[This is an unrelated one-shot based off my story "It's all my fault". Nick mentions that he and Luke made a lemon cannon as kids so I decided to write a short monologue in Luke's POV where he recounts the childhood memory. Hopefully you guys enjoy and hopefully I didn't make Luke seem OC. I really tried to keep him in character but unfortunately there are no real scenes in the game where Luke speaks about the past to use as reference. I could only use his "birthday" scene as a guide. I just tried to keep him humorous and light hearted. (Or Luke-like as I put it).]

The lemon cannon

The worry of "burnin' daylight"…

Time has no meaning when you're ten years old and you've got two years on your best friend.

Sure, maybe I had an advantage over him and maybe… just maybe I was the juvenile mastermind equivalent of… you know what. Forget I mentioned that.

My point is that this event was supposed to form a good anecdote for adulthood, not stream into an endless pity case for Nick. So I'm gonna tell this "anecdote" from the beginning.

So we were in elementary school at the time. Being a little older than Nick, we were in different classes which means we didn't tend to see each other a whole lot. But afterwards when that bell rang, all us guys would meet in our small country town's main street.

Now we weren't jumping rooftops by that stage yet, but we did however put our pocket money together and buy some cheap fire crackers. We used to take them down to the river and try to "fish" with them. It never worked out but, hell, it was fun.

So one day we meet as usual at the river and some Secondary School kids show up. They've got this big black ABS tube in hand and a bag of potatoes. All us kids watch as they start shooting the potatoes miles up the river bed.

Now that I think about it, those guys were kind of losers… but that didn't stop all us kids wanting one of those cannons. They called her "Big Betty" and said that if we wanted one of those cannons, we'd have to pay up.

Now this was the mid 90's, it's not like me and Nick could exactly Google our way to Big Betty. If we wanted one of those cannons, we were gonna have to make the ultimate sacrifice.

That sacrifice….

Nick's rare baseball card collection.

I know what you're thinking. Why did Nick have to give up his cards?

It's not like I was the only one who wanted the cannon. And besides, I didn't have cards. I was more of a comic book kinda guy, I liked the art. So after a little persuasion, Nick was all in. We made our deal with the kids up at the old water tower. It was very mafia style. They turned up on their motorcycles and Nick and I peddled up on our bikes. Nick still had training wheels, but hey.

He stayed behind with the bikes as I approached the older boys, package in hand that contained the rare card collection. We were very professional, but they just shoved a piece of scribbled paper in my hands, took the cards and rode off.

I was dumbfounded. I had expected a fully crafted Big Betty in my hands, but what I got was my mum's shopping list.

I had no idea what half the shit on the paper was and I returned to a disappointed Nick. He was pretty pissed that his cards were gone, but I convinced him that these were the "blueprints" to our awaiting cannon.

We didn't know what to even look for. But Nick had mentioned his Uncle Pete had one of those tubes leaning up against his shed.

So we rode our bikes out to Pete's house but upon knocking on the door, receiving no answer and concluding he wasn't home, Nick thought we should just take the tube because "Uncle Pete wouldn't mind".

So we walk our bikes out behind the house and leave them leaning against the back porch railing, continuing towards the shed. Nick is quick to point out the tube, racing towards it and trying to pull it off. Now as a ten and an eight year old, we found it miraculous that Pete had cemented this tube into the ground. We clearly had no knowledge of what drainage was, so we thought it was best to just hacksaw the damn thing out. Nick was too weak to even cut through cheese, so I took the hacksaw and we started making good progress. That was until a shit tonne of water started pouring out of the unevenly rough incision we had made. At this point, most kids would stop and run, but we figured we were already two far down the line to turn back now.

I continued sawing through, water soaking me down, as Nick ran to Pete's washing line and grabbed the set of sheets hanging to dry. He ran back and shoved them up into the pipe. The water was just dripping slightly now but the whole thing had started to rumble. Nick and I hesitated, and as I made the last cut we grabbed the pipe and ran to our bikes. Let's just say that we got the fuck outta there.

There were a few extra things needed, but we had managed to swipe them up. It was nowhere near as difficult as obtaining the pipe though. We had dubbed it "Pete's Pipe of Watery Death".

So all we had to do now was get to constructing Big Betty. We couldn't go back to my house. My parents were too goody two shoes for this. They'd have probably sniffed right out what we were up to. We found sanctuary at Nick's. His mum worked night shifts so she was asleep, and his dad was somewhere out in the world lying in a hole face down for the last year so he wouldn't be showin' up anytime soon.

We laid out the items in the yard and I went over the instructions. I was telling Nick what needed to go where but he just ended up covering all our items in glue. So yeah… we may have started circling each other in anger and we may have thrown dog shit at each other but, come on we were kids.

Eventually we were back on track and the cannon had been assembled.

We picked up the glorious cannon. Held her high above our heads.

We couldn't call her Big Betty, not with her white tube body that caused those to squint when she reflected the daylight into glare. It was very angelic. She deserved an angelic name.

Because we were young and had zero creativity when it came to names, we just called her "Big Bertha". It was different enough in our minds.

We tried to sneak out to our bikes with Bertha, but Nick's mum exited through the front with an old Polaroid camera. She was proud that Nick had finally "made" something. Although she didn't know what it was nor that all Nick had "made" was a mess of the glue, but nonetheless we found ourselves hastily posing with Big Bertha between us.

Soon enough we found ourselves dartin' on our bikes towards the orchards at the edge of town.

We needed ammo.

We needed lemons…

Nick had protested. He didn't want to be the one to jump the orchard fence. He whined like a little girl too, "But Luke there's dogs in there!" He couldn't boost me up so I think I was purely justified in tellin' him to "man up and stop being a scaredy cat", then proceeding to basically throw him over.

I kept perimeter watch as Nick scaled the lemon tree's trunk to reach the fruit above.

I thought I was being a good look out as well… until I saw the cute girl I liked from my class. She was roller blading past with her group of friends and they had stopped to giggle and wave at me.

So I waved back.

Then they waved again.

So I waved again.

They started gesturing for me to come over, so I did.

Yeah I admit that I had completely forgotten about Nick, but there were girls that wanted to talk to me. Although Nick hated me at the time, he understands now.

So I was being a real player. Crackin' jokes and making the girls laugh. The girl I liked was so close to inviting me to her birthday party, but Nick had to go ruin it with his screaming.

The girls started panicking and sped off, they didn't want to be associated with me once they realised I was the partner in crime of the dark haired boy flailing about inside the orchard walls.

Goddamn Nick had just ruined my chance at settling down with a lady at age ten. Pfft… what an asshole, right?

But of course I was there to aid Nick after the girls had left. What I didn't expect to find when I returned to the fence was him getting more luck with a girl then I was.

Zoey, the orchard guard dog, had Nick's ass in her mouth.

He was screaming but I guessed that by the way Nick looked, this would probably be the closest he got to female contact. So I may or may not have prolonged my rescue.

After Nick threw some curses my way, I picked up a stone and threw it at Zoey. She yelped and I felt bad but at least she had let go of Nick. As she regained her focus, I was already up the fence and pulling Nick over.

But of course Nick had forgotten the damn lemons…

Finally we had just did what we should have in the first place and bought some lemons.

On our bikes with Big Bertha and the lemons, we rode up to the overpass.

Now I'm not sayin' that we didn't know shootin' lemons at high speed into traffic was a bad idea, but we were curious.

And stupid.

This was the moment that this whole day had been building up to. So upon pushing the hairspray can and watching the first lemon fly out in an almost slow motion picturesque movie scene of our childhood, we could have never predicted that the lemon would hit the car of a teacher at our school.

We couldn't just bolt. This wasn't a random stranger passing through town that could not locate us. This was a man we saw 180 days of the year, and it wasn't the first time we had plagued him.

Last summer we egged his house.

Last month we toilet papered his prized trees that he pruned into animals… more along the lines of deformed animals though.

Then just last week we left a flaming doggie poo bag on his doorstep.

This was a man that we hated. But we were on our last warning from the school, so we were avoiding the man.

It was almost as if he was tailing us all day and intentionally swerved into our lemon's path, just to see mine and Nick's downfall.

We peddled as fast as we could but it wasn't quick enough to escape the sound of our names being yelled.

In the end, Big Bertha was taken from us and we never saw her again.

We got two weeks detention at school and had to spend most of it cleaning the grounds.

Nick and I, though, we didn't really take the whole thing too seriously. We just walked out into the school parking lot, climbed the asshole teachers car…

And started jumping the rooftops.