some notes, first:
my condolences to anyone still waiting on hlvrsp but this is the last thing you're gonna see outta this account for a while. not to be grim but gang, I am only mostly in a place to continue LIVING. writing is taking not so much "the backseat" but "the trunk" and I will see you, space cowboys 1, cowboys 2, c
I have nothing to say for myself, except for all the stuff I have to say for myself, like how this started as "fortnite dilf au" and, as you'll be familiar with if you've read anything else I've ever fucking written, Then I Started Thinking About Everybody Else And That's Where Shit Went Sideways. I have never played Fortnite in my life. also I inexplicably set this in the middle of 2020, so while the basic premise of this fic was "benrey & josh bond over fortnite" the background extended edition premise quickly became "darnold loses his job and ends up dragged into leverage-style crime, tommy has been doing organized crime his whole fucking life with complicated feelings about it, gordon figures he has nothing more to lose (after custody lol) and says sure, fuck it, let's rob a bank for the bail funds, and bubby & coomer are living their best lives" bc I was thinking about all the BLM protests that also happened in 2020 and the subsequent ACAB stream. speaking of fundraising, check out the navajo water project and CSVANW. from the river to the sea.
and here's the actual fic (so far)
Forzen is banned forever because he says mean things and also French, and is wrong about so much. One of the things he's wrong about is "Benrey is stupid." Benrey's not stupid. Benrey knows- they know so much about. Stuff. And things. All the time, forever, all of it, thank you? Omniscient motherfucker unlimited? Thank you? So they know, as a person who's met other people, (and knows everything) that fruitsaladcowboy isn't sixteen. They know that. And fruitsaladcowboy probably knows that. But fruitsaladcowboy doesn't know that they know that, and Benrey's not a fucking narc. Snitches get stitches and the last time Benrey got stitches, their body ate all the thread before the doctor told them to come back and get it taken out, and it was a whole thing, and Darnold threw up about it even though they weren't even his stitches.
"Hey," says Benrey, "you ever got stitches?"
Cowboy, who's probably- Benrey doesn't know, like, seven? - says, "I'm not a fucking narc!"
"Hell yeah," says Benrey. Cowboy already knew swears before they started playing together with VC on, soooo don't talk to them about it. Life's- life's tough, out on the range. The wild wild west. The- in, uh, in Massive Two Sets. Which Benrey knows is where Cowboy lives because the little man is definitely a snitch, but only for himself, and not anymore. Probably. Benrey told him not to tell other people where he lived. It's Benrey's information now. Proprietary. "Check your six?" Cowboy starts building a barricade in the way, but the same pay-to-win fucker who's been paying to win all of their matches takes him out before he can finish it. Benrey doesn't swear because he's setting a good example.
Cowboy shrieks, "You fuckhead I'm gonna throw you off a boat like a big ugly anchor made of rusty nails and you're gonna droooowwwn!" Damn, babyman's got breath control for days. Voice like a- like a lighthouse. Or a foghorn. Benrey can't even say more than three words in a row without needing to think about it or breathe or something. They can definitely shoot the rusty nail anchor in the head, though, so they do that before dropping Slurp Juice on their buddy. Baby buddy. Bubdy. Babby? "Oh boy!" Cowboy says. "Time to drink my juice! Slurp! Slurp! Slurp!"
Benrey's not stupid, but their memory is kinda shit, so they're not super sure on when this started being a thing that they did. Cowboy's not super duper sucks at this game, but he's also not. Good. 'Cause of, look, Benrey's not a pro gamer, okay? That's Darnold. Darnold could probably whoop both of their asses at once if he ever got off of Valve's hat lootbox deadservers, but Benrey could still win against Cowboy pretty much every time if they wanted, so. Cowboy's not great at games, is the point. He's got little hands. Benrey's not gonna hold that against him. At some point, though, Benrey heard this baby swearing at everybody and being mean and loud and they thought wow that's pretty shit because they used to be like that, (and so did Forzen, except they got better and he got worse (French) so they blocked Forzen) so Benrey just told the baby to start being nice. Not hard. Just stop killing people and stealing? C'mon? And it wasn't hard for Cowboy at all because as soon as Benrey started talking to him like he was a person instead of a shitbaby, (even though he was kinda being a shitbaby) Cowboy told them about his mom and his grandma and grandpa and his dad and his uncle John and his uncle Wyatt who vanished into orbit ("I wanna vanish into Orbit," Benrey said, thinking about spearmint and punching the living shit. "No, it's 'cause he's a freak and it's good that he's in space forever!" Cowboy corrected patiently from behind cover as Benrey grabbed all of dead shit's stuff) and how he used to live in Seattle but then his dad graduated so now he lives in Massachusetts but not Boston because fuck Boston ("Yo, what? They got Dunkinsed!" Benrey argued, since Tommy loved it and Tommy was smart as hell and right about most things. "Al Pacino's ad for them wasn't real," Cowboy rebutted frame-perfectly, shattering Benrey's Bro Code arguments like a beautiful dropped chandelier, "it was in the same movie with the chocolate bird and Adam Sandler!") and how come Benrey always missed when they tried to shoot him, they should come over to his house because his controllers were better than theirs, his address was 123 and Benrey started singing - no tune no words just Loud - to drown him out because fuckin' stranger danger, bro, c'mon.
Benrey could still be dangerous, but they're not a stranger anymore because they started being one of Cowboy's best friends at some point. Benrey doesn't know when the point was.
Benrey's pretty sure kids are still doing school, so they look up when schools end and then wait like an hourish after that before booting up Fortnite. Most of the time, Cowboy sends them invites. Sometimes, Benrey plays solo. Mostly though, if Cowboy's not there, they find one of Darnold's shitty deadservers and blow it up to fuck until Darnold logs on and starts trying to kill them, and then they both talk about work- Darnold can't do any work from home, and his lab is being very cautious which is good, but it means he's basically fired which is bad; Benrey's raking in more Minecraft server host cash than ever, and Darnold gets so fuckin' weird about it when they offer to share, even though it's not like ol' Benny Boy's paying rent- until Darnold has to feed himself or his cat.
Benrey doesn't know when they started making all these friends. Good friends, too. They've known Darnold since high school, and they met Tommy when he broke their hand in a door, and some of their old PSN buddies are still around somewhere... but Cowboy's different. Cowboy's a kid.
Benrey hasn't gotten to talk to kids since the museum they used to work at, before they helped a robbery happen on accident and got their hand broken and almost got sued to death. The kids were the best part of the museum. Adults went in and went ohhhh what does this meannnuh whuh ugghhh haha was this artist on DRUGS oaghhgghghhh and tried to touch shit and ruin it with all their nasty fuckin' finger oils. Kids tried to touch stuff, but kids usually don't know better, and they try to touch everything to understand it, anyway. Benrey got to tell 'em that there was other art down the stairs that wouldn't get hurt if they touched it, and it wasn't art for babies, either. It was real, important art that the grown-ups could touch too, and kids always went wild for that shit in a way only old lesbians and that one group of really high business dudes could ever match. Buncha people listened and looked at the paintings or sculptures or whatever was in the room Benrey was guarding, but the kids thought it was cool as shit, and they'd make sure Benrey knew why it was cool as shit, too. One time some little girl in a Pikachu onesie explained Rothko to them until they had to go back to their post. They don't remember anything about Rothko, but they remember how big her smile was. Any redditor talking about too-wide smiles or whatever the shit hasn't even let a baby infodump at them. Losers.
Cowboy says slurp until he's done healing, and Benrey sings until they run out of healing to give, which is about when some gingerbread man runs up on them. Cowboy shrieks as he shoots, which is weird for an outlaw, but so is dying so it balances out. Benrey "killsteals" which is a fancy word for "helps" and then Cowboy runs through all the drops so they're Just For Him. Benrey says, "Nice."
Cowboy says, "Lemme finish this match!" It's so awesome how he does that really loud, right into the mic that's still on his face even though he's yelling across the house at his dad.
Benrey says, "Tell your dad he's smart and cool."
"No, shut up. I'll do it in a minute, we're almost winning! There's only twenty-six people left!"
"Tell your dad heeeee's your best friend and you love him."
"Shut up, Benny! No- he didn't invite me, he was already online when I got home!"
"Tell your dad I'm a great influence and a cool dude and I let you drink beer so I'm better than him." Cowboy keeps arguing with his dad about not doing homework, and Benrey helps by dropping all of their shit and dancing around like a useless bot. The circle's closing, and there are only so many places to be, so when somebody else sees them- AFK and Awesome Fucking Kmoves, respectively- there's almost immediately a JFK incident and now Cowboy has to go do his homework. "Tell your dad I said hi," Benrey adds helpfully, and then disconnects right as Cowboy starts calling them names.
Benrey doesn't know anything about Cowboy's dad, except that he makes Cowboy do his homework and he used to live in Seattle and that he hates Boston. That's more than Cowboy's dad knows about them, though, because Cowboy unmutes to say, "Dad says you're never gonna pass high school if you keep playing Fortnite with mi- other high schoolers instead of paying attention in class." Benrey's got a running translation in their brain all the time, and they're pretty sure that means Cowman thinks you're a shitty teenager only barely older than his shitty baby.
Benrey's mouth bypasses their brain to say, "You don't need school to get a job." You don't need school to get a job, Benrey's brain adds when it hears the words that they just said. Which, yeah, uh, cool, okay, but that's not something that a good influence says? To a weird little human? And Benrey needs to be a good influence, since Cowboy's probably the only weird little human who still talks to them. Not like they're going back to a museum while they live with Tommy. Or while nobody's going to museums. Or while they don't have a job at a museum. They're pretty sure they graduated high school to get it, but not completely sure. If they ever got that degree, it's with the copy of Portal 2 they sent to Darnold, and they don't remember where he lives now. LA? Silicon Valley? Somewhere bad where Benrey didn't wanna follow, so they just stayed in their super cool hometown and got a job in the super cool museum two hours away and told people to quit touching the art. They got selfies taken with them sometimes when they were in a weird sculpture room and people didn't realize they weren't a weird sculpture. Nobody needs a degree to get mistaken for a weird sculpture.
"I know! I'm gonna be an astronaut, but not like Uncle Wyatt!"
The first astronauts had to be smart because they only had 4GB RAM to back them up. But also RAM doesn't mean much now because NASA's full of bloatware and viruses leaking government secrets and like, AAA games with fully modeled pores. Whatever a pore is. Benrey's pretty sure those are just made up to sell more GPU. "You need school to get that job," they get their mouth to say helpfully. Good influence again.
"How do you know?" Cowboy challenges.
"I'm from," Benrey says, "rockets." Benrey isn't from rockets, but Cowboy doesn't need to know that. Cowboy also doesn't need to know that Benrey's getting their ass danced on by somebody named after a fruit streamer, so instead of saying anything about getting danced on by eggplantserma, they ask, "What grade do you think I'm in?"
Cowboy does his best impression of a pug with breathing problems and three-fourths of a pound of mucus in its nose (also known as Any Pug) which is what it sounds like when he laughs, and says, "I know you're not a high-schooler, Benny." Sick. They figured this kid was smart. Sometimes they'd ask other kids and get assigned Eleven Year Old At Job, but Cowboy gets another point in Benrey's book. It's an extra cool point, too, with um. They're putting in scratch-n-sniff stickers. In the book. "You're like, fifty," Cowboy adds like it's obvious.
Benrey stands up out of the couch and turns off their fucking PlayStation.
Benrey teams fortresses and mines craft for the next three days without booting that shit up once. Fuckin... fifty. Bullshit. Benrey's not gonna make it to fifty. Benrey barely made it to sixteen; there's no fucking way they'll be able to hold on for another doubling. They're gonna wake up on their fortieth birthday, take a big sip of stalewater from the cup on the bedroom floor right next to their bed, and then they'll peacefully disintegrate into a billion pieces of ash and bone dust. And Tommy will vaccuum them up and shake that shit into the stupid potted plants downstairs that the landlord keeps trying to grow. And then Benrey will be a bunch of cool dandelions strangling the fuckin... exotic rose bush or whatever he's doing this week.
Fifty. Man, fuck kids. Benrey's glad they can't work at a museum ever again.
The next time Cowboy's dad asks so politely about do your math homework, kid, Christ, Benrey helps. "Yeah, I changed my mind. Changed m, um, you have to. I'm gonna need you to put your dad on the phone? Hand him over? Please?"
"You're not allowed to talk to my dad!"
"I don't- I don't think you can, I don't think you're qualified. To say that, to me. I think you-"
"Okay, Boomer."
"I'M THIRTY-TWO."
"And you're playing Fortnite? That's cringe!" Cowdad says something. "...Benny?" Cowdad says something a little louder but still super muffled. "Bennnnyyyy! Benny, I can hear your breathing! You're breathing loud as fuck and it- WHY WOULD YOU SHOOT ME! WHY WOULD YOU SHOOT ME WITH A GUN? A GUN! I'M JUST A BABY! I'M A BABY BOY!" So Cowboy has to go do his homework and Benrey gets like, fifth place overall. Which is a win-win, except for Cowboy, who loses. Cowboy doesn't count. If he did, he wouldn't hate math homework so much, probably.
(Benrey's not sure what that noise at the end of their call, was. It didn't sound like his usual laughs, but it's not like- Benrey's funny in person, sometimes, but over call? Nah. It was far away, too. Cowdad must've said something. Probably oh thanks Benny you're a cooler dad than me and a great influence, not that Benrey wants to be Cowboy's dad, ew, Benrey's not. Right. At that. They're more like. They're, uh, they just kinda showed up and made everything sooo much better and cooler and stuck around because- of reasons. So they're the lice. Of. Cowlice.)
(Can cows get lice?)
(Tommy would know, but Tommy doesn't like that Benrey has so many friends online, so. Benrey's not gonna ask. Also, Tommy's arguing with his dad again, and Benrey needs to be taken care of and is a potential witness and is complicit in this now, are you happy, and stuff. They're lice to Tommy and his dad, too, but in a less fun way because Tommy knows too much about why lice are useful and why it's a good and helpful and important thing that Benrey's actually supposed to be here, legally. And Tommy's dad has one of those screaming combs.
Benrey hopes cows can get lice.)
Tommy comes home in the middle of a match that Cowboy's actually doing pretty good in, so Benrey doesn't feel bad for going, "Wanna see something cool," and walking right into the nearest line of fire so they can yank off their headset and go catch their genius idiot friend before he hits the floor. Faintly, Cowboy is making New Noises, the hit sequel to Noise and the only syllables worse than Fuck.
"Hii," says Tommy, even more faintly. He leans away from Benrey so hard that they have to plant their feet to keep him from performing an illegal sit-down maneuver.
"Yo," agrees Benrey, squinting at him to find the arm with the least amount of blood on it and then slinging it over their shoulders and dragging him to the bathroom. "I gotta clean up the stairs?"
"Mm-hmn."
"Cool. You got. Blood?"
It doesn't smell like his blood, but also Tommy's doing the weird space cadet thing like when he's been drugged or something. Not that Tommy's drugged a lot. He is something a lot, though, and sometimes the something is bloodless on account of the blood loss because Tommy loves to do things that make him lose his blood. But also sometimes the something is that they both forgot to replace the carbon monoxide detector, so who knows. "Someone leaked the plans. The bank had... um, there was extra, they had more. Security." Benrey makes a grunt of sympathy on purpose, it's their choice, it has nothing to do with their back crumpling in on itself like a default Blender cube nudged a little too hard when they lower Tommy onto the shower floor. "The, um- our fence... she, our fence knows a guy, so... we're gonna try somewhere else. As a, um, for a trial! Run. With the new guy. And we might be getting those, uh- the, the guys from the headlines."
Benrey pulls the burner phone out of Tommy's pocket and puts it in the sink under hot water to rinse all the blood off it. "Didn't they kill people." Because guys in headlines aren't usually in the headlines unless they're really really good at making sure security gets kicked out of museums forever or unless they're killing people. Tommy's quiet again. Benrey shuts the faucet off. "Did you kill people?" Benrey asks the clean phone dripping pink water down the drain.
They're not looking at Tommy because they don't have to look at Tommy because whenever they ask this, Tommy doesn't look back. "It was an accident." If he's not admitting to it, his brain is still in one piece, and that's pretty much all that matters. Hospitals are still crowded as hell; Benrey's not gonna send him out there. They just grab the iodine out of the cabinet and unscrew it for him, passing it over with a fistful of gauze.
"Cool," Benrey says, and then they go to grab the mop and the hydrogen peroxide to clean the blood off the building's stairs. When they pass the TV, they take a step back to really look at it because there's no fucking way that Cowboy's in the top 10. Except he is. Holy shit, god gamer. All it took was Benrey dying and Benrey's best friend maybe dying. They pick up the headset to whisper into the mic, "Don't fuck up," and immediately get to see Cowboy fuck up so bad it wraps around to being sick as shit. "Niiiice," Benrey says, "'kay bye," and then turns the PS4 off.
(They even bring up the duffel bag full of cash that Tommy left at the second landing because Benrey is an angel who's never done anything wrong.)
Benrey sets down the lentil soup that Tommy really likes and says, "Hey."
"Hi!" Tommy answers. He grins kinda wobbly when he's tired, but Benrey likes all of his smiles. The smiles are a thing to help them know that Tommy wants to be a good friendperson to them, or to someone else, but mostly to them because everybody else only sees a few of Tommy's smiles. Benrey hands him the spoon.
"Can cows get lice?"
Tommy blows on his spoonful, takes a big bite, and thinks about it while he chews on all the lentils. Benrey read the recipe but he didn't feel like weighing the bag so he just counted how many lentils weighed exactly a pound into a bowl and then counted them out of the bowl into the crockpot that Darnold mailed a few weeks ago when Benrey mentioned trying to cook an egg on an overheating tower. Benrey wants to fry an egg in the crockpot. "I think they get fleas!" Tommy, the only person telling Benrey not to fry eggs in the crockpot and therefore their greatest enemy, answers.
"Hm."
"Is- did you and Cowboy have an argument?"
"Nah, Cow- Cowboy's cool. As a cu. As. Is cucumber a fruit."
"Um, biologically, yeah. I think it's a, a vegetable like tomato, but it's a fruit like tomato, too!"
"Oh shit, goin' in the salad."
"The fruit salad?"
"Yummy yummy."
"Don't put tomato in fruit salad?"
"Yummy yummy."
"Yo, check this shit out, flea's circus."
"That's the worst trick you've ever tried! Do it again next round!'
"Hell yeah. Yeehaw."
"Yeehaw!!"
And then Cowboy doesn't come back for three weeks.