts. Strong Bad imitates the sound of a car crash when the main character bikes off-screen, and makes her out to be some kind of smelly-weirdo anytime she's around her crush. The calm and reasonable teacher now becomes a brain-eating alien in human skin, and they talk over heartfelt scenes to narrate the conversations of background characters.
Eventually the main character confides in her best friend.
“He can't go out with her! She’s… she’s…”
“His girlfriend?”
“Exactly! It should be me!”
“What kind of message is this teaching the impressionable teenage girls watching this?” Strong Bad jabs his chopsticks into the chow mein. “‘Hey, don't worry if the guy you like is already dating someone. Date him anyway!’”
“I dunno,” Homestar says through a mouthful of chicken. “Maybe it’s one o’ them cautionary tales where the main character doesn't actually win in the end because she did a bad thing. So, it’s like, 'Hey, don't do that bad thing.'”
Strong Bad makes a "Pshh!" sound. “Puh-leez. A show with ratings this high has no choice but to let the main character win. If they don't, they’ll have a freaking mutiny of sixteen to twenty-four-year-old girls on their hands! Trust me, man, you don't wanna mess with that crowd.”
Homestar swallows, then hums with something like understanding.
Later, Homestar points out that the actor playing the main character's best friend keeps making weird faces when she talks. Strong Bad just barely misses it. They wait for the scene to pan back to her and Strong Bad bursts into laughter when she does it again. It's the hardest Homestar's heard him laugh all night, and Homestar gets a warm, fluttery feeling in his gut.
“Oh man," Strong Bad says after his laughter finally dies down. "We are so keeping count of all the weird faces she makes from now on.”
Homestar makes a mental note. Weird Face Count: 4
The next episode is another rerun. The main character gets put in a group project with her crush. That's it. Peak television, right? We pay money for this!
When Strong Bad's finished with the chow mein, he chucks the empty carton at the lightswitch and the lights go out. Homestar's amazed by this feat clearly mastered over years of experience. Strong Bad remains humble, even while keeping that smug smirk he gets when he knows he's awesome. He's so, so awesome. He tells Homestar to grab him the sweet and sour chicken.
So he does. Homestar reaches into one of the plastic bags and he notices a few fortune cookies huddled together at the bottom of the bag like lost children. Sympathetic, Homestar picks one up and cracks it open.
The fortune cookie reads: “Will you go out with me?” With two checkboxes: yes and no. Homestar's eyebrows knit, bemused until an idea hatches in his mind. Straining back a giggle, he slips the fortune in with the chicken and passes it to Strong Bad.
He's barely holding back his excitement when Strong Bad opens the carton and he tilts his head. He fishes out the slimy piece of paper and holds it in his hand. Homestar can tell when he reads it because he looks up at Homestar, glowering. Homestar's not even trying to hide his giggle anymore.
Strong Bad crumples up the fortune and tosses it into Homestar's face. It falls to the ground with a Plbbht!
It's around when the main character gets a new boyfriend when Homestar realizes he hasn't been paying attention. The harder he tries, the more his eyes want to drift back to Strong Bad. They're closing in on the last few episodes before the new episode starts, and somewhere along the way, Strong Bad had gotten invested. Maybe it was when the main character's best friend betrayed her, or maybe when she finally beat the popular girl for Prom Queen. It's hard to pinpoint.
Strong Bad's on the edge of his seat, hunched over a carton of General Tso's chicken and eyes glued to the TV screen. The glow from the TV reflects off his eyes in a way that makes them glimmer. Homestar's always sort of thought his eyes look like lollipops after you suck on them and they get that shiny look to them. It's nice. He gets that feeling in his gut again, and he thinks maybe he's just hungry, still.
“Hey, Strong Bad I—”
“Shh, shut up."
Ahead of them, the main character and her crush are talking about something Homestar clearly hasn't been paying enough attention to to understand. They're sitting close to one another in an open library. Noses almost touching, they get closer... A little closer... Then the phone rings and her crush is drawn away. Strong Bad groans and seeps into the couch when it cuts to a commercial.
"Dargh, come on!" he whines. His arms fly into the air. "He was right there! Just move your head like three inches! He obviously likes you! Just..." Another groan and he throws his gloves over his face. Homestar can't help but smile.
Then Strong Bad looks up, shiny green-apple-flavored eyes looking right at him. Homestar shivers.
“Okay, what?”
Homestar blinks. “What?”
“You were gonna say sumthin'?”
Homestar thinks for a second, pouting his lip. “Hmm, no, I think I’d remember something like that.”
Strong Bad stares at him. A grunt. "Never mind."
"Hey," Homestar says, another thought occurring to him in his venture to remember what he was about to say. "Don't you have to leave soon for your skydive-bullfight-riding-thing?”
Strong Bad pauses, and for a second Homestar thinks he must not remember. Another moment later Strong Bad mumbles, "Oh," and looks down into the carton of chicken. “No, I, uh, moved it to next week.”
"Did you get The Cheat his shoes? He's gotta have his shoes."
Strong Bad spares him a glance. "Um, yeah. I did. He does."
Homestar nods. "Gotta have shoes."
Strong Bad falls asleep before they make it to the premiere of the new episode. Homestar figures he won't be too bummed out to have missed the ending where the main character and her crush kiss. But he’ll make sure to tell him all about it next week at work, anyway.
That is unless someone from Fredrickson's party doesn't tell him first. But he wouldn't count on it. He's not too sure, but he doesn't think anybody else in the office likes Strong Bad very much. When Marzipan was still working in HR, she'd tell him about all of the complaints she'd get about Strong Bad alone. From stolen lunches to stapled butts, it was clear there was some animosity there. But Homestar thinks if they just tried to get to know him, they'd see that Strong Bad’s not a bad guy.
Homestar glances over at Strong Bad.
He's snoring beside him, arm slung over his chest and drool leaking from his mouth. His usually clenched fist hangs limply over the edge of the couch.
Strong Bad’s not a bad guy.
There's a different show playing now, something about talking dead people. He gets through the first few minutes before switching the channel back to the shopping grandmas. Right as he's about to leave, he steps in something slimy enough to hear. He lifts his leg and turns his head. Stuck to the bottom of his foot is the sweet-n-sour-slick fortune from earlier. He peels it off of him and lets it sit in his nonexistent palm for a moment.
It's sticky. He slips it into his pocket.
When he gets upstairs, he puts the Chinese leftovers in the fridge. He tries to write Strong Bad’s name on them so his brothers won't get to it first. But he writes, “Stomg Bab,” with a heart next to it instead. As far as expectations go for Homestar Runner, it’s close enough.
That following Monday, Homestar tells Strong Bad he counted twenty-three weird faces.